You need a foreman by next week. A guy is available because his old shop folded. He looks fine on paper, the interview goes well, and you make the offer because the season is on top of you and the seat is empty. Then, a few months in, you are paying the hidden cost of a wrong seat all over again.
If that pattern feels familiar, you are not bad at hiring. You just do not have a hiring process. Most trades owners do not. Recruitment happens when a truck is short and a crew is standing around, which is the worst possible time to make a careful decision.
I am Bruce Baker. I have run the jobsite and the back office, and I have spent more than twenty years advising owners, most of them in construction and the skilled trades, on how to move revenue and protect margin. A big piece of that work is helping owners stop losing money on hires that looked right and were not.
Why a reactive trades hiring process costs you
Hiring on gut feel is not a one-time mistake. It compounds.
When you fill a supervisor seat with the wrong person, you do not just lose the salary. You lose the jobs they run behind schedule, the crew morale they drain, the callbacks, and the weeks it takes you to admit the fit is wrong. Then you start the search again, usually more desperate than the first time.
Skilled field supervisors and leadership roles are the hardest seats to fill and the most expensive to fill wrong. The trades already face a tight labour market, and demand for experienced supervisors does not soften just because your process is informal. BuildForce Canada tracks this supply pressure across the sector [citation needed: BuildForce Canada labour-market outlook for construction supervisors].
The deeper problem is what an empty seat does to the rest of the shop. Work you promised slips. Your best people cover the gap and burn out. You end up making the next hire from a hole, which is exactly how you got here.
The signs you are hiring reactively
- You only recruit when a seat is already empty.
- Every candidate goes through a different, made-up-on-the-spot screen.
- The decision comes down to who interviewed well or who was available.
- You have no line item in the budget for finding people.
None of that is a character flaw. It is a missing system, and systems are fixable.
Build a hiring funnel you can run every time
The fix is to treat hiring like any other repeatable part of the business, the same way you would treat estimating or job costing. You want a funnel that runs the same way whether the market is hot or slow, so you are never inventing a process under pressure.
Here is the frame I use with owners.
1. Define the seat before you post it
Write down what the role actually has to deliver, not a generic job title. A site supervisor is not “a good hand who got older.” Name the real demands: the schedules they own, the people they lead, the calls they make when something goes sideways. If you cannot describe the work, you cannot screen for it.
2. Standardize the screen
Every candidate should go through the same steps in the same order: application, phone screen, structured interview, reference checks. Same questions, same scoring. When the process is consistent, you can actually compare people instead of comparing your mood on two different days.
3. Measure fit, not interview voice
The best interviewer is often not the best hire. I have watched owners burn through a couple of supervisors who looked right on paper, then finally get it right by measuring each candidate against the real demands of the role.
I use Person Profile assessments for this, weighting behaviours, driving forces, and competencies so the decision rests on fit instead of gut feel. The owner who does this hires the person who matches the work, not the one with the best voice in the room.
4. Budget for it
Talent acquisition is a cost of doing business, not a surprise. Put a realistic number against finding and vetting people, and recruit before you are desperate. A small standing budget beats a panic hire every time.
What about the candidate who negotiates hard?
Here is an honest counterpoint. A structured process will not remove judgement, and it should not. Real hiring still involves negotiation and trade-offs, like a strong candidate who wants a vehicle allowance instead of a company truck, or terms that do not match how you usually do things.
A process does not make those calls for you. What it does is make sure you are negotiating with the right person, someone you already know fits the seat. Structure protects you from the rushed decision. It does not replace your read on people. Keep both.
The other pitfall: do not over-engineer this. You do not need a fifteen-stage funnel for a first-year apprentice. Match the rigour to the stakes. Leadership and supervisor seats get the full process. Simpler roles get a lighter version of the same steps.
The next step
Pick your next open seat, the one that keeps you up at night, and do one thing before you post it: write a one-page description of what that role must actually deliver. Not a title, not a wish list. The real work.
That page becomes the yardstick for every candidate, and it is the foundation of a hiring process you can run every season. If you want help building the funnel and the assessment behind it, that is a core part of what we do at Workplaces, coaching trades and home-service owners on operations, leadership, and building a company that runs without you in every seat.
Build what compounds. That includes how you hire.
