How to Hire Construction Workers: Tips From 12 Experts
Written By: Krystin Morgan
Last Updated July 1, 2026
The job market is struggling, but the construction industry will actually need 456,000 new workers in 2027 — a 30.7% increase from 2026. Yet, as many as 92% of construction firms struggle to find qualified candidates.
A Redditor summed up this concern simply: “It’s easy to find general laborers, but skilled workers are impossible to find.”
We talked to 12 experts to get real-life advice on how to hire construction workers. In this guide, we walk you through where to find skilled talent (job boards may not be your best bet), how to assess candidates before you make an offer, and common mistakes to avoid when hiring.
Why the usual playbook doesn’t work
When companies have roles to fill, they immediately turn to job boards to make a posting. In doing so, they miss the important steps that come before it: planning what they need to hire for, deciding how to assess candidates, and ensuring a solid hiring process.
Making a post on job boards often doesn’t work as expected either. According to Constantine Anest, Owner of Ethos Roofing & Restoration:
“We received a large number of applications [through job boards], but most of the candidates lacked the necessary qualifications or were not seriously interested in the job.”
One reason companies struggle with finding good candidates through job boards is that they keep pulling from the same candidate pool, which doesn’t have the right skills in the first place.
Plus, most job boards filter out strong candidates who don’t speak English early on. Andrew Bernardo, Founder of Workhand (Innovative Ops LLC), shares:
“English-only job posts on Indeed or ZipRecruiter are filtering out about half of Florida’s construction workforce before anybody even applies.”
When Andrew started making job posts in Spanish on other channels, “applications jumped about 3x almost overnight.”
And even if you end up hiring from boards, the risk of the new employee not working out in the long term is high. For Emily Demirdonder, Co-founder and Director of Operations at Proximity Plumbing:
“Roughly 60 to 70% of applicants from standard postings never made it past the first week on site.”
Solving the hiring problem requires focusing on the entire process, not just where to make the job posting.
How to hire constructions workers: A step-by-step process
Companies that make successful hires tend to begin their search long before they have a vacancy.
Planning the hire: Set up systems before you make a job post
There’s a lot of planning to do before you advertise your vacancies.
- “Get sharp on the role description to make sure you are recruiting for the right person,” advises Whitney Hill, CEO and Co-Founder of SnapADU. “Forcing yourself to be clear on what you want makes the recruiting process much easier, and it gives you a fair way to assess whether the person is actually succeeding once they start.”
- Next, define “onboarding milestones before starting to look for candidates,” Whitney adds. She advises creating an onboarding strategy with “a 30-, 60-, and 90-day plan, and being ready to let go of people quickly who’re not meeting the mark. A lot of companies over-invest in trying to make the wrong person work.”
Start your planning months — not weeks — before you actually need to hire. Rather than recruiting only when a project is about to begin, build a long-term strategy for continuous hiring that helps you maintain a pipeline of qualified candidates. This could include:
- Maintaining ongoing relationships with trade schools throughout the year
- Keeping a list of strong past applicants
- Regularly reminding your team of any referral programs you offer
Finding qualified candidates: Look outside of job boards
“Great construction workers rarely spend their time applying to dozens of online job postings,” says Andrew Pho, General Manager at Mister Baluster. While you can still post your vacancies on common job boards, these shouldn’t be the only places you look.
Referrals from your crew and network
Dean Mahmoud, CEO of EcoGen America, recommends leveraging your network first.
“I would contact every contractor and installer in my network and simply ask, ‘Who is the best person you have let go in the last few weeks?’ There have been numerous times when this one question has netted better results than any job advertisement I have posted.”
This works because “most reliable, skilled workers in construction find their way via referrals, not applications,” Mahmoud says. When the team was building an installer network throughout the United States, “The most productive teams were offered jobs before they were ever publicly advertised.”
Don’t forget to look internally too. Andrew Bernardo says the best workers he’s hired came in via internal referrals.
“Current crew won’t recommend someone unreliable because it makes them look bad.”
If you need to hire right away, Bernardo recommends offering a cash bonus, paying “$200 to $500 per hire, paid same day, when the new guy hits 30 days.”
Trade schools or vocational programs
Emily Demirdonder successfully found candidates through community colleges or trade schools. Rather than simply getting in front of students, she recommends building a partnership with the instructors first. Referrals from instructors can then serve as a “pre-vetting filter.” She shares how their team got started.
