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Key Takeaways In construction, energy, and healthcare, contract workers are the backbone of the workforce — and they have to clear serious compliance hurdles just to get on a job site.
New data shows that when that process is broken, nearly 4 in 10 walk away and don’t come back. That’s not just an operations problem. That’s a brand problem.
Map the contractor experience from first contact to cleared-to-start. Measure how long it takes. Find where handoffs go dark and requirements appear without warning.
You should also assign ownership, front-load every requirement before someone starts and give visibility into where they stand.
Most business owners have spent real time thinking about how their employees represent the brand. How they answer the phone. How they show up on a job site. How they treat a customer when no one is watching. That relationship is understood. It gets managed.
The contractors are a different story.
In construction, oil and gas, and healthcare, contractors aren’t an afterthought — they’re a structural part of how work gets done. They’re contractors: specialty subcontractors, traveling clinicians, pipeline crews, per diem workers hired for a specific scope and released when the work is done.
In oil and gas, specialist contractor establishments now employ over two-thirds of the entire U.S. extraction workforce, according to a BLS analysis. In healthcare, hospital contract labor expenses surged 258% between 2019 and 2022 as chronic staffing shortages forced facilities to rely on traveling nurses, locum physicians and credentialed vendors. In construction, 92% of firms say they can’t find enough qualified workers, making the contractor pool not a supplement to the workforce but the workforce itself.
Before any of these people can begin work, they have to clear a compliance process — drug and alcohol testing, criminal background checks, safety certifications, medical clearances, insurance verification, site-specific orientations.
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