Best Recruitment Strategies For Construction Companies

Last Updated on May 17, 2023 by Admin

Nowadays, there is a significant shortage of skilled construction workers at nearly all levels, and construction companies’ recruitment strategies have never been more critical. Therefore, we have come up with this guide on the best recruitment strategies for construction companies.

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Discovering qualified candidates is consistently ranked as one of the most pressing challenges facing recruiters. In 2022 and beyond, it is only going to be more challenging. But with the right recruitment strategy, you can find the best candidates and hire them before someone your competitor does.

Table of Contents

Why You Need A Solid Recruitment Strategy?

Recruiting top talent is a hard job. And it is not any more accessible in the wake of a pandemic and an increasing list of hiring managers’ demands. In a crisis, recruiting needs tend to be more urgent, requiring an agile workforce that can stand up to new hybrid or remote work setups. And even as parts of the economy have yet to recover, many businesses are actively searching for talent to meet the invasion of demand.

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These mentioned below recruiting strategies can help you meet that challenge and plan for long-term success at your company.

As the construction business expands, new opportunities come, and companies win new contracts. They require adding more staff to meet the demands of new business contracts. When such situations come, recruiters are often slogging and contacting recruitment agencies to provide a quick hiring pool.

Such hastes lead to hiring mediocre talent and can prove damaging in the long run when you want to sustain the business propositions. Such hiring often leads to employees joining with mismatched expectations and results in poor productivity and attrition.

If companies spend some amount of time and effort brainstorming and putting together a recruitment strategy and a plan to implement, they would save a lot of money and pain later during critical needs.

How to Meet your Company’s Hiring Demands

First, hire for aptitude.

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This might seem counterintuitive. It would be easier to hire someone who matches the job requirements exactly. But how often can you find someone who precisely matches the description?

Modern job descriptions include vast numbers of competencies and skills that few candidates can meet without exceptions. That leaves recruiters stuck finding as many candidates as possible who only come close to meeting the requirements and deciding among them.

Hiring for aptitude solves this problem. When a recruiter sees a high-quality candidate who has the core skills for the job and a strong learning mindset, they can confidently make an offer.

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The second way companies can hire more competitively in 2022 and beyond is to prioritize generalists and those willing to be flexible to meet changing demands. These people have the drive to learn and experience in multiple fields—though they sometimes lack the exact skills and experience you seek.

Generalists are the people you want at your company (though there’s a place for specialists, too). When Google studied the qualities that made their employees successful, they found that science, technology, engineering, and math skills were dead last.

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Which qualities were more important? Understanding different points of view, being a critical thinker, having problem-solving abilities, and making connections across complex ideas, time zones, and even via Zoom.

These are characteristics generalists tend to have—and they put them at an advantage in the workplace.

Focusing on aptitude and hiring generalists lets companies more quickly onboard top-quality candidates.

Recruitment strategies you can use to attract the best candidates

It’s easy to see why the hiring process is such a costly endeavor when you look at everything required to replace a team member — advertising open jobs, screening and selecting candidates, new team member onboarding, training, etc.

Hiring the right candidate is a crucial part of every company’s strategic HR management process, which is why your recruiting methods and strategies must be optimized for maximum benefit.

One of the top recruitment strategies for construction companies is to plan. Construction companies should know if their business is picking up or if the change is happening. Construction companies should also look at the upcoming project schedules to ensure enough laborers, managers, and staff for all upcoming projects. Companies have more fruitful searches when they have time to do a complete investigation. When companies have a strict hiring deadline, they hire the first available person rather than the most qualified person. Planning isn’t stressful or complicated, and these easy steps can help improve the overall quality of new hires.

#1. Create a candidate persona

You don’t want just anyone responding to the jobs you’re posting. You want the best possible candidates to notice the positions you’re advertising — and not after waiting weeks or months. But first, you have to define who your ideal candidate is. You do that by using research, data, and facts to create a candidate persona.

A candidate persona is a fictitious profile that represents your ideal job candidate for a specific role in recruitment. It includes their characteristics, skills, qualifications, educational background, where they’re from, interests, etc. When you know exactly what you’re looking for in a future team member, you can tailor your recruiting strategies toward attracting the right people.

#2. Outline Your Job Descriptions

After determining the required positions, the company should now write the job description and set internal minimum requirements. One of the recruitment strategies for construction companies is to present clear job descriptions for potential candidates.

