Not Enough Hands

Everybody is working on how to get more people into the trades. Almost nobody is asking why the good ones keep leaving.

That is the part that gets missed. We treat the shortage like a faucet problem, as if the only fix is to turn up the flow at the top, more apprentices and bigger signing bonuses. So companies pour money and attention into the front door while the back door stays wide open. You can hire all day and still shrink if your best people are walking out the other side.

I have watched this up close. I work alongside a team that backs blue-collar trades businesses, and the pattern holds across all of them. The companies that cannot keep people almost always blame the labor market. It is rarely the market. A young tech who is good at the work does not leave over a dollar an hour. He leaves because nobody there was for him. He leaves because he could not tell whether anyone noticed he showed up.

Think about what actually holds a person in a job he could get fifteen other places. It is not the pay, past a point. It is whether somebody above him is building him. Whether the foreman knows his kid's name, noticed the day that went sideways, cared enough to teach him when he got something wrong instead of just writing him up. People do not stay where they are managed. They stay where they are invested in.

I learned this in a locker room long before I ran anything. The teams I did not want to leave were never the ones with the best facilities. They were the ones with a coach who made me believe he was in it for me, not just for what I could do for his record. I would have run through a wall for that man, and I would have run through a wall to stay. The teams I could not wait to be done with had everything except that.

Here is the uncomfortable version for anyone who runs a crew. When a good person quits, the first question is usually what the market is doing, or what competitors are paying. Those are the comfortable questions, because the answer is somebody else's fault. The honest question is harder. Did that person have a reason to believe I was for him? Most of the time, the people who leave were telling you for months that they were loose on the rope, and nobody was holding the other end.

Retention is not a perk problem. It is a leadership problem wearing a recruiting costume. You do not keep people by competing on benefits. You keep them by being the kind of leader a person does not want to walk away from, which means doing the slow, unglamorous work of investing in them before they have given you a reason to.

Leadership is service. The paycheck is the market's job. The reason to stay is yours. People stay where someone is for them, and nobody is for them by accident.

So if you are short-handed and you cannot figure out why, before you write another job post, go count the people you already have. Then ask yourself, for each one, whether he has a single clear reason to believe you are in it for him. If he does not, you do not have a hiring problem. You have the one problem a bigger ad budget cannot fix.