Hiring from Outside the Roofing Industry

Robbie Kerr, Director of roofing recruitment specialists, The Externals Group, explains why roofing contractors should also consider hiring from outside the industry when recruiting new talent.

Robbie Kerr, Director at The Externals Group

ROOFING COMPANIES are sitting on a goldmine of potential talent and most don’t even realise it.

Our industry has a habit of only looking within itself when hiring. If someone doesn’t have roofing experience on their resume, they don’t get a second look. It’s understandable – there’s comfort in hiring someone who already knows the difference between TPO and EPDM, but this blinders-on approach to the outside is costing contractors good people and in some cases, better people than what’s currently available in the roofing talent pool.

Transferable Skills Work in Every Other Industry

If you walk into any manufacturing company, you’ll find project managers who came from logistics, tech, or even retail. The pharmaceutical industry regularly hires quality managers from automotive. Construction pulls estimators from engineering firms that have never touched a building site. They do this because they understand that core skills – the ability to read plans, manage budgets, communicate with teams, and solve problems under pressure – don’t belong to just one industry. They are transferable and the cost not to hire often outweighs the cost to train.

Has Roofing Missed This Memo?

Yes, a roofer needs to be trained in roofing. That’s not up for debate. What about an estimator, a project manager, or an operations coordinator? These roles rely far more on process, organisation, and people management than they do on knowing every roofing system and they don’t really have to have this specific experience with another roofing contractor to do a good job.

You can teach someone about modified bitumen or metal panel systems in a few months. You can’t as easily teach someone how to think critically, manage their time, or handle a difficult conversation with subcontractors or stakeholders.

I’ve seen estimators come from HVAC and general construction recently and thrive with roofing contractors. They already knew how to read blueprints, work with suppliers, and put together competitive bids, and the learning curve on roofing-specific materials was very short. The clients had been trying to fill these roles from within the industry for a long time and it was costing them a fortune in time and effort by not having them in place that training was a non-issue.

The Age Issue

There’s a big push right now to bring younger people into the trades and into roofing specifically. We need new blood, and getting people interested in roofing early is important for the long-term of the industry, but there is a caveat to this: younger people are still figuring out what they want. They’re exploring. They’re testing different careers to see what sticks. That’s completely normal but it also means they’re more likely to leave after a year or two when they decide roofing isn’t for them.

On the other hand, you have someone in their late 30s or 40s who’s spent a decade in project management for a general contractor or in estimating for a mechanical firm. When they make that move, it’s calculated. They know what they want and they’re far more likely to stick it out because they’ve already been through that phase of their career and are a lot more settled elsewhere in life.

Time and time again, I see contractors pass over these candidates in favour of someone ten years younger with roofing experience but half the maturity and a resume that shows three jobs in four years. The misguided assumption seems to be that if they don’t have roofing experience, they won’t get it or they won’t last.

What You’re Actually Hiring For

When you hire an estimator, you’re hiring someone who can analyse drawings, communicate with clients, manage deadlines, and work accurately under pressure. When you hire a project manager, you’re hiring someone who can coordinate people, troubleshoot issues on demand, and keep a job on track and on budget. The roofing knowledge is the easy part.

If you only hire from within the industry, you’re fishing in a very small pond along with everyone else. The result is that you’re all competing for the same limited talent, and when someone good becomes available, five companies are trying to hire them at once. Meanwhile, there’s an ocean of talent in adjacent industries that most roofing contractors won’t even consider because the resume doesn’t say “roofing” when your vacancy could be filled with a solid team member so much faster.

Building the Industry from the Inside

If more contractors started hiring people from outside the industry and training them up, the roofing talent pool would grow. Right now, everyone talks about how hard it is to find good people. But no one wants to be the one to invest in someone without experience.

If every company took on even one or two people from related industries each year and developed them properly, within a few years you’d have a much larger pool of experienced roofing professionals to choose from when the time comes to hire genuinely experienced people.

The companies that start doing this now will have an edge. They’ll have access to talent others are ignoring. They’ll build teams with different perspectives and skill sets and they’ll stop losing out on great candidates just because those candidates haven’t worked in the roofing industry before.

If your project manager just left half way through six projects, hire someone from within industry. If you have three project managers already and you want to take some workload up or prepare for some upcoming projects, hire from outside and train.

If you follow this logic, your company will boom, the work you can take on will grow with it, and your teams will be happier to not be under so much pressure because you are struggling to hire.

Fresh blood doesn’t just mean young. It means new to the industry.

>> Read more about recruitment in the news