Johny Rooney

The construction industry will need 349,000 net new workers in 2026, and 92% of contractors already struggle to fill open positions. But the data reveals something most TA leaders miss: candidates are applying – they're just often off the market in under a week. The average craft worker takes an offer within 24 hours of their first conversation. The average construction employer takes 17 days to respond.

In this session, Classet breaks down exactly where qualified candidates fall out of the construction hiring funnel – and how their AI voice screening is helping leading trades companies close the gap between "applied" and "hired."

• Why time-to-first-contact – not sourcing volume – is the single metric that determines whether your hiring spend actually converts to hires
• How leading trades employers are solving construction's hardest funnel problems: engaging multilingual applicants, verifying certs and credentials automatically, and covering the nights-and-weekends applications that sit untouched until Monday
• Real outcomes from skilled trades companies that stopped losing qualified candidates to faster competitors – and what changed in their first 30 days

This session invites participants to explore how construction can rethink traditional recruitment approaches to accelerate hiring, improve quality-of-hire, and expand talent pipelines. Attendees will examine the intersection of hiring manager engagement, recruiter efficiency, and skills-based assessment to uncover actionable insights for their own organizations.

• Redesigning the hiring manager experience to foster alignment, accountability, and faster decision-making
• Embedding recruiters into the process to focus on higher-value sourcing and candidate engagement
• Leveraging skills-based hiring to reduce bias and unlock broader, more diverse talent pools
• Building a scalable, future-ready recruitment model that balances speed, efficiency, and capability