Business Innovators Radio - Episode 24 Innovation in Recruitment: The Roadmap to Attracting Youth in the Trades with Clay Coffman

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Part of the Construction Executives Live Series For every five people who retire or leave the skilled trades, only one new person enters the labor force. This trend is creating a shrinking labor force in an industry that is growing rapidly.‍As a result, demand for people in the trades is exploding. This demand will contribute to stability and wage growth in these careers over the next decade. Learn from industry expert, Clay Coffman, as we discuss this important topic and valuable ways we can attract more youth to the construction industry!In The Zonehttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/in-the-zone/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/episode-24-innovation-in-recruitment-the-roadmap-to-attracting-youth-in-the-trades-with-clay-coffman

Welcome to In the Zone and Construction Executives Live, brought to you by U.S. Construction Zone, bringing you strategies for success with construction innovators and change makers, including In the Zone peer-nominated national award winners. Here's your host, Jeremy Owens. Welcome back to Construction Executives Live. I'm your host, Jeremy Owens, in very sunny and hot, northern California, where it's going to be a balmy 114 this weekend. So I'm not too high. happy about that. Thanks again for attending. I see a lot of familiar names and faces. Thank you so much for being here and for taking your valuable time. We have an important subject to talk about again today. A couple updates. If you can check out US ConstructionZone.com, I wanted you guys to take a look at our newly created shop where we have construction related goods and services. Take a look. I'm open to your feedback. I think there may be a few of you who sell goods and services in the construction industry and I wanted to let you know that we're open to to adding your your products

or services to our site as well. So please take a look at that when you get a chance. Also, a couple other things. If you want to learn a little bit more about me, I was just on the Builder Nuggets podcast. Go to BuilderNuggets.com. Duane Johns interviewed me the other day and it is now live and on their website. Really cool conversation and it talks a little bit about my history in the construction. industry. And today we are sponsored again by the great team at build12.com. Automate your construction business into a revenue generating machine with the Build 12 system. As I mentioned last time, I'm getting ramped up with this program and I really like all the features and benefits it has. Take a look. Mention U.S. Construction Zone and they will

give you a scream and deal. Again, build12.com. We have a great show for you today. The title is innovation in recruitment, the roadmap to attracting youth in the trades. And this is obviously a hot button topic. This is near and dear to my heart. As you know, I'm third generation in remodeling. And we have struggled with especially the labor force for really going on close to 10 years. It seems to be a slow trickle where it just slowly started to really affect our business. And now it's to the point of like, we really have to figure this out.

And here's a couple of stats. For every five people who retire or leave the skilled trades, only one new person enters the labor force. This trend is creating a shrinking labor force in an industry that is growing rapidly. So as a result, demand for people in the trades is exploding. This demand will contribute to stability and wage growth in these careers over the next decade. We're going to learn from an industry expert today as we discuss this important topic and valuable ways we can attract more youth in the construction industry.

Today, you will learn some valuable tools that hopefully you can take back to your team and really implement today. And our special guest today is Clay Kaufman. Clay is the co-founder. Excuse me here. He is the co-founder and CEO of Trade Foundry, a talent platform helping connect America's next generation of talent with careers in the skilled trades. Previously, he was the co-founder of a venture-backed startup called Zago in the real estate technology industry, and prior to that, held various roles in sales, marketing, and product development. Clay is passionate about solving America's skilled labor crisis by using technology to attract talented young people and two careers in the trades.

So please help me welcome Clay Coffin. Clay, thank you for being here. Hey, Jeremy. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. As you know, you picked a hot button topic here. I mean, I guess I just wanted to hear a little bit about your background as an entrepreneur and how you kind of came to come to the construction industry. Yeah. So I think you covered a bit of my work experience there.

I have a bit of a non-traditional background, at least for, you know, venture back tech founder. grew up in the Midwest, family of entrepreneurs. My dad grew up on a farm in Missouri, so farmers, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, he had six older siblings, uncles who worked in the trades. And we moved to Kansas City when I was a kid. I actually went to school in Canada, which was obviously a little non-traditional. I went to school for a computer science business. And when I got back to Kansas City after being in Canada for a few years,

years. I met my co-founder, Adam. I was working in the solar industry for his commercial solar company in Kansas City. And we ended up spinning Zigo out of that company. We took some of IP that I developed there and repurposed it for the real estate tech industry. And we sold that to a company called Paley's in San Diego. I moved out there. I was there working in product and engineering for a few years and then worked for a blockchain. startup for about a year. And then I took, you know, last year I spent some time trying to figure out, you know, what do I want to work on for the next decade? Like, what's a big problem that I'm really passionate about, something I feel good about working on? And Adam and I reconnected. We were

kicking around a few different ideas. And he had brought up this topic of the labor shortage in the skilled trades, like just the general skilled labor crisis. And it sort of immediate, it wasn't something that I had been thinking about proactively. But it immediately resonated with me. You know, I, you know, I think given my background, my dad used to always joke, like, who's going to build stuff if you're all working at Facebook? Like, I watched my uncle build his own house and, you know, he could weld and was an electrician, could do anything.

