Understanding Your Workforce is Key to Recruit and Retain Top Talent

Jeani Ringkob: Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob, and you're in for a little bit of a treat today because the tables have gotten turned on me, and I'm giving you guys access to that right now.

I was recently asked by ConExpo if I would be willing to be interviewed for an article. If you don't know, ConExpo isn't just the largest construction show in North America and Expo, it also has an incredible wealth of content on their website.

They're always generating helpful resources, articles, interviews, some really incredible stuff is housed right there on their website. Of course, I was thrilled to be asked to do it as always.

I jumped right in with a wonderful gentleman who works for them on their behalf, helps pull all this great information out and turns it into brilliant, consumable, really incredible articles. I was super excited to get interviewed by Gregg Wartgow and he did an excellent job.

We had so much fun. He drew out incredible insights that were just really natural and conversational. He asked incredible questions, questions that I actually get from clients and prospects and I get at events when I'm speaking and we really dug into some nitty gritty.

I asked them if I could actually take that interview and share it with you here. It was so good that we've actually broken it into two podcasts. This is going to be part one of me getting interviewed and you getting to peek in on that behind the scenes.

In this first episode, we're going to be talking about the importance of getting into the trenches with your workforce. How do you really know them and understand them and allow that to help you build a better talent strategy?

We're also going to talk about surveys. How do you do them? How do you keep them simple and accessible and actually make sure that they're going to be something that you're going to use and you're going to translate into better decision-making around your workforce.

We're also going to talk about my opinions about where we're at now versus where we were just back in 2022. We're now in 2024, we're going to be in 2025 before you know it. So, what are we seeing if any shifts?

We talked about those and several other topics in this first episode and you're going to want to hear what our conversation evolves into. Sit back and enjoy, but before you do, remember that we also have a really great resource to help you start taking action on creating the workforce part of your strategic growth plan.

You need a full and comprehensive strategic growth plan in order to operate your business and know that you're creating the bandwidth for you to focus where your business needs you to be.

A large component of that, especially these days, is workforce. We've actually created an assessment that's going to help you do that. There's going to be a link in the show notes that you can go and you can take that assessment. It's going to take you five minutes or less, and it's going to give you a really good indicator of where you're at in your current brand strategy as it relates to workforce.

This is recruiting, this is retention, this is onboarding, this is starting to think about compensation, all of those things because we have to be more competitive, not just in attracting the clients and the partners that we need, but also the workforce that's going to help us build our businesses.

You can snag that over at storybuilt.marketing/workforce. Then you can also find that link right here in the show notes so you can take that quick assessment. Let's dive right into my interview with Gregg.

Your first question was, “How would I characterize the labor crunch today versus 2022?” I had some suspicions about this, but I hadn't done a lot of research, and I'm a bit of a geek, I like to do some research, so I actually went and did some research.

What I found is that in 2022, the average job opening rate in construction was 5.5, so there were over five job openings available for every hundred positions in the construction industry. That is how that metric works.

Then as recently as April 2023, the research is showing that that same rate is at about 4.6. We're seeing a slight shift. I've wondered if I felt this, but also in construction, you have the seasonality as long as companies get the people that they need to get started. They're really worried about it, depending on where you are geographically and whether April, March, you're really worried about this.

Even in May, making sure if you're really bringing in a lot of seasonal work, that's always a big push, then they get so busy with operations that they don't really think about it again until they get to about the end of June, the beginning of July, or even late July—once again, it depends on where they're located—but later in the season, they'll have people leave, so they have some turnover. That's typical that people who work for a while get burnt out, whatever it is but yet they still have a big workload.

Like I was just talking to somebody in Europe and Wisconsin right now, so you can probably relate, they have a company in Minnesota just a few days ago, and they've had so much rain that they're really, really hoping for not only more sales but also that they can get all the work done later in the year. It's hard.

What companies don't realize and need to think about is that late operational season, you're going to have some turnover, and it's also when the company starts pushing its employees the hardest in terms of production, operations, getting stuff done to meet deadlines, and stuff like that. That could be a pinch point.

