How to recruit staff in a tight labour market

Greg Steele - Downer BOP Water Contract Manager

This paper outlines the five key steps that we implemented to successfully recruit staff in a tight labour market in the Tauranga 3 Waters Maintenance Contract. These steps are transferable to any team trying to grow and demonstrate the importance of a strong culture and a people-focused approach rather than simply trying to pay higher wages.

When I joined the Downer Tauranga 3 Waters Maintenance Contract in 2018, the local labour market was saturated with a high volume of construction projects. This made it difficult to recruit staff into the maintenance contract. Construction projects are usually delivered over a shorter time frame than a maintenance contract; therefore, they can increase their rates to meet the labour market increases. Maintenance contracts are traditionally longer-term, have tighter margins, lower labour rates and less favourable working conditions. The current New Zealand labour market is becoming even tighter with the post-COVID government’s ‘shovel ready projects’, further extenuating the situation where more work is available than labour to deliver it.

With the Downer Tauranga 3 Waters Team in a challenging position, we struggled to keep up with the maintenance work due to a low staff retention rate. Our staff were fatigued and nearing breaking point. A new leadership team implemented five key steps to turn the water team around to resolve this challenge.

1. Set a Vision – We aimed to over-deliver, and the concept inspired a positive direction for the team to buy-in. 

2. Recruit Good People – We stopped trying to recruit qualified experts. We targeted good people who were honest, reliable and wanted a career, and then we trained them how to do the job.

3. Create Career Pathways – If we were going to hire career-minded people, we needed to invest in our team’s capabilities and create staff development and progression opportunities.

4. Support the Team – Creating a support network for the team, we had the experience in the trenches with them when it mattered and available when needed.

5. Family Culture – Rewarded successes, cared for our staff outside of work and arranged events for the team to socially bond together.

By implementing these five key steps, we increased the water team from 8 to 21 staff, increasing our completed jobs and revenue by 30% from the previous contract high. The increase in work volume and team size required additional supervision, training, plant, equipment and vehicles. We decreased overtime and on-call requirements, maintained the previous margin and improved the service level KPI performance.

The innovation of these five steps is that we embraced our difference in the labour market. Rather than trying to compete with the rising labour rates for a small pool of resources, we provided an opportunity for new people to join our industry, giving them the training and support they needed to succeed, which has provided greater resilience in the Tauranga labour market for the future.