You have a seat open. A foreman spot, a lead installer, a service tech you needed last month. The work is out there, your crew is stretched, and the hire keeps slipping. Every week the seat stays empty, someone on your team is covering it, and you are the one staying late to keep jobs moving.
Slow hiring does not feel like an emergency because nothing breaks all at once. That is exactly why it hurts you. It compounds in the background while you are busy putting out the fire in front of you.
I am Bruce Baker. I run Workplaces out of Edmonton and I have spent more than 20 years advising owners, most of them in construction and the skilled trades. I have been on the jobsite and in the back office. When an owner tells me hiring is dragging, I already know a few things are true before they finish the sentence.
Why slow hiring compounds
An empty seat is not neutral. It has a cost, and the cost climbs the longer the seat sits.
Here is what actually happens on the ground:
- Your best people absorb the missing role, so they are stretched thinner and closer to burnout.
- Jobs slip because there is no one dedicated to running them, which pushes your schedule further behind.
- You get pulled back onto the tools or into the field, which is the most expensive labour hour in the company.
- The pressure builds, and pressure is where bad hires get made.
That last one is the real trap. When you have been short-handed for weeks and a warm body walks in who interviews well, you hire the interview instead of the person who fits the work. I have watched owners do this twice in a row on the same seat, each time paying the hidden cost of a wrong hire: the ramp-up, the rework, the crew morale, and eventually the exit.
A lot of the delay is not the candidate. It is friction in your own process. Interviews that never get scheduled. A video call that drops and nobody follows up. A resume that sits in an inbox for ten days. None of these feel like decisions, but together they add up to a seat that stays empty for a month you could not afford.
The fix: treat hiring like a job you run, not a favour you squeeze in
You would never run a build with no schedule, no sequence, and no clear scope. Hiring deserves the same discipline. When the process is loose, friction wins. When it is tight, good candidates move through fast and bad fits get caught early.
Here is the sequence I put in front of owners.
1. Define the seat before you post it
Write down what the role actually has to do, day to day, on your sites and in your shop. Not a generic job description. The real demands. A site supervisor who cannot hold a schedule and a crew accountable is a wrong hire no matter how good the resume looks.
2. Remove the logistics friction up front
Decide your steps before the first candidate applies. A short screen, one real interview, and a role-based assessment. Book them in advance. Use a scheduling tool so nobody is trading emails for a week. Have a backup plan for when a video call drops, because it will.
The goal is simple: a good candidate should never lose interest because your process made them wait or made them chase you.
3. Measure fit against the work, not the interview voice
This is where most trades hires go wrong. The person with the best interview presence is often not the person who does the best work. I use Person Profile assessments to weigh a candidate against the actual role, looking at behaviours, driving forces, and competencies, so the decision rests on fit instead of gut feel.
One owner I worked with had missed on a couple of site-supervisor hires that looked right on paper. When we measured candidates against the real demands of the seat, he hired the person who matched the work, not the smoothest interview, and stopped paying for the wrong seat.
4. Move fast once you have a fit
Good trades people have options. If your process is tight and you have a clear signal on fit, make the decision. Speed is only dangerous when it is panic. Speed on a well-defined, well-assessed candidate is an advantage.
The honest counter-argument
Some owners will say a rigorous process just slows things down more. Fair concern. The point is not to add steps. It is to replace weeks of drift with a few deliberate ones. A defined process is faster than an undefined one, because nothing sits waiting on a decision you keep postponing.
The other risk is over-relying on any single tool, including an assessment. A Person Profile report informs the decision. It does not make it. You still walk the site with the person, you still check references, you still use your judgement about your own crew.
Where owners get help systemizing this
If hiring keeps stalling, it is usually a symptom of a business running on reaction instead of rhythm. That is the work I do with owners: putting a repeatable process around the things that cost you the most when they are left loose. It is the same discipline behind operations frameworks like the Entrepreneurial Operating System from Gino Wickman’s Traction, applied to a trades business the way it actually runs.
You can see how I work with construction and home-service owners at Workplaces.
Your next step
Pick the one seat that has been open the longest. Before you touch another resume, write a single page: what the role has to do, the three steps in your hiring process, and who owns each step. Put dates on it. That one page turns hiring from a favour you squeeze in at 9 p.m. into a job you can actually run.
Build what compounds.
