Millennials: Builders Are Desperate to Hire You
Facing a labor shortage and an aging workforce, companies across the industry are trying out new methods for recruiting younger employees.
The Empire State building rises beyond a construction site in New York City. Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg
When the builder Frank L. Blum Construction, based in Winston-Salem,
N.C., was getting started in the 1920s, the company’s assets included an
automobile, two concrete mixers, and a team of mules. One assumes
the animals were paid in food.
Today, Blum’s talent gets
considerably more coddling. In recent years, the company has doubled
down on its employee training program, fattened its benefit package, and
started a mentoring program that has met at a bowling alley and a Dave
& Buster’s arcade. The company has also invited clients, including a
local hospital and a park for which it's building a public art
installation, to talk to employees about why construction work matters.
Those
initiatives are an attempt by Blum's president, Mike Lancaster, to
answer a question that resonates across the industry: Faced with an
aging workforce, how can construction companies attract the young
workers they need for the ongoing expansion?
“The
old days of hiring someone and sticking them on the job site and
saying, ‘Go learn construction,’ that’s gone,” said Lancaster. “We have
to show new talent that we will develop you, appreciate you, and engage
you.”
The construction industry shed about 2.3 million jobs, or 29
percent of its workforce, from the beginning of 2007 through the end of
2010. It regained close to 900,000 workers through January of this year
but has been slower to bring back workers aged 19 to 24, according to
an October analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau.
That
may be because employers prefer to bring back more experienced hands
before tapping untried workers. But many in the industry say that
employers haven't convinced the millennial generation of the appeal
of construction jobs and that they need new talent pipelines to recruit
workers who would, in past decades, have been funneled into construction
by vocational schools or union apprenticeship programs.
Seventy-nine
percent of companies are having trouble filling positions for hourly
workers—especially carpenters, sheet metal installers, and concrete
workers—according to a September survey by
the Associated General Contractors of America. The need is less
pronounced for the types of salaried workers Lancaster is seeking to
recruit, though 55 percent of companies in the AGC poll said they were
struggling to hire project managers and supervisors.
“It’s
absolutely a challenge that the construction industry is going to have
to face,” said Robert Dietz, an economist for the National Association
of Home Builders. “Scarcity of labor has been a top challenge this year,
and it’s not going away next year.”
Present-day labor shortages
and concerns about the aging workforce have led employers and trade
groups to launch new programs to train workers, as well as marketing
efforts to persuade young workers that they can build careers in
construction. Tecta America, a commercial roofing firm in Rosemont,
Ill., with 2,800 workers, is seeking certification from state labor
departments across the U.S. for a new three-year apprenticeship program
for field workers, and the company has a separate program to teach
future supervisors skills such as finance and computer skills.
Meanwhile, Tecta America has been promoting itself
to students as a place where employees can work on environmentally
sustainable projects such as green roofs. “We’re not just going into
high schools but junior high,” said Nicole Eisenhardt, a human resource
manager for the company.
Trade groups, meanwhile, have marshaled
resources in support of broader-based efforts. In 2013, the Foundation
of the Wall & Ceiling Industry, a nonprofit in Falls Church, Va., published
a report for its members that uses such phrases as "coddled" and
"me-first" to describe young workers. The report recommended that hirers
engage in social media recruiting and highlight the high-tech aspects
of construction trades.
In 2010, AGC helped launch Go Build
Alabama, a statewide marketing campaign arguing that construction
offered better earning potential than the average American job and was
accessible without expensive college degrees. The campaign, which featured reality TV host Mike Rowe speaking
such catch phrases as "not all knowledge comes from college," was later
replicated in Georgia. A third Go Build program got support from the
Tennessee state legislature this year, although that program will likely
tap a country music star as spokesman, according to Bill Young,
executive vice president of the state's AGC chapter.
How effective
these campaigns will be remains an open question. Go Build Alabama
helped boost applications to apprenticeship programs by 73 percent,
according to the organization. Other programs may take longer to bear
fruit. In April, the Home Builders Institute, the training arm of the
NAHB, launched a program to train military personnel in construction
trades to help them move back into the civilian world. The program's
first cohort, stationed at the U.S. Army's Ft. Stewart, Ga., base, are
building tiny houses for a nearby homeless population, said Dennis
Torbett, a senior vice president at HBI. The program ticks some boxes
for the pop-science of millennial recruiting but is years away from
funneling a meaningful number of workers into the industry.
Construction,
meanwhile, is expected to add jobs at the second-fastest rate among
U.S. industries, after health care, according to estimates published
last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If the marketing
strategies fail, employers may have to take another, perhaps more
obvious tack to meet the labor shortage, now and in the future.
"Anecdotally, some builders are reporting that wages are going to have
to rise," said Dietz.
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