Every spring we staff up for the summer push — that stretch from May through October when the upper Midwest tries to fit a year's worth of framing into six good months. We're in the middle of that hiring right now. After building crews across Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Montana, we've learned that who's on the wall matters more than almost any other decision a framing contractor makes. Here's what we actually look for, and why it should matter to the GCs and developers who hire us.
Reliability beats raw talent
The most skilled carpenter in the county is worth nothing if he shows up three days out of five. Multi-family framing runs on crew rhythm — a wall crew, a deck crew, and a truss crew all feeding each other — and one unreliable guy breaks the chain for everyone. When we interview, we care less about the war stories and more about the track record: how long were you at your last outfit, and will your old foreman take our call? A guy who spent four years somewhere and can explain why he's leaving is a better bet than a guy with ten employers in five years.
Layout leads are the rarest hire
Anyone can learn to nail off sheathing. What's genuinely hard to find is a lead who can take a set of structural drawings, pull dimensions, snap out a floor, and catch the conflict between the plumbing wall and the beam pocket before it gets built. One good layout lead sets the pace for a dozen people behind him. We test for this directly — hand a candidate a sheet from a real job and ask him to walk us through laying out the second floor. You learn more in ten minutes of that than in an hour of interview questions.
Our working ratio is one lead for every three or four hands. Get that wrong and either your leads burn out doing everything themselves, or your hands stand around waiting to be told what's next.
Safety habits nobody has to enforce
Framing is edge work — leading edges, floor openings, truss setting. We watch how a new hire moves in his first week: does he tie off without being told, does he cover the stair opening back up behind him, does he look up before a wall swings? Those habits are set long before a carpenter gets to us, and a guy who fights fall protection is a liability we can't price. GCs notice this too — a crew that runs clean and tied-off is a crew that doesn't stop the job.
For green hands, we hire attitude
Not everyone we bring on in the spring has years of experience, and that's fine — summer is when new framers get made. What we need from a green hand: show up on time with boots, a belt, and a tape; take direction without sulking; ask before guessing; and move with a purpose. The skills come fast on a production multi-family job because the repetition is a teacher. The attitude either walks in the door or it doesn't.
Travel crews are their own breed
A good chunk of our work runs out of state — Fargo, western Wisconsin, Montana — and travel framing takes a specific kind of person. Weeks in hotels, per diem instead of home cooking, and a crew you work beside all day and eat with at night. We're upfront about it in hiring and we pay for it, because a travel crew that gets along and stays the whole job is worth far more than a rotating cast of guys who bail after two weeks away from home.
Why any of this matters to a GC
Because your framing schedule is really a people plan wearing a schedule costume. Every duration we commit to assumes a certain crew size at a certain skill level, and the subs who blow up summer schedules are usually the ones who bid the work first and went looking for bodies later. When you're vetting framing subs this spring, ask who's actually running the crew, how long that foreman has been with the company, and how they staff the peak — the answers predict your schedule better than the bid number does. It's the same theme we hit in our breakdown of multi-family framing schedules, and it's why we put crew and foreman information front and center on our page for GCs.
We build crews for the long haul, not just the summer — which is exactly why the summer goes well.
Lining up framing for this summer's projects? Get in touch — our crews are staffed, and the calendar is filling.