About this report
Research takes time, effort and a massive amount of resources. Thankfully, Skillit’s recruitment platform not only provides self-perform construction companies with access to a growing database of qualified craft workers and a suite of worker-first hiring tools, it finally brings to the surface a treasure trove of previously invisible data to help give your craft hiring strategy a timely competitive advantage.
With this report we set out to address two important questions concerning carpenters in Nashville:
● What is the true state of their skills in 2022?
● What are their compensation expectations and sensitivities?
Let’s meet the carpenters of Nashville.
Since launching in July of 2021, Skillit has on-boarded onto our platform and digitized the real-world employment criteria of 84% of the supply of all carpenters in the Nashville market (equal to 8% of the supply of the Tennessee market).
Carpenters in Nashville classify themselves as either Novice, Assistant, Apprentice, Journeyman, Lead, Finish or Foreman.
At a high-level, they want permanent work (well, 91% of them do), prioritize good benefits and career growth over everything else, prefer interviews outside of business hours and – we cannot stress this enough – need you to hire them before expecting them to do their OSHA-30 training. All will be revealed. Let’s dig in.
The state of carpentry skills in Nashville
We get it, performative testing is risky and paper-based assessments are labor-intensive to administer. Skillit’s carpenter assessments are fully digitized and designed by leading carpenters and educators to use knowledge as a leading indicator of skills and accurately assess the skill of any level of carpenter.
Our scoring methodology
The average passing score set by our customers is 70% and we at Skillit include a 10% margin of error to allow room for other desired hiring characteristics (e.g., personality traits like work ethic and learning capacity) and allow for poor test performance / environment (e.g., the user is on the road, distracted at home etc). Therefore, we consider 60% as a lower bound passing score for the sake of benchmarking carpenter skill quality.
With that established, we simply filter our database of carpenter members in Nashville to determine what percentile achieved what score. Here are the results:
Time-Saving Fact: Before adopting Skillit, Messer Construction’s hiring team spent 45 minutes interviewing each candidate and assessing their carpentry skills and another 15 minutes scoring them. Today, each candidate arrives at Messer fully skills assessed by Skillit which has reduced interview times to just 15 minutes.
Individual Subject Strength
Each of our carpenter assessments consist of 40 questions split evenly between 5 subject matters: Safety, Cranes & Rigging, Construction Math, Building Knowledge and Plan Reading. Here are the average scores by subject obtained by all carpenters in Nashville in descending order:
Safety – 74%
Cranes & Rigging – 64%
Construction Math – 60%
Building Knowledge – 47%
Plan Reading – 44%
Compensation Expectations & Behaviors
With real and perceived labor shortages on the rise, Skillit has seen a 16% hike in salaries offered in just the past 6 months. We’re also seeing signing bonuses of up to $2,500 being offered to entice carpenters to join (read jump ship).
Thankfully our system puts contractors in the driving seat by building an understanding of how much carpenters in Nashville expect to be paid; their assessed value based on their assessment scores, and which offers they’ve received, accepted, and rejected.
Here for example, you can see that on average, Journeyman carpenters desire $30/hr, are typically offered $24.7/hr, accept offers $25.2/hr and above and reject offers $22.8/hr and under. Their sensitivity therefore (acceptance average minus rejection average) is $2.4/hr.
OAR-Boosting Fact: Optimizing your company’s Offer Acceptance Rate in today’s market is mission critical to your company’s success. That’s why Skillit’s platform captures previously hidden variables on an individual worker’s offer acceptance behavior and helps you present them with a mutually acceptable offer at the tap of a button.