And we used to always joke about that. And it was just something, you know, after seeing what's happened with tech in the last few years and I don't know with my career and seeing my peers I think we're all sort of realizing that we've I wouldn't say neglected but we sort of glorified this path of oh you've got to go work at like a big tech company or a big law firm and there's so many different pathways to success in this country and so yeah we it really just kind of came up there was something adam had been thinking about and yeah it just aligns with a lot of things I care about personally and I think it's a really important problem for us to solve as a country.

Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think all of our dads have said a similar thing to us over the years. It's obviously been a hot topic for our industry for a long time. And before we get really delved into the construction industry, I mean, the whole labor market and job force in general is changing at a rapid rate. I mean, you mentioned blockchain, but AI, virtual reality, 3D printing. There's so many things that are really entering our space, now, how do young people stay up to date with these trends and know, hey, what job they're

really going to be available when they're ready to hit the? So I think it's really, it's definitely tough because what you learn in school is always going to lag what is kind of being developed at the bleeding edge. Sure. So I think back to, you know, I'm 31, so I'm not that old, but I'm 10 years out of high school. And I think back to how did I keep up to date on, you know, things I was interested in technology. And there's still the traditional news outlets, you know, are you reading water? Are you following the right journalist on Twitter? You kind of have to be thoughtful about what you're consuming. YouTube is amazing. Like you can learn pretty much anything on YouTube. Reddit. I was kind of late to the Reddit game, to be honest. I was big on Dig when that was around.

but anything I'm ever interested in, I go deep on Reddit, join Discord communities. I have two younger brothers, one of them. He just graduated from college, and we've kind of talked about this. And I don't think much has changed in the last like five years in terms of, you know, the tools that you can use to stay up to date on stuff. It's still Twitter.

It's still YouTube. I think maybe what's changed is a lot of those same content producers are on TikTok now, and it is really high quality content. So I think the best way to do it is just be really thoughtful about the content you're consuming and try different things, explore different subreddits. And when you do find something, especially if it's software, contribute to open source, get really involved in the community,

people are generally pretty friendly and helpful. Yeah, I mean, it's like you said, you have to be proactive in kind of learning where the industry is going, right? You can't just do what we used to do, which is go to high school, go to college, and then everything will be kind of fall on your lap or you'll figure it out in college. You really have to be proactive. And, you know, I think this, as parents do, parents have to be proactive in helping their kids figure out that career path, right?

It's not always just, hey, just go to college. And I know with all these technology advancements, you know, how should we as a society change the way we view college and higher education? I think we need to, like college, at least from my own experience and peers and just what I've seen and heard from, you know, people who have just graduated college, it's still very much about the experience of going to college for four years, especially if you go to like a state school and a college town. It's not as much about the skills you're learning, which, you know, there's pros and cons. I think it's a really important, like, formative time in your life. and meet a lot of friends. You build networks and, you know, critical thinking and all the arguments for, like, liberal

arts degrees. But I think as a society, we have to think about what is the purpose of college? Like, it's to teach skills that can make you effective in the workforce. Right. And so I think we'll see, I don't know if college, I mean, all these things take time, too. So obviously, none of this will happen quickly. But I think we'll see a shift towards, I just don't think it's. it takes four years to learn a lot of things.

Like, that's just a really antiquated way of thinking about it. Like, you can go to a coding boot camp and learn JavaScript in six months and make 100K years a web developer. It's just there's very few things that take four years to learn anymore. So I think you'll see more acceptance of taking these sort of non-traditional path today of like, I'm just going to go do a coding boot camp right out of school or I'm going to go do an apprenticeship instead of going to college. So.

Yeah. Was it different in Canada? I'm just curious, like, was there more emphasis on trade schools and and wood shop and things like that in high school? I mean, that kind of went away for me as a kid. It was like we were the last generation. I even have a woodshot class. But that pretty much went away right after I graduated.

You know, I didn't go to high school there. Obviously, a lot of my friends did. I will say it's definitely more. And I lived in Denmark in college for six months and have a lot of friends who grew up in Germany or in the Netherlands. And I think Canada is closer to Europe and that it's more acceptable to just go into the trades. Like I have friends from Vancouver or I went to school who just saw them like a plumbing company or winning at HVAC or did electrical and went up on the rigs in Alberta and worked for a few years. And that's totally normal. Like I think from a societal perspective, those friends just hung out with like my friends.

who went to college. And so I think, I don't know if from a structural or educational perspective, they put more of an emphasis on it, but from a social and cultural perspective, it's definitely more acceptable to write out of high school, just go straight into the trades. Like, that's a very common path. Yeah, it brings us something that I was going to bring up later, but, you know, what happened with our society in terms of skilled trades? You know, was it the push to college that made skilled trades appear like it was lesser than. You know, I guess just talk a little bit about the cultural, structural, societal issues that really kind of led to our labor issues.

