The construction industry is the one of the largest employment sectors in the United States. With the federal government poised to invest more resources into building and maintaining America’s infrastructure, the construction industry job market has a bright future indeed. An evolving industry, however, also means changes in the dynamics and expectations in hiring practices.

The Need for Speed

Several powerful influences are having an impact on how job candidates and hiring managers are conducting business. Technology has made recruiting a 24/7 enterprise, where job candidates and clients find themselves in situations where quick decisions need to be made. With both jobs and candidates becoming available, and unavailable, within seconds due to digital interaction, a skills set is emerging on both sides of the table: the ability to contextualize situations and make smart decisions. This is where a recruiter can have meaningful impact.

The modern job marketplace is nimble and mercurial. When hiring managers find an ideal candidate sitting across from them, they must pull the trigger. High-quality candidates are in high demand, and companies burdened by antiquated protocols and hierarchies will lose candidates to the competition time and time again. By working with recruiters, hiring managers can prevent costly losses due to cumbersome vetting processes. By developing trusting relationships with hiring managers and job candidates, recruiters can streamline the processing by filling in important information gaps that exists between the candidates and hiring managers.

Knowledge Is Everything

The most important information in a transaction is acquired by asking the hard questions. This is an area that both clients and job seekers often navigate inefficiently. Most professionals won’t admit it, but being honest throughout the hiring process is more difficult than most people realize. Recruiters know that the truth is the most direct and economical way to create success for both clients and job seekers. However, even though job candidates and companies believe they are being completely truthful with each other, both have agendas that often are not clearly articulated in the early stages.

Creating transparency that leads to the truth is a matter of executing a value system through business practices. Recruiters are uniquely qualified to ask the hard questions whether dealing with a client or a job candidate. Recruiters must be willing, for example, to ask about a candidate’s employment gaps in their resumes or other thorny details that may be addressed later in the interview process.

Of course, every company wants to showcase their values through their business practices, and every job candidate strives to land the perfect job by showcasing their experience and expertise. But both of these agendas often lead to more misunderstanding than the beneficial relationships.

Why Technology Is Changing Construction

There are few other industries in recruiting developing more rapidly or profoundly than the construction industry. With 3D and virtual reality technologies, recruiting in the construction industry has become more dynamic and compelling that ever before. So recruiters offer an unprecedented opportunity to cultivate the relationship between new talent in the industry and emerging opportunities. Also, this accelerated evolution of technological evolution — relative to the emerging construction landscape — means that job candidates and clients must have a more sophisticated understanding of the complexities of the technologies that drive industry innovation.

Technology is changing the construction industry faster than any other industry in the world. Recruiting in this industry requires a dedication to studying and understanding evolutions in the ways human beings interact with information and conform to their lifestyles around the new ways data in distributed and internalized. Recruiters in this industry are poised to set the standard not only for a new generation of technology-minded job seekers who aim to make a difference in the world but also companies that need people who satisfy their intellectual and talents requirements and who contribute to their cultural needs.