The other thing that I think of when you ask the question about 2022 versus 2023, and I've said this in a lot of my presentations, workforce is never going to be the same as it was before, like 10 years ago, even six, seven years ago, it is never going to be like that for the companies.

Again, it's much more competitive. Even as consumers, later on, you have a question about, “How do we position ourselves more as product versus service or jobs?” this relates to how people are trained to not only consume and make purchases but also just to make decisions because really a purchase is a decision. No different than making a decision to leave a job, to look for a new job, to take a new job, to take a raise or an elevation in a company, all of those things are decisions.

We, the generations that are really prime career and the ones coming behind it, are trained to make these decisions in a different way because of all of the flood of information and access to digital data that they experience.

We know that people like to be 70% of the way to a decision about a product or service before they even talk to a salesperson or have direct contact with the company.

That's because we know we can go out, we can check reviews, we can ask peers, we can read about it, we can do all kinds of research, and people want to do that, and that's how they expect to make decisions.

What we're seeing is they're doing the same thing, even when it comes to making a career decision. I have companies that have agency contracts or long-term contracts, I'm like, "Well, we don't really care about our website. We don't really do any marketing or some of those kinds of things." That's great. You just pretend like that doesn't matter, but if for no other reason, you should seriously consider that stuff because of workforce and labor.

Even if you think your customers don't care, which I would argue that you're wrong there too, because I grew up, we had agency contracts, but I still was a salesperson and I had to go out and meet with real people that ran counties and districts and had thousands of road miles to take care of and I had to convince them that our product and service, even if we had a state contract they could use as a mechanism to write a PO, they still had to choose me and they still had to choose my company and the product that we put down as the ultimate choice to write a purchase order.

We know that even in these scenarios, it's still people that make decisions. I would argue that even in that case, they need to be aware of these things in doing it because you can't afford to not be doing these things anymore and the companies that are getting behind are going to fill it first and hardest on talent.

Because they've been able to get by depending on how they go to market by not doing some of these things. First off, people are going to start like, “Wow, I can take all these tools and apply them over to the workforce, talent branding, building pipelines of talented workforce, better-identifying quality fit candidates, all of that kind of stuff,” and yes, you can, and you build these assets and a lot of them actually exist and do that in the background all the time, supporting your HR team, supporting your operations managers.

First off, we're seeing a little bit of release of the pressure, but it's still getting more competitive. We actually had 1.9 million people leave the construction industry to go to other industries. The good news is we have just over two million that they say are forecasted to be entering right now into the construction industry.

We're having a shift. That's good news. But still, those people are making decisions differently, they might not be very educated on the construction industry, what types of jobs they want, and what types of companies they want to work for.

Twofold, it's an incredible opportunity for the companies that are like, “We're going to lean into this and we're going to build a talent employee brand. We're going to actually think about this strategically and build something out that's actually working. It’s a tool, almost like a piece of equipment that's working inside of your company that is attracting an asset, building a supply chain into your company of an asset that you have to have. It's essential.”

I always tell people that it's really investing in infrastructure that you can't live without anymore because it's going to get so much more competitive. I think it's twofold. We're seeing a little release, but I don't think it's ever going to be like it was, and the consumer in this case, the potential employees, they have different expectations, and they're going to expect more from companies as they're making decisions about where they want to go. It's going to just get more competitive to get employees you really want to have inside of your company.

Gregg Wartgow: Yeah. That's awesome. I didn't realize that. If I recall correctly, I think the latest labor data says there are seven or eight million people in construction. So my goodness, that's a quarter of the workforce that has turned over recently. It's probably going to continue to happen with the average age of a construction worker being such that it is.

Right. Awesome. Then what about that next question? As you mentioned, you have to build this infrastructure and build this brand about being a great construction. You mentioned last time, Jeani, about getting a little dirty to figure out what you need to do. Can you maybe just talk a little more about that?

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah. I think, to the point that you were asking about, I think this is twofold. I think you have to really get in there and get in the trenches at every level of your company and understand who are our employees. What are their pains? What are their dreams? What are their aspirations?