“Just a cold email to the head of the trade program at a local community college, with a brief one-paragraph description of what you want, is generally sufficient to initiate a discussion. This alone contributed to the reduction in our average time to hire from approximately three weeks down to eight days.”
If you aren’t familiar with local trade or vocational schools, start with a quick online search for “construction worker programs in [City].”
Hubs that construction workers visit frequently
Another way to get your job to the right people is by taking it to the places construction workers often visit, even when they’re not actively searching for jobs. This could be in-person communities or online portals.
What worked for Andrew Bernardo was supply houses. “Pinch a Penny, Sherwin-Williams, the local lumber yards.” Andrew shares how he made it work:
“I’d stand in line, chat them up, leave my number. Asked store managers if I could leave a stack of business cards near the register…Cheap as it gets, and the people who pick up your card from a supply house are already in the trade. They kind of pre-qualify themselves.”
Andrew also shared job posts on niche groups online.
“Channels that worked best: Florida Pool Pros, a bunch of Tampa-area Spanish-speaking contractor groups on Facebook, and WhatsApp groups for pool finishers and gunite guys.”
This worked because people “want to work for someone who’s willing to talk to them in their own language.”
Meanwhile, Emily Demirdonder recommends targeting candidates in vocational rehabilitation programs.
“Get started…by contacting your local workforce development office and specifically requesting to speak with the trade placement coordinator.”
Finding these candidates was a major win for her.
“Not only did they arrive at our location on the designated day and time; they followed all directions provided by staff and continued working for a longer duration than was typical, due to the fact that structure had been established in their operations before they ever walked onto our site.”
Attracting talent: Find people who actually want the job
Owner of Gentlemen Plumbing & Drain Cleaning, Jake Romano, shared that in his early days hiring, he accidentally created a careers page that was long, dull, and not user-friendly. But it surprisingly brought in the right applicants.
“These guys had to navigate my crappy website (at the time) to find the careers page. They had to read my crappy content to find the apply button. And they had to go to my website in the first place. This told me something: these guys really want to work here. And they did!”
This doesn’t mean you should intentionally create a complicated application page, but a small barrier to entry will help attract people who truly want to work for you.
Romano adds other indicators to watch out for:
“Tailored cover letters, using the hiring manager’s name, and tailoring the resume.”
For Whitney Hill, it was about:
“…How professionally someone responds to a request for a brief video about their interest in the role.”
This also helps screen for tech-savvy candidates while letting you “skip candidates who are not motivated or cannot convey their interest in your company.”
Assessing applicants: Prioritize reliability, not just experience
Craig Perfect, Owner at ALLCON Roofing, says he’s seen many people put “too much weight on experience rather than attitude and reliability.”
“Someone may have 20 years of experience in roofing or construction, but still have attendance, safety, or teamwork issues…A great résumé doesn’t always translate into a trustworthy employee.”
His workaround is asking interview candidates to describe a difficult project they navigated.
“How they handled it gives insight into their accountability, analytical skills, and ownership of their work. These traits are equally important, if not more so, than technical skills.”
Lo Choe, Owner of Aurora Fire Safety, recommends asking questions that get to how candidates do the work. For example, you could ask about how a worker handled transitioning phases. Listen to how they talk about documentation and risk mitigation, Choe recommends.
“Reliable employees will explain the transitions involved in completing one phase of a project and moving into another phase clearly. They will advise you of access issues, photos, labeling of equipment or materials left on-site, any pre-existing conditions left uncompleted, any physical constraints that could impact safety during the course of the project, and who would need advance notification prior to commencing work. This indicates to me that they consider the building as a shared environment where all individuals have responsibilities, rather than simply a task list.”
Pay attention to workers in other industries who can bring transferable skills.
Whitney Hill has “recruited from unconventional backgrounds, such as set designers who managed stage productions.” This works because “someone who can succeed in that environment is often used to managing moving parts, deadlines, personalities and last-minute changes, which translates well into residential construction management.”
Craig Perfect has experienced similar success. “The best candidates often come from industries with a culture of safety, discipline, and physical labor. Logistics, warehouse, manufacturing, and military backgrounds tend to produce strong candidates for roofing and construction because they understand procedures and know how to balance teamwork with accountability.”
