Most construction companies can tell you their backlog to the dollar and their labour burden to the cent, and cannot tell you how long it took to fill the last foreman seat. Recruiting runs on feel. Five numbers turn it into something you can manage, and none of them needs a spreadsheet if the process lives in one system.
1. Time to hire
From the day the job opens to the day the offer is accepted. For skilled trades, a well-run process lands inside two to three weeks; site leadership and engineering take longer because the candidates are working and the interviews are scheduled around projects. The number itself matters less than where the days go. Break it into time to first reply, time to shortlist, time to interview and time to offer, and the slow step shows itself. It is almost always the gap between a candidate saying yes and somebody calling them.
2. Cost per hire
Everything spent to fill the seat: board sponsorship, agency fees, the platform, and the hours of whoever ran the process. An agency placement at 20 to 25 percent of first-year pay is the top of the range; an in-house hire from your own outreach is the bottom. Track it by source and the mix changes on its own. Cutting agency spend without slowing down goes into the mechanics.
3. Reply rate
Of the people you reached out to, how many answered at all. This is the health check on your message, your channel and your list. A pay figure in the first line, a text instead of an email, and a list built on the actual trade and radius each move it. A reply rate that drops on one job and not the others is telling you something about that job: usually the pay or the location.
4. Show-up rate
Of the interviews booked, how many happened. This is the construction-specific number, because no-shows are the tax the industry pays for slow confirmation. A booking confirmed by text, with a reminder the day before and the morning of, and an easy way to reschedule, shows up. A booking made by voicemail tag does not. If your show-up rate is below the high eighties, the fix is in the confirmation, not the candidates.
5. Ninety-day retention
Of the people hired, how many are still on the crew at ninety days. It is the only number that says whether the other four were worth it. Hires that leave in the first month were mis-sold on the site, the commute or the pay; hires that leave in the third were let down by the crew or the foreman. Tag every hire by source and by who screened them, and the pattern will tell you which of your channels and which of your screening questions are actually predicting the outcome.
What good looks like
- Reply within the hour, shortlist within the day, interview within the week.
- Every candidate touched by text, every booking confirmed three ways, every reschedule self-serve.
- Cost per hire falling as the share of hires from your own outreach and referrals rises.
- Retention reviewed every quarter, by source, with the losers dropped.
Constructico records every one of these as a by-product of running the process: the pipeline shows time in each stage, the source of every applicant and the outcome of every interview. See the hiring pipeline or book a demo.