Is the current skills shortage set to be the challenge of the decade in Construction?

I don’t have to say it because we all know it. Recruiting in a skills shortage is tough. Hiring for highly skilled roles when unemployment is at it’s lowest in 45 years is no easy feat. It takes tenacity, resilience, dedication and a bit of strategic thinking along the way.

It is estimated the construction industry employs $1.2 million Australians and while employment is higher in the sector than 5 years ago, staff turnovers in some businesses can be 50% or more of their workforce.

Employees can make or break a business and therefore are a company’s most valued resource. That resource is scarce right now and there is great discussion that skills shortage is the challenge of the decade for the industry. Overcoming this is about continually improving and leveraging from the talent we can access in the market and operating under a new model of thinking.

What our focus needs to be is putting more strategy and thought into who we hire just as much as we put into the way we hire. When we are looking at a smaller candidate pool we need to be recruiting for both skills and attributes- ensuring future employees don’t just have the skills but also have the attributes to help build the culture and functionality of your team. Choose your workforce carefully and ensure you are hiring to retain for the long term rather than a quick fix.

There are several things to look at in building your workforce and a blog from Bluebeam Inc., a developer of technology solutions for the global architectural, engineering and construction industries suggests several ways to build your construction workforce and I’ve added a few tips and tricks here of my own from plenty of experience in this space:

1-    Consider upcoming projects and resourcing requirements needed to successfully deliver these scopes of work. Work off your tender ratio and start talent pooling now.

2-    Map the project requirements and gaps against your existing workforce. Do you have a great Project Manager? Profile their competencies in the role and work off that for your hiring. Building a powerful profile of what a high performing Project Manager looks like in your business will be the benchmark you can work towards for future hires.

3-    Identify members of your workforce who can be upskilled and plan their development to align with incoming priorities. Understanding their pathway and building their plan towards it keeps them engaged and keeps your talent pipeline humming. Better yet, link it to remuneration targets so they are staying engaged when the company next door is tapping their shoulder offering another 30K. They are loyal to you because they see a tangible shared goal you are working towards. It’s a win/win.

The reality is construction job vacancies have increased by 80 per cent since 2019 and it is forecast that by 2023 there will be more than 100,000 unfulfilled roles in the sector. A recent report from Arcadis in their construction costs index report also identified that the unfulfilled roles gap will be almost 50 per cent greater than the number of people expected to be qualified to fill them.

We have a strategy that works beyond just hiring a role and offer a recruitment and coaching service. Through over 30 years combined experience in recruitment and coaching talk to us about how our role profiling, leadership analysis, executive search and qualified coach during the onboarding of your team member can set you apart in the market.

It’s a challenging market but we can choose to put our head in the sand, get reactive or we can get proactive and look at profiling, hiring and investing in developing our new hires to get them performing at their best sooner and retained within your organisation for the long term.

Chat to us about our unique solution through emailing me at lauren@karanandco.com.au to see how we can add value and insight into your hiring process.