Ten years ago, if you would ask a business owner that question, very, very few of them would have said that they knew and they would have said, “I don't care. I'm too busy.” Not that they're bad people, but they're busy. They're doing so much stuff and the pain point wasn't there yet.

But we're also seeing people have different concerns. We have a different set of conscious morals going on. It's really important. Then the people that get down there in the trenches and understand their people, understand the people out on the cruise, understand the people operating our equipment, understand the people operating in plants and facilities, all of those kinds of things, we need to have more connections from those top executives to all of those people if you're going to build what I call a really true and authentic talent brand.

There's authenticity and we'll talk about that. We'll move into that a little bit more in some of your other questions. But you cannot be authentic if you don't understand those people.

There are ways to do it. I'm always advocating for processes and systems. It's hard. I understand that when you're the head of operations, you're the owner, you've got a lot of hats you're wearing, sometimes it's hard to get out in the field as much as we would like.

A lot of the owners like getting out in the field when they can, but it gets harder. But we can create surveys. We can schedule and create processes and triggers in our company that we're doing random interviews periodically, and we're asking the right kinds of questions that are going to inform us of the things that really matter to those people.

Then that is all information because they are a reflection of the people that you're looking to bring in on a larger scale. The things that they tell you are actually gold. Putting some systems and processes, maybe you survey your employees once a year.

If you do, you have to also look at that data and say, “What is this telling us? What are we currently doing that might be misaligned with this? What should we lean into a little bit more heavily that maybe has been working well?”

They'll tell you things that you didn't even know that you should have known that may impact both recruiting and retention. Then having key people in your company actually do some face-to-face interviews with those people, that can even be in the form of job reviews or things like that throughout the year too, but knowing that you're collecting data at that opportunity that needs to be looked at and informed strategic workforce decisions.

Gregg Wartgow: Gotcha. I guess, and it's probably one of the follow-up questions later, but I mean, are you really seeking to find out just like why he or she employee likes working for your company, what they don't like, what their expectations are, that type of thing? Or what are you talking about specifically?

Jeani Ringkob: What made them consider your job? What made them leave previous companies? Another question is what other industries have they previously worked in or did they just come from?

That might tell you what other industries maybe you want to start targeting. There's so much we can do, especially with social media, if you are running ads, if you have a lot of positions, it might be worth running ads to those on LinkedIn or Facebook, which tend to be really good with our demographics right now anyway, you can actually target them to specific career industries that they're already in.

If you can find some trends, also ask them about what they want. What were they most confused about when they started? What do they wish they knew when they most started is one that I love to ask because it informs things, processes, and strategies inside of our business, like onboarding or employee development, but also it informs the messaging that you're using for recruiting.

One of the things we see pretty frequently and consistently across the board is when they start or even when they're considering your job, they really want to know how to build a career and not just start a job. That's great that this job is opening and this is what I'm qualified for, but what happens in a year, two years, five years from there inside of your company?

The research also shows with like millennial generations that are super relevant right now and the generations underneath, that is super important to them. They want to be having those conversations. They want the development to actually get to that level, but first, they need to know, “What is it? What are my gaps? Are you willing to help me fill my gaps as part of this?”

They're looking for those kinds of things. When I said, they want to get 70% of the way there, if you're doing this stuff inside of your company, those are actually opportunities to tell people that you're doing that stuff. That can be huge. We know from research, but we know that because we're asking those types of questions on surveys and interviews.

Gregg Wartgow: Okay. This is maybe a little too in the weeds, but with surveys, it's been a while since I've done it, but are there still online tools like SurveyMonkey that are pretty cheap, [inaudible], is that what we're talking about there?

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah. I often say the simpler, the better. We have so many software subscriptions when we're auditing our businesses these days. You know what I use when I'm doing this on behalf of clients and we're doing this process right now? It's a little bit more client-facing on this project but we're always in the process of doing this with some of our clients.

We just wrapped one where it was more employee-focused but we use Google Forms. We love it. It pulls it into a spreadsheet for you. It pulls it into charts and graphs. It does all that on the backside for you.

