A commercial builder has two openings this spring: a superintendent for a new medical office building and three carpenters for the framing crew. The owner wants to run Google Ads for both. Around Cincinnati, people type "carpenter jobs" into Google about 110 times a month. The superintendent opening barely gets searched at all.
In our example market, the search for carpenter jobs ran about five times the search for superintendent jobs. That gap decides what a hiring campaign can do on Search, and what it has to do somewhere else.
This bonus chapter covers construction hiring with Google Ads: how much hiring the industry faces, which roles people actually search for, where a builder's applications end up, Google's rules for job ads, and how to reach the people who aren't searching. It follows Chapter 15, which covered bonding and license claims.
ABC Says Retirements, Not New Work, Will Drive Most Construction Hiring
Associated Builders and Contractors, a national construction trade group, publishes an estimate early each year of how many workers the industry needs to bring in. The January 2026 release put the figure at 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and 456,000 in 2027.
The reason matters more than the number. ABC's chief economist, Anirban Basu, said that "a majority of new worker demand in 2026 will be attributable to retirement rather than increased demand for construction services." Even if construction spending only meets expectations, he added, "contractors will continue to struggle to fill open positions, especially in certain occupations and regions."
That's one trade group's model, built from federal spending and employment data, and it estimates a national total, not any one builder's need. In our experience it matches what many commercial builders see: experienced people are leaving, and the firm has to replace them whether or not it's growing. For a builder that runs Google Ads, that makes hiring a standing job for the account, not a one-time campaign.
Chapter 1 kept job applications out of project tracking so Google wouldn't mistake applicants for owners. This chapter is the other half: when a builder does want applicants, how to find them on purpose.
Carpenter and Laborer Jobs Drew 10 Times the Searches of Superintendent Jobs in One Metro
We pulled Keyword Planner's monthly averages for job searches by role in our example market, the Cincinnati metro, over the last 12 months:
- Carpenter apprenticeship: about 140 searches a month.
- Carpenter jobs: about 110.
- Construction laborer jobs: about 90.
- Construction project manager jobs: about 50.
- Construction superintendent jobs: about 20.
- Construction estimator jobs: about 20.
- Assistant superintendent jobs: about 10.
The two crew job searches add up to about 200 a month, and about 340 with the apprenticeship search. The four leadership searches (project manager, superintendent, estimator and assistant superintendent) add up to about 100. Keyword Planner rounds small numbers to a few fixed steps (10, 20, 30 and so on), so read the bottom of the list as "a few dozen at most," not an exact count. Across the whole country the gap is smaller but still there: "carpenter jobs" and "construction laborer jobs" each drew about 14,800 searches a month, and "construction superintendent jobs" about 4,400.
Two things stand out for a builder. First, crew roles have enough local searches to support a small Search campaign. A builder hiring carpenters and laborers can buy those searches directly. Second, in this market the apprenticeship search ran ahead of the job search. People looking to learn the trade are a real audience. A builder that trains apprentices, or that works with a union or trade association program, should say so in the ad and on the page the ad links to.
Leadership roles are different, and the last section of this chapter covers them.
Three of 12 Builders Send Applicants to Portals Where Their Google Tag Never Loads
Before a hiring campaign spends anything, a builder needs to know where an application actually finishes. We looked at how the 12 example builder sites take applications:
- Three send applicants to an outside hiring portal. One uses Paycom, one uses Paylocity, and a paving contractor uses ClearCompany through its parent company. A fourth sends applicants to a separate careers site that blocked our automated check.
- Five take applications on their own sites, through a careers form (one asks applicants what pay they want), a careers email address, a resume upload or a downloadable employment application. We didn't see a careers page on two others, and one links to a careers page we didn't check.
We loaded each of the three outside portals in a browser and watched which Google tags fired. On the Paycom and ClearCompany portals, no Google tag loaded at all. The Paylocity portal loaded Google Tag Manager containers, but not the builder's own container, which loads on its main site.
So for those builders, the tag can see an applicant reach the careers page and click Apply, once it's set to count that click. It can't see whether they finished. That's fixable, in two steps:
- Count the click to Apply. Set the builder's tag to record a conversion when a visitor clicks the Apply button that leaves for the portal. It overcounts, since some people who click won't finish, but it's a real signal of interest from a job seeker, and it's the one the builder's own tag can see.
