You have a seat open. A foreman walked, or you finally admitted the crew is one body short of hitting the schedule. You post the role, a few resumes come in, and then the process stalls. The video call drops. Someone shows up on the wrong link. You reschedule twice, lose a good candidate to a competitor, and end up hiring the person who was simply easiest to reach that week.
That is a slow hiring process, and it is costing you more than you think.
I am Bruce Baker. I run leadership development and business coaching for owners in construction and the skilled trades, and I have spent more than 20 years watching this exact pattern play out. The problem is almost never a shortage of candidates. It is the friction between wanting to hire and actually deciding, and that friction is where good owners lose good people.
Why a slow hiring process compounds
Here is the trap. Your recruitment is already informal, because you are busy running jobs. So screening happens in the cracks: a call from the truck, a video interview squeezed between site visits, a text thread that goes cold for three days. Every logistical hiccup (a dropped call, a missed link, a scheduling miss) adds another delay.
Delay does two things, and both hurt.
First, it costs you the strong candidates. The good ones have options. The longer you take to evaluate and decide, the more likely they accept somewhere else. You are left choosing from whoever is still available, which is not the same as whoever is best.
Second, it forces the decision under pressure. When the seat has been open for two months and the crew is stretched, you stop evaluating fit and start hiring relief. That is how you end up with a site supervisor who interviewed well and then did not work out. I have helped owners recover from exactly that: a couple of hires that looked right on paper, hired fast because the pain was high, gone within months.
The hidden cost of a wrong seat is far larger than a slow one. Rework, missed deadlines, a crew that loses trust in the person above them. You pay for a rushed hire long after the interview logistics are forgotten.
The fix: make screening a system, not a scramble
The answer is not fancier software. It is removing the friction that lets a hire drift, and setting a bar before you ever get on a call. Here is how I coach owners to do it.
Decide what the role actually demands first
Before you talk to anyone, write down what the seat requires in real terms. Not a resume wish list. The actual behaviours, drives, and competencies the work needs day to day. A site supervisor who has to hold a crew accountable needs different wiring than one who mostly coordinates suppliers.
This is where I use a Person Profile assessment with owners, weighting behaviours, driving forces, and competencies so the decision rests on fit against the real job, not on who had the best interview voice. When you know the bar in advance, the logistics matter less, because you are measuring every candidate against the same standard instead of reacting to whoever impressed you last.
Remove the logistics friction on purpose
Small things kill momentum. Fix them once:
- Send one calendar invite with the video link embedded, plus a phone number as a fallback. If the tech fails, the call still happens.
- Block dedicated interview windows in your week. Do not squeeze evaluation into the cracks between fires. A hire this important deserves a scheduled seat.
- Give a single point of contact for the candidate. A hire lost to a cold text thread is a hire you did not have to lose.
- Set a decision deadline before you start. Know when you will choose, and hold yourself to it.
Protect against the pressure-hire
The whole point of a system is that it holds when you are tired and behind. When the bar is written down and the logistics run clean, you can move fast without moving blind. Speed and rigour are not opposites. A tight process gives you both.
A note on doing this without spending big
Owners sometimes ask how to run a real screening process without money to burn on recruiters or expensive tools. You do not need either. The bar, the calendar discipline, and the single point of contact cost nothing. The assessment is a modest expense against the price of a wrong hire, which is one of the largest hidden costs in a trades business.
If you want help systemizing hiring, operations, and leadership, that is the work I do with owners in construction, plumbing, HVAC, and electrical through the Business Building and Leadership programs at Workplaces. The goal is the same one I hold for every seat: a leader who fits the work, hired on a cadence, not in a panic.
One honest caveat. A cleaner process will not fix a role nobody wants. If you keep struggling to attract candidates at all, the issue may be pay, scope, or reputation, not logistics. The labour market still has real pressure in it. BuildForce Canada’s Construction and Maintenance Looking Forward outlook for 2026 to 2035 projects that 135,000 residential construction workers, more than one-fifth of that sector’s labour force, will retire by 2035, and it reports continued tightness in non-residential labour markets tied to major-project timing. So be honest about whether you are competitive before you blame the funnel.
Your next step
Pick your next open role and write one page before you post it: the behaviours, drives, and competencies the work actually demands, and the date you will decide by. That single page turns a slow, reactive hire into a measured one, and it is the cheapest insurance you will buy this quarter.
Build what compounds.