It seems simple, but it is a significant cause of poor candidates. A clear construction job description will help you to stay on track in your search and interview process. For your job description to be functional, it has to include;

The exact skills for the position
Whether the position is temporary or permanent
Likely backgrounds for candidates having the requisite knowledge or experience
Any qualifications required, whether educational or professional

Your job description will help applicants to know if this is the right job for them or not.

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#3. Launch an employee referral program

According to a study by LinkedIn, employee referrals are a leading source of quality hires, alongside social networks and online job boards, making referrals one of the most effective recruitment strategies.

An employee referral program is a structured program where employers ask their employees to recommend suitable candidates for open positions. Your employees know the types of candidates you’re looking to hire better than other sources, which is why most employee referrals make a better match right from the beginning. This means a lower turnover rate, reduced recruiting costs, faster hiring time, and better workforce planning, among other benefits.

#4. Internships Programs

One of the most straightforward recruitment strategies for construction companies is to partner with the local colleges to offer internships and apprenticeships. By providing internships and apprenticeships, companies can train qualified workers. Companies benefit from an internship program because they see who the best workers are and fit in with the existing team.

After successful internship/ apprenticeship completion you can offer them a full-time job based on your assessment. Most of the colleges called them a Pre-placement offer. In India, a lot of campus placements happened through this route only. As the majority of the companies are taking participating in the Campus internship programs.

Benefitting students – Internships and apprenticeships benefit students. Often the students are getting paid to both learn and work.

Benefitting businesses – Businesses with an internship program can select the best student or students to join the team. This gives students a sense of security when they leave school because they know they have a job.

Benefitting schools – Schools want to have a high employment rate. They need their students to have jobs after college to prove that the school’s program helps students. By partnering with the school, schools know that their students get real-life experience that looks good on a resume.

#5. Improve your employer brand

Your company’s reputation is your brand, and your brand is shaped by a whole gamut of things: logo, typography, packaging, your value proposition, customer service, the quality of your products or services, and so on.

On the other hand, your employer brand is your reputation or popularity among current, past, and future employees. It’s how the market perceives you as an employer. Having a positive employer brand in today’s highly competitive job market is one way to dominate in the war for talents.

#6. Leverage social recruiting

Social recruiting uses social media sites, job boards, online forums, and blogs to recruit candidates. Gone are the days when social hiring was solely used to augment more traditional forms of recruiting. It’s gone mainstream, with 84% of organizations now using it.

Practices that fall under the social recruiting category include:

Identifying potential candidates on LinkedIn and messaging them
Using Facebook to post a job opening
Tweeting links to open jobs and using applicable hashtags
Sharing photos or videos of employees and company-sponsored events on your official Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube accounts

#7. Embrace recruitment automation

Recruitment automation is a human capital management strategy that uses machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics to automate recruiting processes you would otherwise execute manually. This, in turn, reduces the cost per hire, accelerates time to fill, boosts recruiter productivity, and improves the overall quality and effectiveness of an organization’s workforce.

It’s used by companies hiring at scale and those looking to achieve optimum hiring results within a limited amount of time using as few resources as possible.

The following hiring processes can benefit from recruitment automation:

Employment Websites and Job boards – depending on the position, LinkedIn, Indeed, and other similar sites can be great places to list open jobs. Using historical data, a hiring manager can determine which sites produced the best-qualified candidates and invest more resources into those platforms.
Job advertising: In a nutshell, programmatic job advertising uses software instead of actual people to buy, place, and optimize job advertisements.
Social recruiting: Social recruitment platforms like HireRabbit let you create Facebook and mobile career sites. They also come with team collaboration features such as calendars, automatic reminders, task managers, and alerts.
Applicant tracking: Applicant tracking systems organize, filter, and sort job applicants. They keep track of the stage an applicant is in and allow the hiring team to collaborate more effectively.
Candidate pre-screening: Pre-screening tools such as resume scanners rank and grade candidates based on their skills, experience, and other characteristics. This allows you to pinpoint the most qualified candidates in less time.
Interview scheduling: With interview scheduling software, candidates see which interview time slots are still available, allowing them to reserve a time slot without having to call, message, or email your team.
Offers: Once you’ve chosen your candidate, you update your human resource planning software, which then automatically generates an offer letter, employment contract, and other related documents.