- Replace it with finished applications if the portal can report them. Ask the hiring system's support team whether it can add a tracking tag, or save the Google click ID from the link and export completed applications with it. If it can, import those and retire the Apply click as the main conversion.
Either way, the hiring conversion has to stay out of the project campaigns. Google Ads lets a campaign use its own conversion goal instead of the account's default. Google's help page says that "in general, it's best to use your account-default goals across all your campaigns," because campaigns learn from one another. Hiring is the exception: an application is a different outcome from a project inquiry, and the project campaigns from Chapter 6 shouldn't learn from it. Give the hiring campaign its own goal, and leave the account default on project inquiries.
Google's Job-Ad Rules Allow a Radius Around a Jobsite, Not a List of ZIP Codes
In the US and Canada, Google holds job ads to tighter targeting rules than a builder's project ads. Google's employment policy page lists what's off limits for a builder's job ads: ZIP codes, plus four demographic settings (gender, age, parental status and marital status). It names radius, city and country targeting as allowed, with a radius of at least 1 km (about 0.6 miles) around a location.
For most employers, that's a limit. For a builder, the radius rule fits the work. Crews don't report to an office; they report to the yard and to whichever jobsite is active this month. A hiring campaign for carpenters and laborers can use a radius around the yard plus a radius around each active project, sized to a reasonable commute. When a job finishes and a new one starts across town, move the radius with it.
Two practical notes:
- Don't reuse the project campaigns' location setup. Chapter 9 drew those around the counties a builder works in, plus a wider campaign for owners in other cities. A hiring campaign works better on a radius around where the crew will report.
- Check the demographics before launch. If the hiring campaign was copied from an older campaign with age or gender settings, set all demographics to "Enable" and remove any ZIP codes. That's the first fix Google's policy page lists for job ads that get flagged.
Twenty Searches a Month Can't Fill a Superintendent Job. Video Reaches People Who Aren't Looking.
About 20 searches a month for superintendent jobs in a whole metro means a Search campaign for that role would spend almost nothing and reach almost no one. Here's our reading of why. An experienced superintendent or project manager usually has a job. They aren't scrolling listings; they hear about openings from people they've worked with, from recruiters, or from a firm they already know by name.
That last one is where Google Ads can help. Some job seekers, likely including experienced people open to a move, search for a builder by name. Chapter 5 found "messer construction jobs" at about 40 searches a month and "messer careers" at about 20 in the example market, and told the brand campaign to block job and career searches. Those searches belong somewhere: put "[your name] careers" and "[your name] jobs" as exact match keywords in the hiring campaign, with an ad that leads with the roles you're hiring for and links to the careers page.
For people who've never searched for the firm, video can do what Search can't. Chapter 11 used Demand Gen to show owners a builder's work before they searched. The same approach works for recruiting, with a different message: a short video of a superintendent walking a finished project, talking about the work, the crews and why they stayed. Keep the targeting inside what Google's employment policy lists as supported. We keep a builder's recruiting video to what the employment policy names as supported: a radius or a city, plus Google's predefined audience segments, with age, gender, parental status and marital status left open. Measure it by the careers page visits and Apply clicks it brings, not by applications alone. A superintendent who watches a video in March may apply in June.
None of this replaces referrals or recruiters for senior hires. But a builder whose name is already familiar, from its jobsite signs, its finished projects and the videos a candidate has seen, gets a better hearing when a recruiter or a former colleague calls.
The budget follows the searches. Most of a hiring campaign's spend goes to the crew roles people actually search for. A small amount goes to the name searches, which are few. The video gets a separate, fixed monthly amount for the leadership roles, judged over months, not weeks.
If you'd like help setting up a hiring campaign that stays out of your project tracking, our Google Ads agency builds these for commercial builders.
Next: The Guide Home Lists All 16 Chapters in the Order a Builder Sets Them Up
Chapter 16 closes the guide. The Google Ads for Construction Companies guide home lists all 16 in order: tracking and keywords first, then exact match and bidding, ads and settings, then Performance Max, Demand Gen, reviews and AI Max once project inquiries are steady, with public bids, claims and hiring as the three bonus chapters.
