Control What You Can, Let Go of What You Can't: A Talent Strategy

You cannot control the labor pool. You cannot control how many people show up wanting to work in construction, and you cannot control what immigration policy does to the pipeline this year or next year. Quit rates are at a 9-year low right now, which means people already in the trades are staying put, but hiring is at the lowest rate the Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked since the year 2000, which means almost nobody new is walking in the door. That gap is a demographic story playing out at a national level, and chasing it, worrying about it, building your whole strategy around fixing it, is a losing game for a contractor.



Here is what is fully in your hands instead. How you develop the people you already have, and how you make staying with your company the obvious choice instead of something they have to think twice about every time a competitor waves a dollar more an hour in front of them. That is the lever that actually moves, and it is the one most owners ignore while they are busy complaining about a labor market they cannot touch.

1. Give people the same clarity you give a new project.

Every job has a schedule and a budget, and everybody involved knows what winning looks like by a certain date. You would never run a job where nobody knew if they were ahead or behind, yet that is exactly how most companies run their people.

• Somebody gets hired, gets a quick walkthrough, and then just kind of exists in the role with no real markers of progress
• No idea if they are moving forward or standing still
• That uncertainty turns into somebody quietly updating a resume on their lunch break

Fix it by writing down what winning looks like at 90 days, 6 months, and at a year. When someone can actually see themselves getting better and can point to it, they stop looking around for that feeling somewhere else. Not complicated, it just takes sitting down and actually doing it instead of assuming people figure it out on their own.

2. Recognition that actually means something.

Not a plaque on the wall. Not a company wide email that goes straight to the trash folder in everyone's head. Not a generic thank you tossed out at a meeting because somebody read that recognition matters.

• Recognition from the person someone actually reports to
• Tied to something specific they did well on a specific day
• A super telling a young carpenter, hey, the way you handled that layout issue Tuesday saved us half a day

That costs nothing and takes 10 seconds to say, but it does more for retention than most benefits packages ever will. One of the most underused tools in this entire industry, and it is free.

Repetition, repetition, repetition = MUSCLE! You embed this system into culture my repeating every day!

3. Put your best leaders in front of your newest people.

Not whoever happens to be standing around and available that day.

• A young hire next to somebody strong learns faster, sticks around longer, starts actually contributing sooner
• A young hire handed off to whoever is convenient learns bad habits, gets frustrated, and leaves within a year

Stats show a 38% turnover number for workers under 25. It makes a lot more sense once you look at it through the above lens. It is not that young people do not want to work hard, it is that too many of them are getting trained by whoever was least busy instead of whoever was actually good.

None of this requires you to control the labor market, and none of it requires you to give away the store either. You are not padding pay to unsustainable levels or making promises you cannot keep just to keep a body on the crew. You are building a company that people do not want to leave because there is a clear path, real recognition, and strong people around them showing them how it is done. That was always yours to build.

If you want help actually putting structure behind this, roles, onboarding, a real development path for your people, that is exactly the kind of work I do with contractors every day. Email me at jerry@pro-accel.com if you want to talk it through and see where the gaps actually are in your company.

Hit reply and tell me, does your company have a real answer for what winning looks like at 90 days for a new hire, or is that something you have never actually written down?

Gerard Aliberti
Pro-Accel, Owner

EXCITING NEWS

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Ways We Can Work Together

Role-Specific Employee Performance Training — Pro-Accel offers role-specific training workshops for Estimators, PMs, Superintendents, and Field Engineers focused on accountability, decision-making, and ownership. Reply if you want to talk about your team.

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