Where construction hiring loses days, and how to get them back

Construction hires against projects, not headcount plans. A superintendent needs a full crew on the day work starts, and each crew is managed against its own daily profit and loss. A crew that shows up short on Monday doesn't cost a firm a hire. It costs the firm Monday.

The challenges in crew staffing are well documented; 45% of firms name worker shortages as causes of project delays. The screening timeline inside the hiring workflow is less examined, and it's the part of the distance between a candidate saying yes and a crew showing up that a hiring team can actually compress.

Associated Builders and Contractors projects that the industry must attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and 456,000 in 2027. Most of the 2026 demand comes from retirement rather than increased construction activity; roughly one-fifth of all electricians are already over 55. That demand doesn't reverse when the market slows, and the people leaving include the superintendents and foremen who trained the crews coming up behind them.

Construction is also by far the most seasonal industry in the US economy; employment runs roughly 10% below its own annual average in February and roughly 7% above it in August. When one firm's crews ramp, so do its competitors'.

Your team also runs the hiring process more often than other industries do. Craft workers aren't quitting construction faster than workers leave other industries. Construction's quits rate is 1.7%, below the all-industry rate of 2.0%. But—the layoff rate of 2.0% is nearly double the all-industry rate of 1.1%. Crews are released when a project closes and hired again when the next one starts.

That makes the rehiring, and the required processes like the background checks, an ongoing cycle rather than a one-time event. Your team needs a screening process built for repetition rather than for the occasional hire.

Your hiring process loses days somewhere that has nothing to do with the records: a form a candidate can’t finish on a phone, a status they can’t see, information they have to type in twice, or a message sent to an email they never check.

60% of frontline workers said they had started an application and never finished it, and the most common reason was forms that took too long. Asked where they dropped out, 18% named onboarding—the stage where the background check often sits. In a market this tight, the offer they take is the one that comes through first and offers the least amount of friction in the process.

Construction planning runs week to week, and so do the candidates. Someone weighing two jobs this week isn't waiting until next week to hear back, and an onboarding process built for a monthly hiring cycle can't serve a workforce making decisions in days.

You don't need the labor market to improve first—you can shorten the time from screening to site yourself with the right technology. Start with these two steps to see where your team's days are going.

Your screening timeline isn't set in stone. You shorten it by changing four things about how the process is set up.

Construction pulls from a wide set of checks, like: criminal searches for the crew, motor vehicle record (MVR) reports for anyone driving, drug and alcohol testing where a contract or an insurer requires it, and occupational health screening for physical work. Sourcing those from separate providers scatters records across portals and leaves every jobsite tracking compliance in its own way.

Put all the checks on one platform, and a superintendent in one state and corporate HR team read the same record, in the same place, on the same day. Order everything at once, and your team waits for a report once, instead of chasing vendors in sequence. Every result lives in the same easy-to-read report, so your team reviews and adjudicates in the same system.

When background checks don't run through your ATS, recruiters re-enter information between tabs. Every re-entry is another chance to introduce the error.

With pre-built integrations, information moves seamlessly through the system. A candidate’s details pass from your ATS to the check without anyone manually retyping them. Equally importantly, integrations also move the work itself.

The check is ordered when a candidate reaches the right stage, the status is added to their records, and your recruiter gets an alert when they need to review. Although “how difficult is it to integrate systems?” is the first question an IT team will ask, pre-built connections cover most applicant tracking systems without engineering work.

When your team has to read every report by hand, you slow down every hire. Automated adjudication tools let your team set criteria for every role and jobsite upfront, so your adjudicators only need to review relevant records when deciding whether to approve a candidate or initiate adverse action.

Hiring managers should be able to see at a glance whether a background check report is clear according to the set criteria or needs further review. The best tools marry these customized adjudication actions with built-in compliance guardrails that only surface reportable information and account for regional regulations. Checkr’s charge explainer, for instance, gives your adjudicator a plain-language overview of a charge, its severity, and the statutes that apply in that jurisdiction, so even an unfamiliar record doesn’t stall the process.

With automation, compliance is consistent and decisions happen fast enough to get a worker on site for day one of a project.

Your candidate is standing in a parking lot between jobs with 20 minutes and one bar of signal. Everything you need from them has to happen on that phone: consent and authorization forms, a photo of a license or a certification card, a correction when the employer name they typed doesn't match. They should be able to track where the check stands in real time without calling anyone, get answers from built-in help rather than waiting on your recruiter. And when a form is missing information, the alert should reach your recruiter too, so nothing sits for three days because nobody noticed.

Put those four changes together and you get what a screening process should do for a construction team: one place to order everything a trade requires, results where your recruiters already work, criteria that move qualified people forward, and a process workers can finish from a jobsite. That's what you should expect from a partner, whoever you choose.

Here's how it works with Checkr. Your team orders the national criminal search and county criminal search from one account, and sets the adjudication criteria. An estimated completion time appears for your field team and your candidate at the same time. And more than 200 pre-built ATS/HRIS integrations mean your recruiters order and read results in the system they already use.

CMC Rock, an aggregates and concrete producer running two quarries and three concrete batch plants in Utah, hires the loader operators and mixer drivers those sites run on. Their HR manager described switching to Checkr this way:

Retirement and local competition set the size of the craft labor pool, and no hiring team controls that. What you do control is everything that happens after a candidate says yes: how quickly your process moves them, and how quickly your teams have access to the information they need to make a decision. Consolidate the checks, connect them to your ATS/HRIS, set your criteria once, and give candidates a process they can finish from a phone. Each of those is a decision you make when you choose a provider, and Checkr is built to handle all four.

About the author

As Solutions Marketing Lead, Kristen researches the impact of the Checkr product and ensure our teams are set up to provide the greatest value to our customers. Kristen has built customer-centric marketing programs at enterprise technology companies in cybersecurity and process automation.