Last week we got into why reshoring is happening and what it means for manufacturing, industrial, and defense. The short version: a lot of work is coming back to North America, and it’s going to take a lot of skilled trades talent to do it. The Department of War estimates unfilled defense skilled-trade jobs could go from 400,000 today to 2.5 million within a decade.
The demand side of our story is clear. But what about that harder question underneath it: where are all these skilled trades talent actually going to come from, and how can companies win over the talent they so desperately need?
So let’s dive into that. What should a growing company do now to win top talent over, all before a bigger competitor with a bigger name does it first?
This Isn’t a Future Problem
It’s easy to file this under “deal with it later,” once the facilities are built and the work actually starts. The numbers say otherwise. Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute project the industry needs to fill up to 3.8 million jobs between 2024 and 2033, and as many as 1.9 million of those could go unfilled.
Read that again. Half the jobs this boom creates might already be structurally hard to fill, before a single new facility even breaks ground. Whoever builds their pipeline now, while the demand curve is still climbing, is the one who’s actually staffed when it peaks. Everyone else is competing for the same shrinking pool, on the same job boards, at the same time.
Get the Role Right Before You Ever Post It
A lot of this comes down to a step people skip: defining the role clearly before you ever post it.
We talk about this in our recruiting intake meeting blog, and it matters even more here. Skilled trades and defense-adjacent roles shift depending on the contract, the facility, or where a candidate is in their certification. If the hiring manager and the recruiter aren’t actually aligned on what’s required day one versus what can be trained in over the first six months, you’ll screen out people who could’ve done the job just fine.
Ask yourself honestly: are you hiring an experienced tradesperson who can start immediately, or could you build toward this through training? Insisting every role needs a fully credentialed hire on day one is a quick way to talk yourself out of a good candidate.
Start Building Your Skilled Trades Talent Pipeline Before You Need It
We’ve talked before about the skilled trades shortage in our HVAC hiring blog: an aging workforce, not enough new tradespeople coming up behind them, everyone fighting over the same small group of experienced hires instead of building ahead of the need. Reshoring is that same problem, just bigger, with one extra wrinkle.
A lot of defense and defense-adjacent roles require security clearances, and clearance timelines don’t move fast. A standard clearance can take months, sometimes longer depending on the level and the current backlog. If you’re only starting that process once a contract lands and a role opens, you’ve already lost months you didn’t have to lose.
A few things worth doing now, before the pressure hits:
- Build relationships with candidates, and where it makes sense, start clearance groundwork, before the contract is even finalized
- Partner with trade schools and technical programs before students graduate, not after
- Hire for the right underlying skill set out of adjacent fields (machinists, welders, electricians, military with trade experience) instead of holding out for an exact match on paper
The companies doing this now are the ones who’ll actually be able to staff up when the work shows up. Everyone else will be stuck waiting on a candidate pool that was never going to appear fast enough.
Speed Still Wins, But Not at the Cost of Judgment
Once you’ve got people in the pipeline, speed decides a lot of what happens next. We’ve written about how AI screening has become a real edge in a market where application volume keeps climbing, and the same holds true here. When a lot of companies are chasing the same reshoring-driven roles at once, whoever can evaluate a qualified candidate in days instead of weeks is the one who gets them.
That doesn’t mean handing the decision over to an algorithm. AI is genuinely good at the volume and pattern-matching parts of screening (we’ve broken down where it helps and where it doesn’t), but a person still needs to make the actual call, especially on roles where hands-on skill, judgment, and clearance eligibility matter more than a resume.
Pay Matters, But It’s Not the Only Lever You Have
If your first instinct in a tight market is to assume you need to out-pay everyone else, you’re not alone, and it’s not always what wins. We already wrote the full playbook on this in 9 ways to compete for talent without offering the highest pay, and most of it applies directly here: real growth paths, benefits that actually fit your workforce, a hiring process that doesn’t lose good people to a slow decision.
Skilled trades talent are often weighing stability and a real path to advancing their craft just as heavily as the number on the offer letter. If you can speak clearly to both, you can beat a bigger competitor who’s only got the wage to lean on.
Filling the Role Isn’t the Finish Line
Here’s the part that’s easy to lose sight of in the scramble to staff up: filling the role doesn’t finish the work if the person doesn’t stay.
We’ve talked about this in our turnover blog: a real fit assessment before the offer goes out catches mismatches that interviews alone miss, long before they turn into a trained employee walking out the door three months later. That matters even more here, because reshoring roles often ask someone to step into a brand-new facility, a brand-new team, or a pace of work they’ve never done before. Hire fast, lose them fast, and you’re right back where you started, except now you’ve also burned the months it took to train them.
Don’t Wait for the Contract to Start Hiring
The reshoring boom is going to create more skilled trades openings than the current workforce can fill, and that gap is already here, not years out. The companies who win this aren’t the ones who move fastest once a contract lands. They’re the ones who already had the role defined, the pipeline built, the clearance groundwork started, and a hiring process tight enough to close before a bigger competitor finishes posting the job.
And this runs straight into recruiting, whether that’s building a sourcing pipeline for skilled trades talent, tightening up a hiring process that’s bleeding candidates to faster competitors, or getting the fit right so a hard-won hire actually stays. We help growing companies get ahead of the demand, before it peaks, not after.
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