Rochester construction firms find unique ways to attract new talent

Listen to this article

Last month the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), a national trade association for the construction industry, announced that based on their propriety model, the industry will need to attract an estimated 439,000 net new workers in 2025 to meet anticipated demand for construction services.

“If it fails to do so, industrywide labor cost escalation will accelerate, exacerbating already high construction costs and reducing the volume of work that is financially feasible,” said ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu in a January 2025 press release. “Average hourly earnings throughout the industry are up 4.4% over the past 12 months, significantly outpacing earnings growth across all industries.”

Locally, construction firms acknowledge the industrywide need for more talent and continue to work hard to attract and retain new talent within their organizations. We checked in with two firms excelling to find out how they’re doing it.

LeChase Construction Services

“Probably one of the most beneficial things for finding our early career folks are the community and college connections that we have,” said Cheryl S. Colavecchio, vice president of people and culture at LeChase Construction Services, which was founded in Rochester by Raymond LeChase in 1944.

Representatives from LeChase attend or host about forty different events throughout the year and throughout all the company’s eleven regional offices, which are located throughout New York as well as in New Jersey, Maryland and North Carolina.

“These events can be anything from workforce development-related activities like BOCES or volunteer opportunities like the ACE Mentorship Program to college career fairs,” Colavecchio said. “From that, we have built an internship program  that has really increased our numbers.”

Annually, LeChase has interns across all departments – including construction, marketing and finance.

“We host approximately thirty interns per year, with 40% of interns either returning for another year or hired full-time after graduation,” Colavecchio said. “Our program includes onboarding, job site tours, social outings, a mentor program and specific training opportunities.  This program is one of our key methods in bringing new talent into the company, both with the operations teams and in service/support departments.”

Colavecchio calls the internship program a differentiator for the firm, as is LeChase’s approach to recruiting from home base.

“We have an internal recruiting manager, so we do the majority of our recruiting in-house, which I think makes a huge difference in terms of being able to connect with our culture and being able to speak to the roles and the people that candidates would be working with,” she said.

LeChase also looks to its current employees for assistance with growing the company.

“We have an employee referral which, over the last four years, has really grown,” Colavecchio said. “We had one a while ago and it was not as robust, so we wanted to make sure it was meaningful for people and a nice bump for referring someone. We’ve seen a lot of traction with it.”

While Colavecchio notes recruitment efforts in some regions where LeChase is located continue to be challenging, Rochester provides a bit of a built-in boost due to the many colleges and universities here and the relationships the firm has built with them.

”We have great relationships, and we have built a lot of their campuses,” she said. “There are times we’ve had project managers that are alums of the campuses they are building on. And we’ve seen a desire for some of our earlier career employees to go back and attend career fairs at whichever university or college they attended.”

Pike Construction Services

Amber Goodman is the vice president of human resources at Pike Construction Services, a fifth-generation construction company founded in Rochester in 1873 with offices throughout the state and in Orlando, Florida. She says that workforce planning is something the firm is always thinking about, especially as a generation of construction supervisory talent approaches retirement age both nationally and locally.

“We’re keeping that at the forefront of our minds,” Goodman said. “But I think that we’ve been really intentional about our workforce staffing and, because of that, we have not really seen as many challenges as some others in the industry may have.”

Goodman believes this success has come, in part, from Pike’s internship program and superintendent program.

“We generally host eighteen interns a year and have a huge success rate of returning interns and ones that we can then turn into full-time offers,” Goodman said. “From last year, we have eleven that will be returning, and we gave five full-time project engineer offers for those that are graduating this May.”

Goodman attributes the strength of the internship program in part to being mindful about making sure that each class is a well-rounded group with interests that cover all aspects of the business.

”With our superintendent program, we continue to develop the program with some key schools, like Alfred State College and SUNY Delhi and recently Utica University with the construction management program that they have,” Goodman said.

In November 2022 the company hosted about 45 students from Alfred State for the day. The students went on a job site tour of the Hampton Inn that Pike was building at the time (and is now complete) next to the Strong Museum expansion downtown and met with a panel of site leaders.

“We did this because we know that part of the lack of interest in the trades is really just a lack of exposure and seeing what the career path can be,” Goodman said. “So, we’re trying to knock those walls down.”

Goodman also credits Pike’s company culture for its success in recruiting and retention.

“We average under ten percent turnover every year, and a lot of those turnovers are retirements,” she said. “Our average tenure is over twelve years, and I would venture to say we have a lot of people that are twenty-five plus years with us.”

Caurie Putnam is a Rochester-area freelance writer.