Hi, Fraser here, Skillit’s founder and CEO.

If you’re an HR or Talent decision-maker at a specialty or general contractor, you know how insanely hard it is to find and connect with today’s craft workers.

You’ve been told it’s because of a labor shortage, driven by an aging workforce, fewer kids entering the trades, the lingering effects of a recession, pandemic etc.

While all of this is true, it’s not the real reason behind your struggles.

Over the past decade, these events have caused a major transfer of power from employers to craft workers.

With more jobs chasing fewer workers, craft workers today are a hot commodity and the best are gainfully employed and flush with offers.

They're hard to find, impossible to connect with and, for the first time in history, understanding them has become mission critical to staying in business.

And this power shift has radically changed the recruiting behavior needed to be a successful self-perform contractor today: 

• Workers are no longer searching for your company and “applying” for jobs — you’re having to search for them and convince them to join you. 

• They’re no longer answering calls from strangers — you’re trying to get warm intros and become a trusted contact on their smartphone. 

• They’re no longer jumping through hoops or filling out endless forms — you’re trying to design a hiring experience that makes it painless for them to consider your company.

The list goes on but the message is the same: the old “employer-centric” recruiting playbook is dead

To successfully recruit craft workers today, you have to be proactive. 

You have to be a headhunter. 

You have to adopt a “worker-first” recruiting playbook. 

And that’s why we’re building Skillit, the world's first data-driven platform for actively sourcing, understanding and connecting with craft workers.  

Every day, hundreds of craft professionals across the U.S. create and maintain a data-rich Skillit profile because it connects them with personalized career opportunities at select specialty and general contractors.

In turn, our platform leverages this data to help employers efficiently target the exact workers they need, create direct and meaningful connections with them and continuously improve their hiring outcomes, all while a suite of AI-assisted tools power a worker-first experience at every step, for every worker, recruiter and decision-maker alike. 

And this is our mission at Skillit, to use data to fix the skilled trades gap. We see a future where every job site has the perfect allocation of skills— and for early adopters, that future is already here. Pioneers like Swinerton, Brasfield & Gorrie, and Shelby Erectors are already working with Skillit to scale their self-perform divisions, expand into new markets and unblock their backlogs.

We believe these companies, the worker-first companies, will be the winners. They respect the skills, hard work, and intelligence of craft professionals—heck, they’re often founded by one themselves—but they get the business side too, they understand these workers are the engine powering their business success, that’s why they win the best projects and play a key role in driving our nation’s infrastructure, housing, and energy goals forward.

If you’re one of these companies, reach out — we’re building Skillit with you in mind.