I mean, if you go, there's a really good book, and this is another reason I'm really passionate about this. It's like I'm really interested in like the student debt crisis and just this whole industrial education complex we have. There's a really good book called The Debt Trapp by, I think he's a Washington Post reporter, Ben Mitchell, that I read last summer before we actually started this company. And he talks about how a lot of this came out.

Post-war GI Bill. Everybody went to college. You know, it was free. And it sort of became like a pathway into a better life. Sure. And I think we haven't really adapted to how jobs have changed. You know, like I said earlier, you can learn how to be a software engineer in six months. And nothing has really changed.

I think that a lot of it actually happened recently, like from a structural perspective with like no child left behind. So much of compensation or not compensation, but funding for schools in school districts is tied to academic testing. It varies, you know, depending where you are, but I still hear from guidance counselors that, you know, they agree with a lot of the things that we say, you know, in environments like this, like too many kids are going. to college, but their funding is tied to how many kids can I get into college or how do they do on these standardized tests, which are very academic. So I think that's part of it. There's also the social aspect. I mean, I think back to when I was in high school, nobody wanted to go to their graduation party and be like, yeah, I'm going to be a plumber. You know, maybe that was just the community I lived in, but I don't think that's the case. I have seen.

there's schools that are doing like signing days for kids going to the trades, which I think is awesome. But I still think that there's a bit of a stigma around, I'm not going to go to college. I'm just going to go do an apprenticeship and get into the workforce, which me now at 31, like that's exactly what I would be telling 18 year old me to do. Like I think that is,

if you want to be, you know, own your own business and make million dollars, like I think that is the absolute best path to do in this day and age. Yeah. How does that stigma go away? Because I think the same way. I went and got my degree. It was just a piece of paper. I ended up just going into the family business into the trades. And I kind of always think back. I go, what? I did it because it was a society pressure almost. It was like, and maybe even like I didn't want to appear not motivated. So it was kind of a pressure that I didn't even realize at the time. That's what I was. why I did it. I could have definitely started my career four years younger and been as happy and in the same exact spot and the same exact chair right now. I mean, these things take time. I'm sure everybody here knows about Mike Roe and what he's trying to do. But the problem is, like, my 22-year-old

brother doesn't know who Mike Roe is. I know who Mike Roe is because I love dirty jobs, but we need people who are in Gen Z to talk about these career paths. And I think the most important thing is, like the story that's not told in schools is your local small business owner, your entrepreneur. Like that story just doesn't, like those people, and I know there's groups. I'm trying to think of a name. It was like junior achievement or something like that. Business owners would come in and talk about their business. But I think that's where a big opportunity to do. And, change the perception of their trades is, is telling, showing kids like, hey, here's like a really smart, talented 35 year old, who owns his own business, who just went straight out

of high school and started his own business and now has 20 employees and, you know, has an awesome life. That's as good of a career path as becoming an attorney or a doctor. Right. And I think, you know, one of the missing pieces that I see in high school, because I have two high school age kids now is that they didn't get that discussion in high school. The only discussion you get in high school is college. And it's still a heavy push. It is still not talking statistically about the student debt crisis. There really, there needs to be more financial sense for one. But for two, there's not a lot of wood shop and auto shop and all the stuff that I had as a kid. So really, they don't talk about that. They should definitely have a, you know, business owners come in and talk about

various career paths and then how to get there, right? And so I think that that's still a missing piece is that that from the high school age, it's still kind of lesser then. Yeah, and it's tough because you don't want to tell a kid like, oh, you're not going to be able to go to college. Like, you've got to go do that. Like, you don't want to beat someone down. Right. I think it's more you just need to make it so like I even said it earlier this alternative path it shouldn't be an alternative path it's just one of the ways you can go right and like I think Germany does this really well they call it like the dual system I think like 80 or 90 percent of students do an apprenticeship in high school in Germany and 50 percent of them go into that field and do a trade when they graduate

and if you look at I think there was a survey some study that I read where they did they look They looked at mid-career earnings for, you know, workers in Germany and skilled and unskilled trades and like blue-collar, white-collar jobs. And the trades, it was like 92% of what their more academic counterparts made. So part of it is also like we just have to, from a societal perspective, make sure that people are making enough money that this is an attractive career path. Right. And that's not the barrier right now, I think, but people knowing about what a plumber makes or an election. I mean, it's legit, it's legit money. Probably more so than someone that's just graduated college, correct?

