Too often, recruitment ends when the contract is signed. But what happens next?
You've recruited the ideal candidate after scrutinising many CVs and conducting several rounds of interviews.
The candidate accepts the offer and starts.
The recruiter moves on.
HR takes over.
The line manager gets on with managing.
Then, as many construction consultancies are finding in 2026, within six months you could be recruiting for the same role again.
And as we often see at Construction Professionals HR & Recruitment, before you know it a £30,000 p.a. resource could end up costing you circa £20,000 in recruitment fees. The real problem is just as much a retention one.
The construction industry's skills problem is usually framed as a recruitment challenge, but the numbers suggest it is just as much a retention one.
The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), in its Surveying Skills Report 2026 published in October, says that across every region, the need to "retain established professionals in the sector and support them to continually upskill" stands out.
The 2026 RICS survey findings reinforce the importance of attracting, retaining and developing professional construction talent at every career stage.
In addition, the Construction Industry Training Board’s (CITB) Workforce Outlook, published in June 2026, shows the recruitment pressure – i.e. how many extra workers the industry needs each year to meet forecast demand, measured against how many people already work in each occupation - is sharpest on the construction professional side.
Relative to the size of each workforce, civil engineers top the list for extra recruitment need at 2.2% a year, with architects, surveyors and construction project managers close behind at 2.0%. That means finding around 1,350 extra surveyors, 1,180 civil engineers, 1,180 construction project managers and 750 architects every year until 2030, on top of more than 5,000 other professional and technical staff in the construction sector
CITB also warns that:
too few people are joining the industry
too many experienced workers are leaving
and productivity gains have not been enough to close the gap, putting pressure on housing, infrastructure and retrofit delivery.
In March 2026, Building magazine’s Good Employer Guide 2026 surveyed 52 firms across the built environment. The subsequent report describes a sector under pressure both to attract talent and to keep it. As the guide puts it:
“….meeting future demand "will require companies to raise the bar when it comes to recruitment and retention..."
The guide's own figures show how uneven the picture is: annual staff turnover among the firms surveyed ranged from 0% to as high as 27%. That's more than a quarter of a workforce to replace every year, even among companies that see themselves as good employers.
Why new hires leave early
So why do people leave so soon after joining? Three pressures stand out across the built environment, and for a new starter who is still finding their feet, each one lands harder.
1. Stretched teams with no time to train
RICS’s Surveying Skills Report 2026, published in October, found that 55% of UK and Ireland members (who participated in the survey) say skills shortages are limiting the time and resource they have to train or upskill existing staff.
For someone joining a new firm, that is exactly when it bites. If nobody has the time to show them the ropes, they are left to work it out alone, and they are unlikely to stay.
RICS spells out the knock-on effect. Where experienced professionals have "limited capacity to support more junior colleagues," it says, skills shortages "become self-perpetuating." Lack of time is the top-ranked barrier to upskilling in the report, and more than one in five respondents (22%) put limited mentorship among their top three barriers.
2. Heavy workloads straight after onboarding
The same report found that 63% of UK and Ireland respondents say shortages are reducing their capacity to take on new work. The work doesn’t go away; it lands on whoever is already in the team.
Too often, new professional hires are handed a backlog of project work from day one. The three-to-six-month probation period then becomes the point at which they decide to leave, before they have had the chance to properly settle in.
3. Rivals ready with a better offer
The same skills shortage that makes recruitment hard also makes new hires easy to poach. RICS found that a shortage of mid-career and experienced professionals is the biggest driver of skills gaps, cited by 62% of UK and Ireland respondents, while 43% point to retention. Someone who joined three months ago hasn’t yet built the relationships or loyalty that would keep them in place.
Competitors are raising the stakes, too. XCO2, featured in Building’s Good Employer Guide, has introduced a nine-day fortnight, cutting hours by 10% with no change to salary. For a new starter already stretched by heavy workloads and too little support, an offer like that is hard to turn down.
Closing the gap through ‘onrooting’.
Each of these pressures lands in the gap described at the start.
The recruiter moves on, HR takes over, the line manager gets on with managing, and nobody owns the new starter's first months.
Building makes the point that the sector’s skills gap is "a retention problem wearing a recruitment disguise." And that "filling the pipeline matters" but "stopping the leaks matters more."
Once new starters have settled in, they still need clear routes for personal and professional development. They need structured and consistent career mentoring.
The RICS figures suggest many firms aren’t there yet. Upskilling current staff is the most-cited strategy for closing skills gaps (42%), but only 31% point to improving reward and progression, and 29% to flexible working and culture.
At Construction Professionals HR & Recruitment we see how trusted old-school onboarding gets recruits in. But “onrooting” keeps them. For professional construction consultancies, this is a joined-up approach, because onrooting is a deliberate and consistent approach to help recruits at all levels put down roots, so they’re still there in month six, and in year three and even in year five.
That's why Dee Airey created the 5-Step Framework to Attract & Keep Top Talent in Construction.
It covers:
Inclusive hiring – attracting the right people before the first CV lands.
Better onboarding – making the first 90 days count, not just Day One, when workload pressure is at its peak.
Line manager development – giving managers the tools to lead, support and retain their teams through constant change. RICS found that one in five respondents (20%) rank low employer or manager support among their top three barriers to progression.
Clear performance expectations – so people understand what success looks like, and why it is worth staying to achieve it. A lack of transparency in career paths or succession plans is the single biggest barrier to progression in the RICS report.
Culture – creating an environment where people feel valued, heard and able to contribute, so the next offer is less tempting.
Because recruitment isn't the end of the process.
It's the beginning of the employee retention journey.
We've put the five steps into a practical guide for construction consultancies.
