Advantage

What Distinguishes CFA?
In a word, experience. Experience of the architectural variety.  It’s what we know. It’s all we do. Our talent pool is deep, and our client base is exceptional. We spend our days helping architects.

Expertise.
CFA is owned and operated by architecture and design professionals with years of experience reviewing portfolios and testing candidates. As a result, we know which skills to seek and which questions to ask to supply the best talent for your position. We can also help assess your hiring needs and the associated costs. And we understand the delicate balance between a firm’s desire to produce a great design and operate a profitable enterprise.

Efficiency.
CFA eases your staffing burden and helps reduce your overhead by simplifying and quickly finding the right person for the job. We provide a variety of personnel with a targeted skill set on a per-project basis, eliminating the pains of hiring and firing as workloads fluctuate—and helping you complete projects on time and on budget. We remove the stress of recruiting, sorting through resumes, and interviewing applicants, freeing you to focus on billable activities and core business operations. Our time records for project consults and client firms are web-based for successful project expense and overhead tracking.

Access to Talent.
We target both active and passive job seekers and work hard to cultivate those relationships. Based on our rigorous screening and interviewing process, we maintain an extensive growing database of hundreds of candidates. CFA also maintains strategic relationships with local recruiters to bring additional candidates to us.

Speed to Completion.
We stay connected with qualified candidates, so when the need arises, we can quickly help you find the right person from among many top experienced professionals.

Minimize Risk.
Our project-to-hire program allows you to work alongside candidates and, without putting them on your payroll, determine if you want to hire them permanently. Where serious personal and property liability is today, CFA’s clients know the risk is minimized by our array of comprehension insurance policies – including Architects Errors and Omissions protection upon request.  No competing placement firm carries Errors and Omissions insurance.

Return on Investment.
For project placements, the consultant’s hourly rate may first impress you as high, but when compared to the hourly rate of your full-time staff, the rates are not higher.  Not after you add back the typical 1.50% multiple for DPE (“Direct Personnel Expenses”) defined as taxes, paid vacations, health care costs, bonuses and 401K contributions, and even severance pay. The placement fee costs of hiring a full-time employee pay off within 6 months of the start date. The cost of in-house recruiting and downtime alone justify the short-term investment. CFA never invoices clients at a time and a half for hours worked above 40 -all billable hours are straight time only.

Convenience.
We use state-of-the-art staffing industry software to manage our recruiting and placement database. CFA’s competitive edge in this niche becomes your competitive edge.  For reliability, we provide online tools for tracking the progress of your search as well as time cards, invoicing, and payments. Our website is smartphone-compatible, too, so take CFA with you wherever you go!

Autodesk Skills Assessment.
Every participating candidate’s skills are evaluated during our interview and screening processes and as new software releases come to market. CFA’s proprietary web-based Autodesk Skills Assessment Tools are state-of-the-art.  Our Autodesk Skills Assessments are available to our clients, who often purchase “packages” of assessments to gauge their employees’ technical software skills and develop in-house training.