It is, but I don't think we do a good job of spreading the word. Because I did, before we started this company, I did probably 50, 20 minute interviews with 18 to 25 year olds all over the country, college, no college, just to get a better understanding of, like, what is their perception of the skilled trades? and I would say 90% of them were blown away when I told them what they could make, you know, five years in as an electrician or as a mill ride or anything. Like all they're shown in high school I've kind of realized is what you could make on an hourly basis, like right as you graduate, they don't show you what you can make over the first 10 years like you would as a doctor or anything else. Right.

So I think as an industry, we just have to do a better job of not just showing like, oh, you can make 30 bucks an hour saying you can make 100k a year, full benefits, 401k match, just like you would talk about any other job. Right, right. And it's, you mentioned Mike Rowe earlier. I also loved watching him and loved what he did for the trades and his skills, US, or micro works charity organization is a great place for young people to go as well. But he always talked about people have a love for what they do.

There's pride involved in construction. And so he talked about the people, you know, when you did those dirty jobs, he's like, they're happy going through the sewers and coming home and they're as happy as anybody else. There is something prideful about what they do. They're proud of it. They go home. And they're as happy as someone who thinks they would have been happier in a different job. So I think it's a decision you make more than it's like, oh, this job's going to make me happy. It's not always the case, right?

It's the people around you. It's yourself personally that can make that decision on how happy you are in your career or not. Yep. Yeah, I think the biggest shift is to start talking about these is careers, not jobs, at least in schools. Like I remember when I was in high school, it was just a job. You could go get it. It wasn't a career path. And so I think that's a really important.

It's really semantics, but it's important that we emphasize that these are careers, not just jobs. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. You know, how is the construction industry different than other industries in terms of the reliance on people? You know, because a lot of people talk, you know, about, you know, how quickly technology is coming out, especially AI, chat GPT, all this stuff's kind of coming at us. And people keep saying, well, that's going to replace a bunch of jobs. But in construction, that's really not the case, right? No, which I think is great. I don't know if you saw there was a billboard in Belgium a couple weeks ago and it was like on the side of this building that was under construction and said, hey, chat GPT finished this building.

I had like 10 people send me that. I was like, this is amazing. Like this is so true. I think that would you look at software companies 10 years ago, super capital intensive, you had hosting engineers today. Like we use AI and our, I use AI for everything in my business. business for generating marketing assets, our website, writing code. You can't do that in the physical world. And I don't think we will be able to for a very long time.

So I think it's great because it insulates, it's going to make these career paths even more attractive. Because I think a lot of what a lot of the jobs have been created in the last 20 years in tech will get, I don't know, eroded away by what AI can do or replaced. Right, or just completely changed. I mean, the only thing I see from the construction industry in terms of replacing a person is, you know, you're automating more, right? So you're just taking somebody from the field and you're making a little bit more offsite, which I think is there's no difference in people.

You're still going to need people to do that. But I think that's one way we're trying to tackle the labor shortage is like, we need to get more efficient somehow. So have you seen that stat about, you know, the numbers of people entering the workforce improve or is it still pretty hold and steady? we're entering a time when baby boomers and those older folks like my dad's age are going to start retiring. So, you know, is that getting worse or getting better? I mean, I think some of the economic data can be misleading at times. If you watch Bloomberg, like it sounds like the economic data is getting better, at least related to employment. You talk to small business owners and they don't agree with that. I would say,

you know, in the microcosm of what we do. I've noticed that, you know, we, the thing that's missing is we're not getting as many really talented kids who are going to college now that really should be going into the trades just because they were sort of shoved into that path. Right. So it's pretty easy to find like general labor, unskilled labor, but it's getting really, really hard. I'm sure everyone knows this to find the really skilled.

skilled, like really highly technical skilled people. Right. I can't really speak. You know, I'm not an economist. I can't really speak to if that trend is changing across industries or across the country. But I think that it's, it's definitely gotten better from where we were a few years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's just, it's strange. I mean, how long these problems take to solve, right? I mean, it obviously took us a really long time to get to this labor shortage place. and I feel like it's going to take equal amount of time to get us out of it, right? I mean, it's not like you just magic wand this thing and, and, you know, people are seeing it. So, I mean, kind of talking about these younger people and, you know, you're younger than I am. You know, we have a hard time understanding the Generation Z and millennial generations. And I've always been protective of that, of those generations.

I have kids in those generations. And I feel like they get a bad rap sometimes, especially in terms of, of their work ethic. I just think they think differently than a lot of us do in terms of what they want from a career. And so I guess, like, speaking a little bit about your, since you're speaking to a lot of young folks, what are they really looking for in a job? Well, you said basically what I was going to say.

I think that there's a big misperception. You know, I hear talking to executives are a little bit older that, oh, this generation doesn't want to work. And yeah, my youngest brother is 22 and he's one of the artist workers. I don't think that's necessarily true. Right. I think that's what has changed is what you touched on earlier. This generation is more interested in getting meaning from what they're doing.

