The expert spoke about the shortage of personnel in the construction industry

Staffing shortages have become one of the key risks in the construction industry. The problem has gone beyond HR — today it directly affects the cost of projects, the timing of commissioning facilities and the sustainability of the development business. This was discussed at the round table "Personnel collapse. Who the market needs now" was told at the Movement forum by Maria Korelskaya, Director of Organizational Development at PRECISELY Group.

She noted that many companies in the industry today face fierce competition for staff. The demand for skilled workers is many times higher than the supply. We are talking about concrete workers, installers, bricklayers — they are ready to hire them for 80-200 thousand rubles per month. But even at such rates, the competition remains extremely high.

"To attract the right specialists, you have to use everything: digital recruiting, referral programs and your own databases. At the same time, we are forced to review the financial models of projects in which such personnel costs were not initially included in the payroll," Korelskaya said.

According to her, the demand for working professions has sharply worsened due to changes in migration policy. The flow of foreign workers has decreased, and substitution at the expense of domestic reserves is limited: vocational schools do not cover the needs of the industry, and retraining requires time and resources. However, an even more acute personnel challenge, according to Korelskaya, is the search for managers.

"At the management level, we face another deficit: managers formed in the conditions of low interest rates and an active mortgage market in 2020-2021 are not adapted to the new market with high interest rates and fierce competition for the client," she shared.

Korelskaya gave an example of commercial directors with no work experience at a rate above 20%. Or technical supervision, focused on acceptance, but not on optimizing the cost of entry.

According to the expert, today the market needs other competencies: the ability to calculate the cost at the entrance, reduce risks, offer an alternative, and reduce costs. In 2021, with a mortgage at 2-4%, only mechanics worked. Today, at a rate of 21%, we need completely different approaches and a different mindset.

"Right now, the main focus is on finding project directors who manage everything: construction, finance, budget, marketing. Finding a person who is actually a CEO and is able to run a large facility of hundreds of thousands of square meters is our huge challenge at the moment," she said.

In conclusion, she emphasized: Today, HR in development has to balance between people and numbers, that is, it must remain a department about people and at the same time be a department about business.

"The personnel problem in construction is no longer a temporary phenomenon, but a systemic challenge. And the winner is the one who will be the first to start working with it as part of strategic management," the expert added.

Earlier, on June 27, Igor Rastorguev, a leading analyst at AMarkets, told Izvestia that salary increases were expected in some areas of work. He noted that, for example, the demand for couriers, drivers, assemblers, builders and manufacturing specialists remains high, which forces employers to raise salaries, especially in large cities.