#8. Pursue People Who Will Help Your Company Grow

It’s not enough to let candidates come to you. It would help if you went looking for people who aren’t looking for jobs.

That might sound like a waste of time. But approximately 70% of the world’s workforce comprises passive candidates who aren’t looking for a job, according to 2019 data from recruiting firm Workonic. Just because someone is not actively looking for a new job doesn’t mean they would not take one.

Why would you limit your recruiting to a fraction of the world’s talent who is open to a new job? Not every person you get in touch with will want a new job. But you might be surprised at how many are at least amenable to hearing about a unique opportunity.

Keep in mind that wooing someone away from their current job takes specific preparation. If they have never heard of your company and do not know what you stand for, you are going to have a much more difficult time convincing them that taking a job at your organization is a good idea.

You will not develop an employer brand overnight. That is where employer branding comes in. Look to these tips for a quick overview of how you can build your employer brand to attract the highest-quality long-term employees.

#9. Create a System for Growth and Succession

In the next few years, bringing in outside talent is likely to solve many recruiting challenges. But forgetting about your internal talent pool would be a big mistake.

“Even if you’re sourcing and selecting the best candidates right now, at some point, you may need to consider a build strategy,” says Sharlyn Lauby, President of ITM Group Inc., a Florida-based training and human resources consulting firm. “It’s better to think about succession planning now because it takes time to develop people and see the results.”

You can go headhunting to recruit new leaders and executives. But relying on that type of recruitment strategy for the top levels of your company means you will spend more money and wait longer for those people to start having an impact on your business.

With more competition for top candidates, recruiters will need to look to the employees they already have. If those employees have been chosen for their aptitude and ability to adapt to new requirements, they have the characteristics to make great leaders.

#10. Showcase Attractive Work Conditions

In an employees’ market, candidates also may be sizing you up just as much as you are assessing them. One way applicants consider employers is by the work conditions they are bringing to the table. You may need to tune up your company benefits to entice skilled workers to join your team.

You may have to provide equal career paths and opportunities, insurance coverage and health benefits, possibly extending beyond the construction season, enhanced on-site working conditions, including breaks, pay according to the value the candidate brings to the company, etc. Remember that potential employees may be looking for continuing education and training to help them progress in their work and their careers.

#11. Lucrative Offer ample benefits, Rewards, and incentives.

Companies that offer appealing perks can attract more school leavers or new graduates into a career in construction. As said before, no longer are workers willing to slog away hours at an end for minimum wages or benefits.

They need to see construction as a career they can grow within, increase their earnings, and have a capacity for career development. Benefits and incentives should be competitive and similar to those offered in other careers whenever possible. Overtime hours, signing bonuses, customizable benefits, and paid volunteer hours are just a few of the attractive incentives that construction companies can offer workers.

#12. Continuous training for your recently hired employees.

For a career to be attractive, it has to offer growth and the capacity for development. Those with the aptitude and drive like to see their careers develop and their earning potential grow along with it. When listing a job description, you must explain that it comes with the opportunity for development and promotions.

Offer continuous training for your newly hired employees, giving them ample opportunities to reach their potential so that both they and the company benefit from their cultivated skills. Simply put, clear career paths should not only be restricted but should also be developed.

Recruitment Strategies for the Future

With increased reliance on freelancers, contract workers, and hire-now-to-solve-a-problem employees, it can be easy to lose track of the ultimate goal: your company’s long-term success.

All of these recruiting strategies for your construction company can result in great hires. But your recruiters and talent sources must take a long view of your hires, contractors, and promoters. It will benefit your company in 2022 and beyond.

Conclusion

Construction companies have to use their best strategies to ensure that they fill their positions. Companies benefit when they plan for open positions, provide clear job descriptions, and post locations where candidates are likely to look. These tips should help any company build a successful recruitment strategy.

Innovative recruitment strategies are the only way for construction companies to cater to the rapidly growing infrastructure development and commercial and residential construction happening almost worldwide.

The construction industry needs to nurture a steady flow of qualified candidates to deliver on promised quality, budgets, and deadlines. Hiring from a position of need does not always allow construction firms to pick the top talent, a situation that can be remedied if a continuous recruitment process is adopted by construction companies to fight the shortage of talented potential employees.

The recruitment strategies for construction companies mentioned above provide a way for the industry to encourage and attract a new wave of employees to consider construction as a viable career option, with lots of potential for personal and professional growth.

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