I wanted to share something with you that I came across recently that I thought would be beneficial to other contractors out there in the industry. It doesn’t matter where you come from in the business, this applies to everybody.  

The Current State Of Construction

In the current state of construction where we have a shortage of skilled labor and everybody’s clamoring for help, temporary employment agencies come into play a lot.  It’s an integral part of the industry and it’s necessary we have them to fill in when we need people to perform certain tasks on jobs or join a crew. 

My Story Of Working With Temp Agencies

We had something come up for us recently and it had a pretty drastic effect on our business.  When you hire temporary help from an agency they are not required to do background checks on the people that they put on your job sites.  We’re always comfortable that they will have workers comp insurance and they’re all fully covered so if anything happens to them the insurance liability goes back to the agency. I wasn’t aware that they weren’t automatically doing background checks. We had a guy on a job site that had a long criminal background and became a giant disruption on our project.  We didn’t find out about the criminal background and everything else until we had the disruption and then we had to scramble around and try to deal with it.  

My Advice

If you don’t want to deal with stuff like that on your job site you need to specifically ask the temp agency to do background checks on the people that you’re requesting them to hire. They don’t disclose this information because it’s an extra step for them and you’re going to need to pay for it.  Some agencies will charge you $50-$200 per background check. I had one agency say they add another $2 per hour in order to do a background check. I found this comical because if you’re going to put somebody on a job for a thousand hours you’re telling me that it costs $2k to do a background check on somebody?  Personally, I think it’s something that should be required to do, but it’s not up to me to change their industry, but it’s up to us to be aware in our industry and what the risks are out there.