I use it for kids' activities. I'm coaching cheer team this year and I'm using it for that. I'm using it for my clients. It's free, it's easy. That's really one of my favorite rules right there. But you can get more sophisticated and still have minimal cost in it.

Gregg Wartgow: Yeah. I figured as much. I just wanted to make sure because like I said, it's been a while since I've done some of that.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. Google Forms is the easiest place to start. Any company can roll that out, super simple.

Gregg Wartgow: Gotcha. Good.

Jeani Ringkob: Another great thing about that I think is worth pointing out, your employee, think about the other side of it. If you go and get something and you're like, "Oh, but this other one has these bells and whistles and it's cool," maybe, but also think about the other side of that. Is it confusing for your employees? Is it something they're unfamiliar with? Is it hard for them?

Keep things as simple for them. You're asking them to take time above and beyond and give you information. And yes, it's going to benefit them, but you got to make it easy, express why it matters, but make it easy for them. That's why Google Forms is also great because people are familiar with Google and how it works.

Gregg Wartgow: Gotcha. Are these more open-ended questions or check all that apply or probably a combination, huh?

Jeani Ringkob: It's a combination and it's in our form and we're always continuing to optimize this inside of our company as well. So a lot of times, with a lot of the companies we work for, we actually create English and Spanish versions of our service, which with AI tools, it's probably going to get even easier to build those and translate them.

I have not looked at it yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google could actually translate that for you already or very soon. In the past, what I've done is I have a contact on Upwork, which is very simple. They're abroad, I know they're fluent in both English and Spanish, and I give them the completed survey, they translate and give me a Spanish version back.

Gregg Wartgow: Awesome.

Jeani Ringkob: I make that accessible so when we send that out to our employees to pay and where they are, we may do other languages as well but we give employees the options to do it both ways so we may get really accessible that way as well.

Gregg Wartgow: Awesome, great idea. That's a good point. That's where I've been the last few days with a client in the landscaping industry or not. I don't know what the data is in construction, but like in landscaping, it's 60% Hispanic and probably 80% of them only speak Spanish. It's probably similar in construction, huh?

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah, absolutely. We had a company that did a really great job getting surveys back, and what they did is they had their supervisors take an iPad out and they picked a day when they could take a little longer lunch or they did it over the course of a week and some of them that were just busy, maybe they're not very tech savvy, and they would actually ask them the questions and fill out a form on their behalf, like when they had short breaks out in the field.

Partly, we were doing it during the heat of the season, so it was a little bit harder, but that increased our survey, the quantity of our results drastically, and it wasn't terribly hard for them to do, but once again, make it easy for them to do.

Gregg Wartgow: Yep, well, that's funny you hear that, and I think back when I worked in the publishing industry when I worked at magazines and stuff, and the majority of the subscriptions, you couldn't count on a busy contractor to always fill out their subscription form. Sometimes you had to call them and ask them questions for them while they were running an excavator or driving.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. Even these days, I've got three kids, I'm in the middle of summer, I'm taking a lot of my calls driving down the road or sitting on a baseball game or something like that. People understand, they make it work and they appreciate your willingness to be flexible. I appreciate my client's willingness to be flexible.

Gregg Wartgow: Yeah. Well, but then the data is still good, and that's ultimately what the end game is.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. Getting that data is good. I think I want to reiterate though that you don't just want to survey, you want to have those interviews because especially, and I'm biased, but I think it's really helpful when a third party, especially with your employees, is doing some of this and interviewing some of your employees randomly because they will tell me things that they might not tell a supervisor or the owner of the business or something like that. That's really authentic.

Plus, that's when you actually hear the words and the inflections coming out of their voice. A big piece of this, when you talk about building a talent brand or an employer brand is the messaging. That is the first piece because that is what everything else builds on. It's how you roll.

That's the words that you use to roll out internal referral programs. It's the words you use to write better job descriptions. It's the words you use to talk about your brand on social and on the careers-lining page of everything else.

The actual interviews are gold because you listen to what are the words that they use. What are the inflections in their voice? Are we seeing consistently in phrases or slaying or things that the team is using that might help somebody more quickly relate to your company?