And I don't really know what the root cause of that is. Maybe it's just they're more aware of the impacts of, you know, what industries are doing, you know, because they have access to the internet their whole life. just more aware of what's going on and implications at a macro scale for like what their company might be doing if they go work at like an Exxon or something. Right. Well, I think they're, I've just noticed talking to a lot of Gen Z kids that they're more thoughtful. They're really interested in a career. They want to get meaning from their work. And they really care about like the values of the company. I think 40, 50 years ago, people were much more willing to just go work at a company and cash a check. I think now there's definitely more interests. Like they want to be able to go to your website

and see, do you care about your people? Like, what is the mission of the company? What do you guys care about as an organization? They want to see, like, who's the leadership team? I know that I talked to a lot of people and they want to know, like, who works at the company, who runs it. What do they care about? So I think the values in getting meaningful work is what they really care about. I mean, I just look at that as so valuable. I mean, we, in my generation and in certain my parents and my grandparents, especially, it was about loyalty, right? It was like start a career, you want to hang on because there's some, I don't know why. I think there's some security there and that they benefited employers really, you know, rewarded their employees for loyalty.

But obviously that changed rapidly and that there's not a lot of loyalty. There's a lot of careers that, you know, you're changing every year or two, which is crazy wild to me. But, but I mean, I think social responsibility of that generation, of these younger generations is great because before, like you said, it was about cash and check and really ignoring the bullshit that happened with the management or how irresponsible they were, whether that's pollution or whatever. So, you're right. I think they look for how is this company different? And I think contractors in general and construction companies in general have lacked having that on their website. They lack the people-centric. They always want to appear big.

They have pictures of the skyscraper they built or whatever, but they don't have a picture of the people, the family. Like you said, the core values. What charity organization do you give to? If you go to a lot of websites, there's not a peep about it. Like, do you not give money away? Is it all about money? So it's like it doesn't seem very difficult to have those things on your website

or really talk about them. But for whatever reason, if you go to a lot of websites, you'll find the same thing. There's not a mention about any of that. Yeah, I think, you know, the top companies in this industry do a good job of it because they have people dedicated to that. You know, they have HR teams. I think where the gap is is these kind of smaller four or 500 person companies where you have a very small HR organization that's more concerned with payroll and kind of internal things and the corporate website gets neglected for a few years and there's not as much emphasis on those things. So it's definitely changing. I do see really good website. You know,

we just kind of started prospecting and sales movements and I'm looking at a lot of websites. And there are companies that are doing a really good job. But I would say for the most part, it's still sort of a gap here. Right. Yeah. Like they're just lacking a little bit. And, you know, also based on some of your conversations with some of those younger candidates, and people in those younger generations. What are some of the biggest, I guess, sources of confusion or misperceptions about the trades and then to the barriers to entry? Well, there's a lot of misperceptions.

I mean, it gets back to the lack of this being taught in schools. And I think a lot of it also is when it is taught in schools, it's taught by someone who's never worked in the field. It's taught by like a guidance counselor who's reading from a. website or something like that. They don't really know how to talk about like the day to day or what it's like to work at a big company. It's definitely confusing. That was one of the first things is, I came to this as an outsider and had to learn as quickly as I could and sort of put myself in the shoes of an 18 year old who just graduated high school. Like, how do I become an electrician?

It's really confusing. If you Google that, the first thing you'll get is trade schools. And you talk to some employers and they don't want to hire people from trade schools because, you know, sometimes they come in entitled. Sometimes if it's like HVAC or something, there's like a certificate that doesn't really mean anything. Or you can go do an apprenticeship or it's just really confusing. Do I go to residential? Do I do commercial? It's not clear what that career path is. So I think as a kid, it could be really confusing and daunting. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. So for those of us who don't know, what's the difference between apprenticeship and a trade school? Well, trade schools, I mean, I'm not like bashing on trade school.

Trade schools serve a very valuable purpose. It depends on the trade. Like there are some really good trade schools. There are some trade schools that are for profit that I think just churn out students kind of like some coding boot camps too with a certificate and kind of send you on your way. and it may or may not be meaningful in the industry. I think apprenticeships are definitely more ideal. You're getting paid to learn. That's what we say in all of our ads.

And I say it to students all the time. And we even hear people say it in screening calls and interviews, like, oh, I'm getting paid to learn. And I don't think that we do a good job talking about that in high schools. Like, I remember when I was in high school, there was no concept of an apprenticeship. No one ever talked about that. I had never heard of that.

