Your Hiring Problem Starts After the Offer Is Accepted

The paperwork gets signed. Everyone exhales. The recruiter marks the job closed.

Then Monday comes, and the new hire doesn’t.

Construction spends most of its energy on the top of the hiring funnel: more postings, more outreach, more pay. Those all matter. But the newest data suggests part of the industry’s shortage is leaking out after the hire has been made.

How many firms lose new hires in the first 90 days?

The 2026 AGC and NCCER Workforce Survey asked contractors what happens to new field employees early on. The answer: 83% of firms report at least some turnover in the first 90 days.

A fair caveat: that’s the share of firms seeing any early turnover, not the share of hires who leave. Plenty of those firms might lose only a few. But the same survey shows it’s big enough to be counted as a reason jobs stay open. AGC’s own conclusion is that the challenge “increasingly involves retaining workers as well as recruiting them.”

Read that second bar again. It’s not a sourcing failure. Those firms found a person, screened them, made an offer, and still ended up with an empty seat. In the Texas results, from a much smaller sample of 70 firms, the figure is 38%.

Why do new field hires leave?

When AGC asked why new field employees leave early, contractors most often pointed to a mismatch between workers’ expectations and the realities of construction work. The physical demands of the job came next, followed by travel and scheduling requirements.

All three have something in common. Each one is knowable before day one.

Notice what isn’t among the reasons AGC names first: pay. The same survey shows 55% of firms raised craft base pay by more than they did a year earlier, and another 29% raised it by about the same amount. Most firms have already pulled that lever, and 42% still report no-shows and early quits. Pay gets people to say yes. It doesn’t tell them what the job is like.

Someone can be told, plainly, what 5:30 a.m. in a Texas August feels like. They can be told what a two-hour drive to site means for their family. Too often they find out on the job, because the hiring process was busy selling the role instead of describing it.

Telling the truth works, and there’s research on why

Industrial psychologists have studied this for decades under the name realistic job previews. A 2011 meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology, covering 52 studies and roughly 17,000 people, found that perceived organizational honesty is the main mechanism through which previews influence voluntary turnover.

That’s worth sitting with. A preview doesn’t work only because people self-select out. It works because the company told the truth, and people notice. The same study found the most effective design may be an oral or written preview delivered after hire, and designed to signal honesty.

So the conversation doesn’t stop once they’ve said yes. The first morning is one of the best times to have it.

A hard job, honestly described, is a better offer than an easy job that doesn’t exist.

The early days are also the riskiest

There’s a second reason to care about the first 90 days. Research from Ontario’s Institute for Work and Health found that workers in their first month on the job face more than three times the risk of a lost-time injury compared with workers who have over a year’s experience. The institute’s finding was that the key risk factor is newness, not youth, and that the risk runs higher in the goods sector, which includes construction.

That’s Canadian research, so don’t read the multiple as a U.S. jobsite figure. But the point travels: a weak first month is a safety problem as well as a retention problem. An experienced hand starting at your company is still new to your site.

U.S. evidence points the same way. A CPWR study of Tennessee workers’ compensation records from 2014 and 2015 found that 44.5% of construction injuries with a known tenure involved people with 12 months or less at their employer, while that group made up 24% of the national construction workforce in 2016. The authors caution that this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, since it’s one state and they couldn’t calculate injury rates. It’s still a pattern worth planning around.

A 90-day plan a foreman can actually run

AGC reports contractors are responding with structured onboarding, regular check-ins, formal jobsite orientations, safety-focused onboarding, and mentor or buddy systems. Here’s one way to put those pieces in order. Treat it as a starting point and adjust it for your crews.

The pre-start call is the cheapest line on that table. It costs a few minutes and gives you early warning if someone has taken another job.

What to measure

You can’t fix what you can’t see, and it’s easy to track time to fill while losing sight of what happens afterward. Three numbers will tell you more:

1. No-show rate: people who accepted but never arrive on day one.
2. 30, 60, and 90-day retention, split by craft, project, and foreman. Differences between foremen are often where the answer is.
3. Stated reason for leaving, captured by someone other than the direct supervisor.

Then connect those numbers back to the source. If one channel brings you people who quit in week two, that channel is more expensive than it looks.

Where a recruiter can help, and where it can’t

No recruiter can fix a site with a bad culture. What a good one can do is refuse to oversell the job, because a placement that fails in 30 days helps nobody. On our Hire page, you’ll see Jessica Walker’s results from her time as a national recruiter, including a 42% reduction in average time to fill and helping cut sales turnover by more than half. Those two numbers belong together: filling a seat faster only counts if the person stays in it.

Getting people to show up is half the job. If you’d like to talk about the other half, we’d enjoy that conversation.