How Louisiana Construction Companies Are Winning the Recruiting War

Louisiana's construction labor shortage is the worst it has been in 30 years. Contractors from Lake Charles to Slidell are bidding work they cannot crew. Apprentices age out faster than new hands arrive. The going rate for a competent foreman in Houma or Thibodaux has climbed past what the math on most projects can carry.

You know this. You have lived it through the last three bid cycles.

What you may not know is that a handful of Louisiana contractors are quietly winning the hiring race. They are not paying $5 more an hour. They are not using a recruiter you have never heard of. They are doing it with marketing, and most of their competitors do not realize that is what is happening.

This work has a name. Construction recruiting marketing is the discipline of running your career page, your social presence, and your employer reputation as a customer acquisition system. The rest of this post walks through the three plays working in Louisiana now and the 90-day setup that runs them.

Why your recruiting problem is a marketing problem

If you have posted the same Indeed listing for six months and resumes have slowed to a trickle, the reason is not that Lafourche Parish ran out of carpenters. The reason is that you are fishing in the same pond, with the same bait, as every other contractor in your service area.

Job boards reach active candidates only. That is roughly 30 percent of the workforce at any given time. The other 70 percent already work for one of your competitors and never see your posting. They scroll Facebook on lunch break. They watch short videos on their phone after the kids go to bed.

The 22-year-olds in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes who could be your next generation of crew have never heard of your company. Your career page is one paragraph of HR language and a stock photo. The last hire you onboarded saw a Glassdoor page with three angry reviews from 2019 before he ever met you.

That is an employer branding problem and a distribution problem. Both belong to marketing, which is why the contractors winning this race are spending recruiting dollars on the marketing side of the ledger.

Play #1: Recruiting videos shot on a real jobsite

The highest-leverage move in construction recruiting marketing right now is a short, honest video shot on one of your active jobsites.

Sixty to ninety seconds. Owner or super on camera. Two crew members talking about the work. A drone pass on the building. The schedule named. The pay range named. No stock footage. No voiceover from a guy who has never held a level.

A recruiting video of this kind outpulls a text job posting roughly ten to one when distribution is set up correctly. The reason is simple. A 23-year-old in Galliano deciding whether to leave his current company does not want to read twelve bullet points about your team-oriented culture. He wants to see the type of job, the equipment, and the guys he would be working next to. Video gives him all three in 90 seconds.

Contractors who do this well have figured out that their finished project portfolios double as recruiting assets. Foret Group's commercial portfolio is already documented for marketing purposes. The same footage tells a prospective superintendent what kind of jobs the company runs. LeBlanc Brothers and LP Landry have built similar libraries. Every drone pass over a finished project is also a recruiting reel waiting to be edited.

Where you run the video matters as much as how you shoot it. Facebook and Instagram, targeted by ZIP code and by age to the 18-to-35 range, is where construction labor shortage marketing actually lives in Louisiana. You can put a recruiting video in front of every working-age adult inside a 30-minute drive of your yard for less than the cost of one missed bid.

Play #2: Career pages that close, not just list jobs

A career page that says "Now Hiring, Apply on Indeed" is not a career page. It is a handoff to a third-party platform that will eventually compete with you for the next candidate.

A career page that closes does four things yours probably does not.

It names the pay range honestly. Not "competitive wages." A range. Applicants assume the worst about any company that will not post a number, and they are usually right.

It names the schedule. Four tens, five eights, project travel, weekend rotation. Whatever it is, say it. The applicants who turn away would have quit in 60 days anyway when they figured it out.

It shows the progression path. Where does an apprentice go in three years? What does a foreman make at year five? What does the path to project manager look like? This is what separates contractors who recruit foremen and superintendents from contractors who churn through them.

It includes a 90-second video and a one-click mobile apply. Half of your applicants will find your page on a phone during a lunch break. If your apply flow requires a desktop and a resume PDF, you have already lost them.

The Foret Group site is a useful model. The career flow is built for the way construction applicants actually behave, not the way HR software vendors think they should behave. That is the difference between a career page that is a brochure and a career page that closes.

If you want the full anatomy of a high-converting construction career page, that is Chapter 2 of our Louisiana Contractor's Lead Generation Playbook.

Play #3: Local employer reputation on Indeed, Glassdoor, and Google

Roughly 84 percent of construction applicants check reviews before applying. They look at Indeed. They look at Glassdoor. They look at Google. They look at your Facebook page if it is public.

Most Louisiana contractors have a 2.8-star rating from four reviews left between 2017 and 2021, half of which are from one guy who got fired. That page is doing more damage to your hiring funnel than your career page is doing good.

Construction employer branding lives or dies on this layer. The fix is not complicated, but it has to be systematic.

Build a simple workflow. Current employees get asked, once during onboarding and once at the one-year anniversary, to leave an honest review. Respond to negative reviews in a way that signals you take feedback seriously without litigating specifics in public. Use your Google Business Profile to surface short employee stories, certifications, and project completions on a rolling basis.

Inside 90 days, a contractor with a stagnant employer reputation can typically double review volume and pull the rating up half a star. That is the difference between an applicant clicking "apply" and clicking the next company on the list.

If this play alone is the one you need to run first, our construction services page walks through how we set it up for clients.

The 90-day setup

Recruiting is a 90-day setup, not a 90-day campaign. The campaign runs forever once the system is built. Here is the build sequence we use with construction clients.

Weeks 1 and 2. Audit and plan. Pull the current career page apart. List every open role with honest pay ranges and schedules. Identify one active jobsite for video production. Audit Indeed, Glassdoor, Google, and Facebook reviews.

Weeks 3 and 4. Shoot the recruiting video. One day on a real jobsite. Owner or super, two crew members, one drone pilot. Edit down to two versions: a 90-second hero and a 30-second cut for paid social.

Weeks 5 and 6. Rebuild the career page. Pay ranges, schedule, progression path, embedded video, one-click mobile apply. Pull anchor language from the recruiting video so the page reads like the same company that is on camera.

Weeks 7 and 8. Launch paid social. Facebook and Instagram, ZIP code and age targeted. Test two creative versions against each other. Most contractors see applicant volume inside ten days.

Weeks 9 through 12. Measure and iterate. Time-to-hire, applicant quality, cost per qualified applicant. Adjust targeting and creative based on what is actually pulling.

Want the full week-by-week with the exact templates? Download the Louisiana Contractor's Lead Generation Playbook. Free, no sales call required.

What this costs and what it returns

We do not quote real numbers in a blog post. The budget depends on whether you have existing video footage, whether you have a usable career page to renovate, and how many roles you are filling. A discovery call is the right place for that conversation.

What we will share is the return profile. Most Louisiana contractors we work with cut time-to-hire by 30 to 50 percent inside the first quarter. The math gets interesting fast. If your average unfilled foreman seat costs you a week of project delay, the recruiting marketing budget recovers itself in roughly half a bid cycle.

The harder return to put a number on shows up two years later, when your competitors are still posting on Indeed and you are getting unsolicited applications from guys who watched your video. That is the compounding return on employer branding, and it is the reason the contractors who started this work in 2024 are not going back.

What to do next

Recruiting is now marketing's problem. The companies winning the Louisiana construction labor war are not paying more. They are showing up better, in more places, with more honesty than the contractor down the road.

The plays are not complicated. The 90-day setup is real and repeatable. The first contractor in your market who runs it correctly will spend the next five years cherry-picking the best hands while everyone else fights over the leftovers.

If you want help building the system, book a discovery call. If you want to read it before you talk to anyone, the playbook is here. Your next foreman is already employed somewhere else and scrolling Facebook on his lunch break tonight. Be in his feed.