Recruiting and Retaining Top Construction Industry Talent

Want to attract and retain top construction industry talent? You need to align your recruitment and employee strategies with their motivations and needs.

The construction industry is notoriously one of the hardest sectors to find the right talent to fill positions and also retain employees who perform at a high level. We have collated our top tips to help recruit the best possible staff and also provide a working environment for them where they want to stay and develop their careers.

How To Find Top Employees

Use Social Media

Everyone is using social media. Building a social media presence for your construction business can be a powerful tool when it comes to recruiting top construction professionals. You can build your company’s reputation by sharing news, interacting with construction professionals and also by advertising your roles. A simple search for ‘BIM Modeller’ in Twitter and Facebook will bring up people tweets and statuses about that specific role. This could be a fantastic way of finding the right people.

Incentivise Within The Company

The best types of candidates often come from referrals. If employees within your company are incentivised to refer people to the company, you are more likely to find high calibre employees as good employees usually know other good ‘potential’ employees. This incentive can come as a monetary bonus, a gift or even a few more days’ annual leave.

Find Specialist Recruiters

Actively sourcing candidates can be extremely time consuming and quite difficult to do as a company. Conventional means of advertising such as job boards and newspaper advertising are no longer as effective as they once were. The quickest way to find the right talent is to retain the services of a specialist construction recruitment company such as Energi People.

Good recruiters should know where to find the best talent, actively headhunt them and sell the potential opportunity in order to find the best candidates for your roles. The best talent within the construction industry are rarely actively looking for jobs and it is the role of the recruiter to headhunt highly sought after ‘passive’ candidates. Of course, using a recruiter comes with a cost, but the cost of advertising, not being able to hire anyone, or hiring a candidate who isn’t quite up to scratch can cost a lot more in terms of time, effort and money.

How To Retain Top Employees

Company Culture

We spend a lot of time at work, so making sure that your company has a great culture is imperative to retaining your best employees. This doesn’t mean that you have to be the next Facebook and have open plan offices and free coffee for all your employees. Creating a set of company values and living them every day will make sure employees are engaged and happy to come to work.

Challenging Work

The best employees in your company will fulfil the duties of their role to a very high standard. However, if an employee is feeling like the work is no longer challenging or there is no variety to their day, they may look for pastures new in order to find a new challenge. Ensure that you have scheduled 1-2-1 sessions with your employees to make sure that any issues around employees feeling like they are not being challenged can be addressed.

Opportunities For Advancement

Along with employees being challenged, it is important that all of your employees have a clear path for advancement. Employers need to have set goals in order to keep their interest in their current role and make them less likely to look for other opportunities. It will also motivate them to work harder, learn more and be a fantastic asset to your team which are all great qualities to retain within your business.

Stay In Line With Industry Salary Rates

One of the main reasons employees decide to leave a company is to secure a higher salary. With this in mind, it is important to research market rates on every role that is within your company to make sure you stay competitive in the market. There can sometimes be mitigating circumstances such as budget, but keeping your salaries as close to or above the market rates will ensure people will be less likely to go searching for that higher pay packet. This can also tie in with creating a great company culture and making sure there is room for advancement as this builds up positive PR around the company and could give you a little more wiggle room when it comes to salaries.

If you need any help with recruiting new talent or any advice on staff retention, please feel free to get in touch. Call us today on +44 (0)1252 413 080.