Gregg Wartgow: Okay. Great point. That's a really good point and that's where you make those connections and probably only submit your credibility all the more when you don't just sound like a hoity-toity HR department, right?

Jeani Ringkob: Right. That's an art form and messaging and for HR, I love HR, I wouldn't want to do their job, bless them, but I always say that HR probably shouldn't be writing your messaging or your job descriptions. They should be collaborating with somebody on your marketing team, or you should be bringing somebody in to help you create the messaging.

You can do things, we use story-based messaging frameworks within our company for anything around messaging. Messaging is one element of all the work we do, all the time. But we actually created a Google document and use it as something that we present during presentations and we give away to folks and it gives them some prompts.

It's not completely perfect because it's not us going through an entire process with them but an HR person could take that, pull out an existing job description, and try to just upgrade it a little bit. We actually have a case study where we've used messaging, we used research from everything that we did, and we had a company that needed to build out two crews.

They already had the jobs sold across the entire United States, they already had the equipment, they were launching a new business, they needed two crews, four supervisors, and the hard part was these crews were going to be traveling all over. I mean, full-time travel, which even regional travel can be a big challenge for companies these days.

So we knew that that was one of the challenges, but I really encourage them like, “Let's not think of it as a challenge. There are people out there that that is their dream job. There are maybe fewer of them, and we have to find them, but more importantly, we have to speak to them. We have to lean into the things.”

Then also, these were going to be crews that we're going to be out living with each other on the road, doing construction work, we knew it was going to be a certain type of person.

When I wrote the job description and I gave it to the operations manager, he was like, "I cannot post these, no way. I've never seen a job description like this. I cannot post this.” So, we took it to the owner. He said, “Yeah, let's do it. Well, this is great. I'm not seeing anything like it. Let's do it.” They had 300 applicants over the week of Christmas in two days with less than $200 ads spent on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Gregg Wartgow: Wow.

Jeani Ringkob: They had two crews and had one turnover all year long, which was incredible, like when you think about spend, statistics, turnover rate, everything, but it was because we really leaned into who is it, which actually leans into your next question, understanding who's a good fit, that research and being willing to talk and present ourselves and position ourselves in a way that was relevant to the right person, it really paid off in that case.

It made it quick and easy and inexpensive and they didn't have the frustrations of turnover throughout the year because maybe they had been a little bit floofy in their job descriptions and somebody gets started, they're two weeks in, they're four weeks in, and they're like, “This is not what I thought it was. This is not the culture or the environment that I thought it was.”

First off, you have to know who is good and who is the best employee for your company. You don't know that until you start looking at who's thriving here, who do we wish we could replicate here, and then you start letting that dictate how do we find more of those and bring them in here and attract more of them.

Once you know that and you know it really well and you're clear and you're confident about it, you should actually lean into pushing away bad candidates from your company or culture-fit candidates just as much as you're leaning into attracting talent into your company.

You may get less applicants, but I would rather my HR department was spending a fraction of the time sifting through high-quality candidates instead of just a mountain of poor-quality candidates and being overwhelmed by that process. Messaging, marketing, and a workforce strategy can really help on that front side of that battle.

Gregg Wartgow: Yep. Gotcha. No, that makes sense. That was that double-sided question, but I see what you mean. But you maybe have a persona or whatever you want to call it, of what a non-ideal employee is, and you just recognize these are people we don't want to draw them in if we can help it.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. All that kind of information and that understanding, it helps your team if you know it. In marketing and product strategy, we will build customer avatars out where we actually talk about, we'll name them, we'll give them a family and a job and we have a document, we'll even find a photo of what we think they look like. It's like a make-believe real person, like, “Who's your ideal customer?”

Depending on the complication of the company and products, maybe you have a few of them, you can do the same thing for your workforce. Who's an ideal person? Maybe it is a slightly different one in sales and estimating, slightly different in labor, and slightly different in middle management. But you don't need to do one for every single role because it does take work.

