I frequently receive questions from customers regarding the difficulty in building a workforce. These questions run the gamut from the crusty 65-year-old contractor complaining about the youth of the day to the fire-eating 24-year-old owner who wants to build a more attractive place for employees to work. No matter how you spin it, building a staff is not an instant proposition. You can rework your finances and see an immediate impact. You might be able to develop a clever marketing plan and find work fairly quickly. But developing people takes time. To make matters worse, unemployment statistics are misleading. Gary Burtless in a December 2012 article for Brookings reported, “Between 2007 and 2011, the fraction of the nation’s unemployed who were unemployed six months or longer increased from 18 percent to 44 percent.” What this means is that there are a lot of people looking for jobs, but many of them are not particularly employable. And the vast majority of the unemployed do not want to work in the field as a tradesperson. So to further study this issue, ask yourself the following six questions and see how you measure up.
This is a complicated question and we could dedicate the rest of this article to it, but let’s try to keep it short and sweet. This starts with the psychological side of things. Too many contractors start out in the field because they don’t know what else to do and then 15 years later, at age 40, they are doing the same thing. If you don’t believe your industry or your company is a good place to work, it is doubtful you will be able to convince other good people to work for you. Look at the positives of working in a small business. People get to see what their daily accomplishments are and feel good about it. Small business employment is results driven with very little politics.