Identifying top hires: Run paid trials before making an offer
Caleb John, Director of Exceed Plumbing & Air Conditioning, believes “an interview only shows you 30% of what you need to know about a candidate; the other 70% is revealed when there is actually work for them to do, with a clock running.”
“That’s why I now offer paid half-day trial shifts before fully committing to someone. This gives me an opportunity to observe how well they can perform a small, meaningful but limited task. From my experience, up to 40% of candidates who are unreliable do not make it through this one test, because their behaviour in the trial is the same as their everyday performance on site.”
If offering a paid trial isn’t possible, bring someone in for one project before you offer them a long-term contract, shares Mike Feazel, CEO of Roof Maxx.
“…Treat the first job as more of an audition instead of trying to fully vet someone upfront…”
Hiring mistakes to avoid
Avoid these common errors that make hiring construction workers more difficult.
Creating a slow hiring process
While due diligence is important in hiring, a slow or long process puts you at risk of losing great candidates. Vardhan Kapoor, CEO and Co-Founder of Firstwork, knows this firsthand.
“One of the biggest hiring mistakes employers make is focusing on finding the ‘perfect’ candidate instead of removing friction from the hiring process.”
He recommends conducting a thorough audit of the hiring process to identify where candidates fall through the cracks. Companies that remove some common friction points usually see successful hirings:
“They…meet candidates where they are: mobile-first applications, simplified onboarding, fast communication, and a clear path from application to first shift. We’ve seen organizations reduce time-to-start from days or weeks to as little as one–two days by eliminating unnecessary administrative bottlenecks.”
Focusing too much on pay
Andrew Bernardo shares another common mistake: focusing on pay instead of other parts of the job. But “paying way over market to poach guys from other contractors” isn’t the solution it may seem to be at first.
“They’d jump for an extra dollar an hour and then jump again the second somebody else offered $1.50. Loyalty comes from getting paid on time, being respected, and being talked to like a person, not from pay alone.”
So lead with that, not simply by offering the highest pay.
Ignoring retention
The best recruitment strategy is retention. But it’s easy to lose sight of that when you’re focused on how to hire construction workers now.
If you can retain your most skilled workers, you’ll need to hire less frequently — which means you won’t have to spend on constantly recruiting, onboarding, and training replacements.
You’ll also keep experienced workers with you for long and won’t have to replace the knowledge and productivity they bring.
There are a few practical ways to strengthen retention:
- Build a positive, employee-friendly culture. Workers are more likely to stay when they feel respected, supported, and treated fairly. Simple practices like paying on time and recognizing good work can improve job satisfaction and reduce turnover.
- Set the tone early. Craig Perfect suggests managers “set the tone for safety, reliability, and professionalism right from the start.” The stronger and better-performing the team, the more likely they’re to stick around.
- Provide a growth path. Give workers a reason to stay by offering the chance for growth and development, whether that’s through new skills, projects, or certifications.
Buddy Punch can help you manage a skilled construction team
Successful hiring is about setting up proper systems, looking for candidates outside of traditional sources, prioritizing those who show they want the job, assessing them on attitudes over experience, and testing candidates before making an offer.
You can make your hiring process even stronger by improving retention. Day-to-day challenges, like inefficient scheduling and delayed payroll, can lower employee motivation, leading to turnover.
Buddy Punch can help reduce these frictions with simple-to-use scheduling tools, employee-initiated shift swapping, and payroll support.
Contributors
- Andrew Bernardo, Founder, Workhand (Innovative Ops LLC)
- Andrew Pho, General Manager, Mister Baluster
- Caleb John, Director, Exceed Plumbing & Air Conditioning
- Constantine Anest, Owner, Ethos Roofing & Restoration
- Craig Perfect, Owner, ALLCON Roofing
- Dean Mahmoud, CEO, EcoGen America
- Emily Demirdonder, Co-founder and Director of Operations, Proximity Plumbing
- Jake Romano, Owner, Gentleman Plumbing & Drain Cleaning
- Lo Choe, Owner, Aura Fire Safety
- Mike Feazel, CEO, Roof Maxx
- Vardhan Kapoor, CEO Co-Founder, Firstwork
- Whitney Hill, CEO and Co-Founder, SnapADU