No. There was internships, but that was unpaid. But I think that apprenticeships, and if you talk to a lot of people, you talk to anyone in this industry, especially if you want to become like a commercial electrician or go into industry, like apprenticeship is absolutely the best way to do it. Right, right. So, you know, as an industry, obviously, like you said, if you Google how to do something and you don't get results, I mean, obviously, again, like we said before, that's an industry,

problem. How do you go about fixing? Is it companies like yourselves that need to go and be the educators? Because it just seems like, like you said, like everyone is so busy and wrapped up in what they have going on. And there's not enough like, hey, we need to have, we need to have, when someone Googles this, we need to have some options there, you know, from an industry standpoint. Yeah, I mean, that is really why we started this company. We started with a problem. How do we solve the skilled labor crisis and how to, you know, we sort of figured out from that, all right, there's not enough young people going into the trades. Okay, how do we solve that problem?

And we have this sort of original vision for creating like a coding boot camp model for going into the trades. You could do a lot of it virtually, maybe a week in person. That's still something that I think will inevitably do. I think that that really needs to exist. There's, I mean, there's obviously people working on this. Like as an industry, there's at CCR and you have a lot of big, associations that are doing a lot of really good content. I think what's missing is standardization

from a legislative perspective. So like the government, if you look at BC where I went to school in Canada, they have the red, I think it's called the red label trades. They're standardized. If you want to become an electrician, you Google it. The first result you get is this website, DC skilled trades, and it shows exactly you get an apprenticeship, you go do this, do this. And it's very clear and it's very standardized. And then you can go work in another province. And I think in the US, depending on the state, it can be different. There's all these different. It's very confusing. So I think you need people like us, but we also need from a legislative perspective to sort of align all the states and create federal programs and make it easier. Yeah. Again, that sounds like a lot

of work. But it takes a long time too. Yeah. I mean, to have the standardized like, hey, this is this is the kind of training we need as an electrician or whatever plumber. But you're right. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. I mean, I always hear stories of other countries and how they've done this. And it's just when you hear it, it's something they've had in place for 40 years already. And you're like, oh, crap, we were that part behind? Like, it does seem like that, though, right?

I think it's changing really quickly. If, you know, when I was doing all those interviews and obviously, you know, this is, what I'm doing. I talk to all my peers about it and friends and family and literally every single person I talked to. They're like, oh, yeah, I had this cousin that became a welder and I owns his own business. Like, everybody is starting to realize like, oh, maybe going to college isn't always the best career path. Right. And so I think it is changing. It's just like you said, it takes time. Yeah. Yeah. So what can, what can companies do better to attract the top talent to apprenticeships or ground up development programs what can we be doing there's a couple of things one i mean you got to

meet people where they are so be on tic-tok snapchat youtube facebook like you don't have to produce a ton of content just be there you know you know i need to run ads have a presence there it at least shows that like hey you're a modern business and like we care about these things we'll meet you where you are right um have a great website it makes sure it looks good on your phone. 70% of our signups are on mobile. I mean, generally 60 to 70% all web traffic is on mobile. I can't tell you how many websites I go to on my phone and you try to apply for a job. And it's pretty painful. It's definitely not easy. Right. I think also the way that we that you're marketing jobs is really important. Like I said earlier, don't talk about it like a job.

You know, we we work with customers to sort of rebrand their entry level of jobs as apprenticeship. and you don't have to do a lot. Like that doesn't require building your own university and having this huge internment training infrastructure. Just have like a certificate you get after the first year and like a graduation ceremony so that I as a candidate as an employee feel like I'm developing and I have something to show for that. And you're just going to get way more applicants if you market it as an apprenticeship

versus just like technician one or field service tech. that's not very exciting. That doesn't feel like a career versus, you know, we have one customer. They have this. It's actually a really cool business. They work on water pumps in California. I think it's a great company. They were looking for field technicians.

We're like, let's call it like mechanic and training. And we got much higher quality applicants because it looks more like a career path, which it is versus just field tech. Like that's just not very exciting. So I think the way that you. you market it on your job site is really important. And I see a lot of jobs that are, the descriptions clearly just spat out of some ATS that's auto-generated.

And there wasn't a lot put into it. And if you look at like our job postings that we do for our customers, they're really exciting. We, you know, we use bold fonts and different sections and talk about the career path and what you can become after this job, not just the wage, the location, who you report to responsibilities. Like, make it seem exciting. Those are some of the big, those are like easy wins.

I think just go to your own website on your phone and try to apply for a job. And you'll probably notice there's a lot of friction there. Yeah, totally. So do you have them kind of list a path to the career? You know, like, so, you know, after you're done with the training, then, you know, kind of like you show them a path to a career. Yeah. Whenever we launch a new customer, we do a kickoff call.

and there's a ton of questions that we ask to train our team on how to talk about the job and the career opportunity. And one of those is walk me through the career path. And it's interesting. A lot of times we'll ask that question, and it takes a minute to really think about, like, what is there? Have we documented this internally? And a lot of times companies have not thought about that. Like it's maybe somebody else in the organization thought about it a long time ago. But it's not top of mind for whoever's hiring.

for that role. So we always talk about that. And I think one of the things I've noticed is if you look at, so we have a big customer that we kind of launched this business with faith technologies. If you look at their leadership team, I think the CEO and most of the leadership team started as apprentices. Like they've been there 30, 40 years. People don't talk, like, that's not talked about enough. And when you talk to like the hiring manager or the recruiter, a lot of times and be like, yeah, you can become an electrician one or whatever. And when you talk to the executives, they're like, well, I mean, you can come in, you could be a project manager, you could go into sales, you could go into management.

