Developing a solid recruiting strategy is a great way to attract and hire more qualified employees. Yet due to the 2023 construction worker shortage, it is now more than just a want, it is a NEED. According to Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), the construction industry will need to attract an estimated 546,000 additional workers ON TOP of the normal pace of hiring in 2023 to meet the demand for labor. ABC reported that the construction industry averaged more than 390,000 job openings per month in 2022, the highest level on record.
“The construction industry must recruit hundreds of thousands of qualified, skilled construction professionals each year to build the places where we live, work, play, worship, learn and heal,” said Michael Bellaman, ABC president and CEO. “As the demand for construction services remains high, filling these roles with skilled craft professionals is vital to America’s economy and infrastructure rebuilding initiatives.”
With high demand and low worker supply, construction companies MUST implement recruitment and retention strategies to entice potential new hires and keep them engaged once they’re on board.
Smart Recruiting Strategy #1: Reduce Your Time to Hire
One of the best ways to combat the 2023 construction worker shortage is to reduce your time to hire. The faster you find and hire employees, the faster you can get them on the job. Time to hire is the number of days it takes to hire a new employee beginning when a candidate responds to your job posting and ending when he or she accepts an offer. Understanding time to hire and using this metric at your company can help you develop a more efficient recruitment strategy.
Calculating your time to hire allows you to figure out:
- How long it takes to confirm that you have the right candidate.
- How fast you move when you find the right person.
- Any bottlenecks that exist in your hiring process.
If your time to hire is too slow, candidates may think you’re not interested and accept another job in the interim.
Take too long to recognize and respond to candidates, i.e. “leave them in the lurch”, and the right candidate may decide not to accept an offer. Once you evaluate the data, you can see where improvements need to be made.
An applicant tracking system can automatically track your time to hire metric as well as offer reporting on time to hire by role or department. Once you have this data, you can see which hiring managers may be taking longer than others or which departments might be falling behind. Even better, an ATS can notably improve your time to hire by automating much of the process.
Smart Recruiting Strategy #2: Automatically push your job postings out into the world.
When you’re trying to quickly hire enough employees to staff the next job, you can’t waste time manually posting available positions. Pushing your job postings out to multiple job boards, your career page and social accounts at once puts it in front of more eyes, which can give you a distinct advantage as you look to hire staff during the 2023 construction worker shortage.
An ATS can streamline the job posting process by:
- Giving recruiters the ability to use one-click job distribution that hits popular job sites, from Indeed and ZipRecruiter to more focused job boards, such as industry-specific or niche demographics like veterans.
- Recruiting via social platforms that target both active and passive candidates. Passive candidates are already working at a position, so they’re likely not browsing job boards as often as active candidates. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be interested in a new position that offers them better pay, better benefits and a better culture.
- Automatically including compliance language. A good ATS can automatically add an EEOC tagline, as well as collect appropriate applicant data and compile it into easy-to-digest reports. Candidate and employee data is always at your fingertips, making fulfilling audit requirements easy.
Smart Recruiting Strategy #3: Put your company culture front and center.
Company culture, which includes that set of shared values and beliefs about appropriate and inappropriate behavior for an organization and its employees, can make a big impact on candidates. Presenting a company culture that’s appealing to new hires can give you an edge when filling positions. According to Jobvite, Job Seeker Nation, 59% of job seekers research companies’ websites, social media, and reviews to gain insight into their employer brand and culture.
An ATS can ensure your employer branding is clear and concise across all of your recruitment materials. For example, Arcoro’s ATS is fully customizable to your brand – colors, copy, logos and video. There’s no confusion about where candidates are applying because the interface is all you, all the time.
Smart Recruiting Strategy #4: Make it easy for candidates to apply.
Your recruiting strategy should not only streamline the process for you, but for your candidates as well. Make sure your application process is mobile-friendly to catch more applicants which is especially important given the 2023 construction worker shortage. You’d be surprised at how many companies don’t take this fact into account, leading to a clunky online experience that doesn’t appeal to candidates. Less than 10 years ago, only 20% of construction websites were mobile-friendly. And with 85% of Americans owning a mobile phone, having an application process that allows them to apply from their devices is a must.
A good ATS ensures:
- Applications are quick to fill out on a mobile phone. (SHRM notes that the candidate drop-off rate for online applications can be as high as 92%.)
- Candidates can apply to your postings in minutes, without creating usernames or passwords.
- Once an application is submitted, the software automatically sends email updates to keep candidates informed and engaged.
Smart Recruiting Strategy #5: Get onboarding started before day one.
Getting new employees hired quickly is one hurdle and keeping them on the job is another. With the 2023 construction worker shortage, you don’t want to deal with high turnover rates. A good onboarding process can make a huge difference in employee retention. It has been found that companies that implement a formal onboarding program could see 50% greater employee retention among new recruits and 62% greater productivity.
Just as reducing your time to hire is important, so is reducing their time to get on the job, without cutting corners on training. Jumpstart the onboarding process at home via a cloud-based onboarding system. Putting your new employee in a job site trailer and making them fill out paperwork on their first day is isolating and boring. A cloud-based system gives employers the ability to collect several documents from employees for legal and regulatory compliance, all from the comfort of their home.
When new employees complete this step from home, their first day becomes less about paperwork and more about productivity. Employees can start to create working relationships with their new team members and really begin to understand the responsibilities of the job and the culture of the organization. An onboarding system can also track your training, ensuring that even though the process is streamlined, it is still comprehensive.
Arcoro offers recruiting and onboarding solutions that are meant to help you find, hire and onboard more workers. And let’s face it, with the 2023 construction labor shortage, you’re going to need all the help that you can get.
