Still facing challenges in building up your construction company’s workforce in 2025? You aren’t alone: 78% of companies are experiencing difficulties in hiring hourly craft workers. While 69% of companies expect an increase in new recruits, 55% also expect hiring challenges to continue–or worsen. Despite a slowdown in residential construction, booms in the public sector, manufacturing, and data have boosted nonresidential construction. To meet anticipated demand, 439,000 net new workers are needed in 2025, pressuring already strained talent pipelines.
Demographic shifts are adding to that pressure and creating a need for new talent sources. The median construction working age has fallen below 42 for the first time in over a decade, marking a slow-down in retirements, but current politics are undercutting core talent pools. For years immigration has supplied over a quarter, or up to 40%, of construction workers. Rising direct labor costs and the gap in young people training in construction work continue, increasing concerns about craft labor supply and worker quality.
Facing these challenges, how can you build a better future for construction? The key is to streamline your hiring process so that you spend your time the most efficiently. In this article we’ll guide you through the steps to build greater attraction for construction, automate your hiring process to boost confidence and efficiency in your candidate selection, minimize attrition, and make the most of retention.
4 Steps to Attracting the Right Talent
Draw people to your pipeline that are likely to be a good fit for your company and boost the talent pool you have to work with. Today, attraction comes down to two major components: strong company culture and solid connections with young, budding professionals. Here are four steps to break ground on building greater attraction to your company:
- Offer enticing benefits. Today’s employees need work-life balance and support to build families and have lives outside of work. That requires good pay, healthcare benefits, steady jobs, and time off that bring them job satisfaction and high motivation to stick with you.
- Create community connections. The current workforce culture draws young people toward white-collar careers, so you need to actively showcase construction opportunities. Attend college, trade school, and high school career fairs to connect with fresh talent skilled in emerging technologies reshaping the industry.
- Mentor budding professionals. Mentorship programs bring young people into your workplace to experience the job, learn key professional skills, and form bonds of respect and mutual learning with veteran employees. That early experience can be a huge deciding factor in the careers they ultimately pursue–quite possibly with you.
- Commit to attractive company culture. Showcase your company’s culture in action. Clearly explain why candidates should join you beyond a paycheck–highlighting coworker bonds, mission, purpose, and unique growth opportunities.
4 Tools for Selecting the Right Potential
From the boosted pool of candidates you have attracted, you can streamline your selection process through integrating automation. Doing so saves you time and money, letting you focus your energy on the most important, people-facing parts of the hiring process: the interview. Here are four steps to transform your hiring process and accelerate your candidate quality:
- Minimum qualification assessments rapidly sort your talent pool to just those who meet your most basic qualification. These tools boost the quality of your applicants and streamline your talent pool.
- Skill assessments compare a candidate’s skills against your needs. Most candidates won’t have resumes for you to rely on, so these tools give you greater insight into their potential performance on your crew.
- Personality assessments show you a candidate’s aptitude for learning and teamwork. Candidates without the ideal hard skills you want may have soft skills that give them a keen interest in learning, making them readily trainable.
- Interview playbooks provide all your hiring managers with a blueprint for consistent interviewing. Focusing on the most insightful interview questions and efficiently using your time to delve into topics that pre-employment assessments can’t cover maximizes your understanding of a candidate’s quality.
3 Keys for Minimizing Attrition
Some attrition–or turnover–is normal, but you want to keep that minimal and focus on boosting retention. Once you have your new hires, there are three steps to maximizing your chances of keeping them on the crew.
- Build your ideal candidate through training. Once you have a new hire, you have to train them. Not only do they need to learn on the job how your company works but they also need continued opportunities to learn new skills and update their practices. This keeps them and you ahead of the curve on new industry developments and gives employees greater motivation to stick with you as the times change.
- Forge bonds between veterans and new hires. To preserve company culture and practices, encourage your veteran employees to be hands-on in showing new employees the ropes and leading them in projects. These bonds ensure that, even when you face turnover, valuable industry knowledge is preserved among your crew.
- Cement a culture of care and strength. Listen to employee feedback and work quickly to effectively remedy concerns. Emphasize and model conflict management. Be a leader in teamwork and show understanding and awareness that employees are more than just labor–prioritize them as people, which will boost their engagement and satisfaction.
Top 3 Traits for Leading a Successful Hiring Transformation
These key steps to successful talent acquisition–attraction-selection-attrition–ride on strong, growth-minded leadership. What does that look like? In yourself, your foremen, and your managers you want to see three core traits of effective leadership, according to Industrial-Organizational psychologist Dr. Craig Ellis:
- Decisiveness. Commit to a course of action confidently and operate with a plan to make that action effective for the mission. Take initiative in leveraging technology and proven techniques to streamline your pipeline and strengthen your hiring.
- Open-mindedness. Stay open to input and ideas from others, even when you strongly feel that you have the right answer. Be an active listener when it comes to feedback from your employees or from the industry itself as you work to boost your pipeline and build greater attraction for the workforce.
- Empathy. Pay attention to how your decisions impact others and always consider how you can advance your employees’ needs along with your company’s needs. Take feedback from current employees on what they most want to see or what really isn’t working for them.
When you lead with flexibility, an eagerness to learn, and heed employee concerns and needs, you contribute to creating an attractive company culture and providing yourself opportunities to keep improving your hiring process whenever the market changes.
Conclusion
Right now, hiring quality candidates and filling positions are major challenges in the construction industry. To maintain momentum and steer your company towards growth, it’s important to follow the model of attraction-selection-attrition. Hiring is challenging, but focusing on creating a company with a compelling culture, benefits, and growth opportunities will go a long way towards boosting your candidate pool. Leveraging the quick sorting and assessment capabilities of automated technology will streamline that pool into a pipeline that gives you confidence in the quality of candidates you hire.
Ready to start hiring confidently and leverage the benefits of automated pre-employment hiring assessments? HighMatch is the partner you’re looking for. We bring to the table more than 15 years of experience helping diverse companies save time and money in hiring.
HighMatch’s robust, automated suite of assessment solutions are personalized and customizable. To ensure these tools respond to your unique needs, our team of I/O psychologists collaborates with your hiring managers, empowering you to make faster, data-driven hiring decisions to secure quality candidates. We give you key insights on bettering your hiring process to better your hiring output. Be more confident in your hiring choices and match with HighMatch.
Contact HighMatch today to modernize your hiring process, identify candidates with the greatest potential, and build a crew with people of potential–saving time, money, and frustration along the way.