You don't have to stay in the field for your whole career. So that's one thing that we really like to talk about is this is, you're getting a job at this great company. There's a lot of different career paths. And you could get into leadership, you get into management. There's a lot of different things you can do. Yeah, I think that's where we, another failure of our industry, too. is once someone gets in a role, we don't talk to them about advancement, right?

They get really good at that job as a project manager and you're like, I don't even want to talk to them about the next role because they're too damn good at it and I don't want to replace them. But like that needs to be part of our strategy as an industry. It's like we need to show people a path to, you know, what do you like doing? Do you like to be in the field or do you like to be in the office, you know, that kind of thing? And then show them a way to make it, you know, more rewarding. I mean, it's a problem for tech companies, too.

You've got a, I think there's, they've been, the tech industry has been quicker to shift just because so hard to retain really good engineers and really talented product people. Yeah. Or really any role at like a really fast growing venture back startup. So you check-ins once a month. Like, how do you feel about your career? And I think that is something that construction companies need to do as well. Like you should check in with your direct reports. once a month or once a quarter?

How are you doing as a person? Do you feel good about where you're headed from a career perspective? Is there any training you want to do professional development, stuff like that? Yeah, totally, totally. So how was that whole recruitment industry change? Like, you know, I don't know a ton about it, but obviously what you have created with Trade Foundry is got to be where recruitment and where you're finding young talent is heading, right?

I think the important thing that we're doing that we have to do as an industry is look outside the traditional talent pools. Like we generate, when we bring on a new customer, we use AI to generate a bunch of different marketing assets and run ads on Facebook, TikTok, Google, to try to find candidates that aren't already looking for a job. Maybe they're driving DoorDash or Uber right now, and we're going to find, they see an Instagram ad and it sends them down this path into a career in the trades. So I think you have to do things beyond just posting a job on Indeed, because that talent pool kind of is what it is. And I mean, those are still the best way to find people, but we have to as an industry kind of branch out and try to pull new talent into the talent pool. Yeah. And you're right. And we talk about Mike Roe being a champion for maybe our generations and maybe even generations beyond ours. But if we don't have that young champion,

that face, right? Like they always say, like, you need to be able to picture yourself in that career. And whether that is a, you know, a diversity situation or a woman or, like, just someone younger, if you don't actually see somebody doing it, you know, what are the chances? You're going to be like, I don't know anybody that's in the trades. You know, I don't know. Mike's great, but again, like most people in my age don't know who bike is. So we need the rock or, I don't know, I mean, I'm not with it.

But we need some younger celebrities to get involved in. Yeah, totally, totally. I just want to talk a little bit more about trade foundry. When did you start it? And you kind of talked about the problem at solving, but kind of rehash that. So when did you start it and what exact problem are you really looking to solve? Yeah, we started working on the problem last fall.

So started talking to people who own construction companies, people in the industry, investors, operators. did a bunch of interviews with young people to really understand the industry, talked to some high school counselors. That was all last fall. And that was when we kind of validated, though. There really is a need here for something like a LinkedIn for the trades or a coding boot camp. Like, we needed a new way to draw in new talent.

Yeah. So we started this company in November of last year. We launched, we've been running a pilot. We started running a pilot with Faith in February. And we've been working with them for about six months now, marketing their apprenticeships, apprentice electrician roles. We just brought on a few new customers in the last month. Had our first sales guy started about a week ago. So we're really just starting to ramp up. I feel like we have a good product now. And we've kind of found our product market

fit. And so we're starting to scale out to other customers now. Right on. So how did that work? I mean, we talked about, you know, maybe you're on Instagram, doing an ad or something, and you find a young candidate. They go down the rabbit hole. They end up on your way. website, what does it look like for them? How do they, how do they, you know, join, I guess? Yeah. So we have a really dynamic onboarding experience. It's different based on whether it's a job that requires experience, whether it's an apprenticeship, like the whole onboarding experience is very different. I'll walk you through, you know, our wheelhouse is an apprenticeship program. We can go out and market that. We can build, we have existing marketing content and add

campaigns we can run that say like, hey, are you looking for a new career? Do you want to get paid to learn? Do you want to become an electrician, learn a trade? So when we onboard a new customer, we'll build out, add content for them, we'll start running campaigns in their area. We'll manage job postings on Indeed, zip recruiter as well, do proactive headhunting for resumes that are there. When a candidate clicks an ad, they get a link from us. They'll fill out of form. They get a link, text in an email. We found text works way better than email. almost no one does email text is by far the best way to do it. But they click that link, they create their profile, they can do it all on their phone.

