​What it takes to be an award winning designer?  Be it Design Excellence Award ceremonies or Residential Excellence Design Award. Every Award can be an opportunity for your interior design business if used correctly. Kitchen & Bath Marketing Solutions aims to guide you through and provide some tips to utilize your award winning opportunity to build your brand. 

1. Know thy audience!
Look for business groups in your area. What awards are available in your area? Google it with your states and then with your city. Where do you want your people to be polling from? Let your audience know you’ve the same award they are familiar with.

2. Media coverage you need for your awards
Some awards are sponsored by media. Others may face difficulty to find right media channels for promotion. Magazines may not be featuring your project in professional publications. In such a case you need to put some effort yourself. Earned feature placement for your projects can be sometimes better than getting into paid award competitions.

3. Build your brand with your awards
Winning an award can help you build your brand. Market your projects in different avenues like website, blog or video. Look for the outlets where organizations giving you awards are promoting their competitions.

4. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your award promotion
You can rewrite about your awards earned in the past and link to those archives on the web. Always have your own links and blogs on your awards as the publications by other organizations may no longer be functional. Remember! Dead links on your website will hurt you.

5. Tips for design competitions
Read all the requirements for winning a particular award including membership details. Know the judges and their background who are in the design competition. Some famous design competitions and local awards in  kitchen & bath remodeling niche are NKBA design competition for Dallas and NARI. 
Search for categories that may have less number of applicants. You can also promote judges’ remarks to showcase your credibility.

6. Target big organizations with your awards
Scope your story in a way that depicts your leadership skills. Some renowned trade organizations, local business journal rank listings or media agencies can offer free of charge, non-commercial promotion of your awards. You need a second hand acknowledgements to know you’re doing well. Know different cultural opinions on aesthetics and designs. Be more strategic.


For more information on interior design business and digital marketing for designers, remodelers and architects visit us at Kabms.com. 

Finding and hiring the right talent can be instrumental to the success of a business. Especially in service-oriented sectors like interior design and remodeling, the human factor can actually make or break a company. With the onus of recruitment and selection laid on top management, the stress is inevitable. However, following certain rules and guidelines, you can improve your chances of hiring the right people for the right jobs.

Talking about the interior design and remodeling industry, great talent is hard to find. Companies that rely mostly on qualification alone may hamper their ability to tap into the real creativity of their people. So, finding and recruiting in this industry may be a little more complicated than the usual profit-oriented companies.  Overall, if you look at the statistics from the US, almost 142,894 people are employed in the interior design industry alone and this figure is expected to grow by more than 1% by 2026. On average the number of employees in the interior design business is increasing every year.

Post-2020, the demand for home improvements, renovations, and interior design uplifts is on the rise. As a consequence finding and hiring great talent for design and remodeling is becoming harder and harder. Whether you are looking for skilled labor, architects, designers, salespeople, construction workers, or engineers, you need to find people who can get the job done right and will stay loyal to your business.

Here is a look at some of the tips that you can follow for finding and hiring great talent for your design or remodeling business.

Be Proactive and Plan Effectively

Staying ahead of the game requires you to plan your employee shortages, labor requirements, project forecasts, and HR processes before the actual need arises. Like all other businesses, predict interior design and remodel peaks, and find and hire the right people before you get more work on your hands than you can handle and you have to rush the process to make faulty decisions.

Do Your Research

To find and hire great talent, you must be able to attract them to your company. For this purpose, you need to carefully research and analyze what employees in the interior design and remodeling industry want from an employer. While every individual might have his own personal preferences for a new job, there are some basic things that you need to assess and streamline in conjunction with the design and remodel industry.

• Base Pay Structure
• Professional Education
• Type of Project Work
• Office Environment
• Working Conditions
• Perks and Privileges
• Colleagues and Coworkers.

Find out the basic criteria that a great talented professional might be looking for in a job based on these categories.

Carefully Draft Job Descriptions

Every time you go out for headhunting, you are sure to get hundreds of resumes in your hands. As your job opening becomes public, there will be an outpour of applications and candidates. The best way to sift out the unqualified and irrelevant applicants is to post a detailed job description with your advert. Be clear, to the point, and include all the job requirements and expectations without any doubts. The more accurate your job description, the more your chances of hiring the right talent.

Conduct Thorough and Well Organized Interviews

Interviewing candidates may sound easy but it requires proper skills. Not everyone possesses the qualities and analytical knack needed to conduct an interview and extract productive and relevant information from it to make better decisions. If you do not have the right interviewing skills, your chances of hiring the wrong person for the job can be very high. So, before indulging in the hiring process, make sure to polish, refine and strengthen your interview capabilities and draft the interview in an organized manner before the actual process.

Lookout for Commitment To their Career

A person who has a history of frequent job switching and career shifts, might not be suitable for your company. You need to look at his or her experience and assess the level of passion and commitment towards the interior design and remodeling profession. Getting a higher salary does not mean you lose loyalty to your company. Hire a person by analyzing her/his previous job duration and reason for leaving the previous organization.

Always Hire Interns

Many people disagree with this concept, but it is probably one of the most effective ways to hire great new talent. With on job assessment, evaluation and training, you can rightly analyze their strengths, weaknesses, and all types of personal skills. It is a perfect way of sifting out the best from a lot.

Final Thoughts - Don’t Forget to Constantly Improve Your Hiring Process

Whether you are a big organization or a small startup business, attracting, finding, and hiring the right candidates for a job is the basis of your operational success. But there is no such “one size fits all” solution to your hiring problems. Every time you plan to fill a job opening, you need to work on the process beforehand. Customize your advert, job description, modes of communication, interview questions, and other minutest details to make it fit for meeting the requirements perfectly. 

For more information visit our Resource Library section. If you have any questions or just want to speak with one of our professionals to learn more contact our office or schedule a strategy session to see how we can be of service.