The Current State of Roofing Recruitment

By Cayden Wemple. 

Listen to industry experts Paul Aguire and John Van Beek shed some light on the current state of roofing employment and roofing recruitment.  

Although unemployment is reaching record low levels, it’s been slightly on the rise of late. On a recent Read, Listen, Watch Webinar, industry experts Paul Aguire of Lumanex and John Van Beek of Labor Central joined Heidi J. Ellsworth to discuss the current state of roofing recruitment.  

Statistics are surfacing that are showing that the construction industry is well short on the labor it needs to thrive. John explained, “We see the statistics come out every month. I think the last one I saw was currently there's a shortage of 620,000 laborers required in the whole construction side of the business. And then if you look at the other very scary statistic is, how many people are retiring? If you look at those numbers together, I think as an industry, we are seeing that this is a very big threat.” 

Paul believes that there is a stigma around roofing labor and it’s causing a misconception for potential employees to know what being a roofer entails. “It's not necessarily a shortage of people willing to do the work,” Paul explains, “It's a shortage of the two communicating properly, meeting the labor force to the actual provider and the work source itself. There is a shortage of connection.”  

Paul also believes that there is an unfortunate stigma about language barriers in roofing. Paul told Heidi, “The question that we want to really ask ourselves is, is there something inhibiting us as work source providers making us think that because of the language barrier that they are inept or they're inadequate or they can't be the provider I need? You really want to stop yourself and think. Because even as a leader, you might think that you're above that, but you start looking at your spreadsheets and your performance, you start getting blinders on, how are your people treating that potential labor source? And do they have those interrupters in their mind? That is a cultural thing to look at in how we treat the labor force as it is today.”  

Recruitment tools like Labor Central are trying to push back against these stigmas and initiate a more “solid” connection between recruiters and employees.  “98% of all of our crews really prefer to communicate via SMS messaging. The reason being is because when they set their browser to Spanish, they receive all of that messaging and all of that information in Spanish, which makes it a lot easier for them.” 

Watch the full webinar to learn more about the current state of roofing recruitment.