That's a great thing. It's like a one-page document and it's great. Somebody could use that when they're interviewing and just have it in their folder sitting next to them to remind them, and maybe when they're sitting there, this person is a great person. There's nothing wrong with them, but they don't look anything like this avatar. Their dreams and hopes and their lifestyle are completely different. You're sensing that, you're seeing that so it can be a great guidepost.

I think having this information, whether it's just a document with some notes about it, or you fully flesh out avatars to help your team, it's great for HR and people that are interviewing candidates to help them. You may like somebody, but that doesn't mean they're a good fit for the company.

Gregg Wartgow: Right. That's a great point. I guess there's a follow-up to that in a second. But the one other question I had was when you're getting to know your employees, how personal can you get? I guess there's maybe a fine line to tiptoe, I'm not sure, would ask her personal questions or what you got some general insights on that, Jeani?

Jeani Ringkob: I try to be a little cautious here. This is always changing and like somebody in HR, this is something where you're always going to want to run by HR if you're going to push that barrier and go a little bit more personal.

Part of the reason in an interview, you can perceive more without asking or getting too deep, but you can sense things and take more observations in because you're using all of your senses.

But also with our employees, you can optionally, one thing that we include in some of our onboarding processes and strap strategies is we create a form that we ask employees to fill out, but we tell them it's completely optional.

We want to know what interests do you have. What sports are your kids into? We'd love to know who makes up your immediate family. So that, if you have young kids, that might be relevant in terms of, “Oh, maybe they need to be a part of a group where we're trying to help employees tag each other out periodically and support each other so that people can go watch kids sports or take them to the doctors.” Stuff like that.

I have companies that they want to do those personal touchpoints of sending happy birthday to your son or your anniversary or something like that. But you have to make that stuff optional. You need to check with HR and what's really appropriate and legally acceptable. That's a fine line right there.

But the more we can understand, and I think it's great also when you're building a process in a system where you're having a cycle of trying to gather feedback, surveys, and interviews, another great thing is interviewing supervisors on crews specifically or managers inside of a company, they learn a lot about their team.

They themselves can just document some of that stuff, add it to a personnel file if it's appropriate and HR says, “Yeah, that kind of information is fine.” Just to encourage them to just take note and don't ignore the things that you learn about your employees. Learn about them, that's great. If there's a way the company can help facilitate us creating a stronger bond with them, then that's great.

Gregg Wartgow: Yeah. That's a great point. It may be a part of that too, is just pay attention and care. I guess, one of your employees is on cloud nine because their son or daughter or whatever hit a home on at the game last night. You should know that as a supervisor, you should be [inaudible] that. That makes sense.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah. Or you have a child at home that's sick or a spouse and it's putting extra strain on you, everybody can relate to that. If the company sets the standard for we're trying to understand this stuff, we're trying to have a fluid awareness back and forth, for what's good for us, what's good for you, that will trickle down into your management and your supervisors as well.

All right. I hope you enjoyed that. I am going to just tell you, though, we may have saved the best for part two because Gregg and I got really comfortable and we got into some more great topics. We're actually going to talk about the impact of measuring success, both on recruitment and retention. If you liked this episode, you are going to love part two of this interview.

We also talk about how building a talent brand in the same way that you might build your overall brand, and we actually talk about examples of how this works outside of the construction space.

You guys, if you've met me at a conference, you know I'm a little bit of a geek about studying and bringing that into the marketplace and applying things to my clients' businesses. So we're going to actually talk about some very specific examples that are going to help you think about this and maybe give you some inspiration for your business, building your talent brand, but not only that, measuring success with the actions that you're taking.

Make sure that you join us. Make sure you have subscribed and that you are going to get the next episode because it's even better. It's going to be so good. Thank you as always. Then also make sure that you go take that workforce evaluation.

It's an assessment that we put together. It's going to take you less than five minutes and it's going to really help you understand what is the current state of your workforce strategy. How do you stand compared to others in the industry on recruiting, retention, onboarding, compensation, all of those things that you need to be thinking about to ensure that you have the resources to keep growing your business? Subscribe, take the assessment, and I can't wait till next time.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.