We ask them to record a couple of videos just to kind of learn more about their character. Like what makes you a great hard worker? Why are you interested in a career in the trade, stuff like that? We have them take a mechanical aptitude test, which is, it's not really an IQ test. Like, I've taken it and we've had people take it who maybe would, You wouldn't have thought they did really well, but they've been working in the trades for like 10 years and they crushed it because it really it tests like how well do you understand how tools work and basic construction physics work. So that's their profile. We can kind of customize that whole process.

Like if there's requirements, do you need a journeyman's license or something like that? Once we have their profile, we have a team that does a screening call, verifies all that data, talks to them, make sure they understand what they're getting into. and then if we really like them, we'll send them to our customer for a final interview. We found that that middle step is really important. I don't know what's going on in a lot of high schools, but a lot of kids aren't prepared for an interview. And so we do a lot of coaching to talk to them about,

like, hey, are you really willing to get up at 5.30 and get to a job site at 6? Are you willing to work hard? Do you really want to pursue this as a career, not just find another job? And so that's, that's helped a lot with our customers in improving their retention. Yeah, no doubt. So how does it work from an employer standpoint? Yeah, how do they get involved? So we have an employer login, so you can log in, you can view profile, watch videos, like their assessment scores, ask questions, make comments.

We haven't set it up in a way today where you can just post a job. I don't think we really want to be a competitor with existing job sites. We use those. We're kind of in the middle right now. But, yeah, I would think of us as we're, you know, there's two customers that work really well with our business. There's a big company that wants to have a more data-driven, programmatic approach to these entry-level roles, like what we're doing with Faith.

We're able to provide them with all this data and like, what does that ideal candidate really look like? We can screen those and just deliver them higher-quality candidates. And then we also have customers. where it's a smaller business that just doesn't have the bandwidth and can't afford a traditional recruiter, like we're so much more affordable because of our approach than a traditional recruiter, we can help sort of be an outsourced recruiting function. So we can own all that job site management, run ad campaigns for you, stuff that like a smaller construction company, just that's not your

wheelhouse. And we can do all that. I mean, that is such a huge market because there is something about recruitment. I mean, obviously, as you said, it's very expensive. And usually, you know, a small or medium-sized company, you're not even thinking about that. You're like, I already know that's not something that we can do. So you definitely would feel that niche for that small and medium size or even larger companies that really just don't have the bandwidth to have that on their plate. They don't have an HR manager, you know. It's a family-run business. You don't have time. So yeah, what a great way to, you know, to enter in and really find that quality candidate. Are you finding any candidates willing to travel or, I mean, you know, move or is it very,

are you guys doing ads that are very localized to where they currently reside? Yeah, we're very local right now, just because it's so much, our ROI on the ad spend is so much better if we're focused on a specific market. We just started recruiting for some more experienced roles to kind of test how our whole. process works there. And so with that, we can be a little more geographically broad. So we can run more national campaigns. And we're testing out some like different automation on emails we can find and LinkedIn automation and stuff like that to try to find people are out there. Yeah. Right. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you being here. Is there anything last thoughts or anything on

trade foundry that we need to know about? And how do we can we get a, if we have some people listening, can we get a like a free you know behind the hood under the hood kind of a look at your program yeah absolutely i i'll give you my email if anyone is interested in talking i you know we're still very early and there's a lot of things we want to build and do in the next few months and our product is evolving i think the advantage we have versus a traditional recruiter is my background in technology you know we can quickly customize things and we're incorporating new things like, hey, I think a lot of traditional recruiters are not. So I would love just to talk to anybody if you're interested in just providing feedback. If you have ideas for us, or obviously,

if you want to work with us, I'd love to talk to you as well. Awesome. Awesome. So what's that email for them to contact you at? Oh, it's my name, clay.comfmann, C-O-F-F-M-A-N at tradefoundary. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. Clay. It's been a wealth of knowledge. This is a topic that we need more learn more about and this is a great solution for us. So thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right. Thank you. Well, thanks again, guys, for joining us on Construction Executives Live. What a great show. Again, the content was spot on. Thanks again for Clay for being here. Next month, we are going to delve into the topic of leadership. So I'll email out and put it out on socials when exactly that's going to be. We're still trying to iron out

those details. I also wanted to thank our sponsor again, Build 12. Again, automate your construction business into a revenue-generating machine with the Build 12 system. Go to Build12.com. Thanks again for being here, everybody. Have a great day, and we will see you next month. Bye. You've been listening to In the Zone and Construction Executives Live with Jeremy Owens. Be sure to subscribe to In The Zone and stay in the know with the best minds in the construction industry. To nominate an innovator or changemaker in the construction industry, connect with your management peers and stay up to date with construction industry news. Be sure to visit usconstructionzone.com.