Melissa Heidmiller runs talent marketing at Procore Technologies — one of the largest construction software companies in the world. The lesson she keeps landing on applies to every firm, from a five-person Atlantic Canada subcontractor to a 10,000-person public company: the time to build your employer brand is before you need it.
When a construction firm posts a job and gets nothing back, the usual diagnosis is the labour market. There are not enough workers. Trades are aging out. Young people do not want the industry. Those things may all be true — but Melissa Heidmiller has a different question: what does a candidate find when they go looking for you?
Heidmiller is Senior Talent Marketing Manager at Procore Technologies, the NYSE-listed cloud construction management platform that connects owners, general contractors, and specialty contractors across the full project lifecycle. She joined from a background in career coaching and social media consulting — a path that ran through Wilfrid Laurier University, a stint with a childhood friend's agency, a COVID pivot, and a landing at Procore's talent brand team. Her job is not to post job ads. It is to make sure the right people already know what Procore stands for before a role ever opens.
In an hour with host Daniel Arsenault, she unpacks the mechanics of that work — and how the same thinking applies to a framing company in Fredericton, not just a tech company in California.
Start with your best people, not a job description
The most common hiring mistake Heidmiller sees is writing a posting before knowing who you are actually trying to hire. At Procore, the process runs the other direction. First, identify who your top performers are. Then study what they have in common. Then build content and channels aimed at people who look like them.
"we look at who are our top performers... we create essentially that Persona so then we're creating content that is going to be appealing to those people"
For a small construction firm, the translation is direct: think about the two or three people who have been with you for years, who do the work right, and who fit the culture of the job site. What did they value when they joined? Where were they before? That is your persona. A job post aimed at that person will pull better than one aimed at everyone.
The corollary is that recruitment marketing is not just advertising — it is filtering. Content that speaks specifically to a defined candidate will also send the mismatch candidates somewhere else. That is not a loss.
Values need to show up in the interview, not just the handbook
Procore's three core values are openness, optimism, and ownership. They were codified around 2015 and have been reviewed periodically since — a discipline Heidmiller describes as checking whether the values still hold: "reflecting backwards have we stuck to these in the past year do they make sense and then going forward do they need to shift it all." Values are not a founding document. They are a live operating spec.
The internal shorthand at Procore is blunt: no brilliant jerks. The theory is that if the values are genuinely embedded in how the company works day-to-day, a high-skill hire who does not share them will disengage from the friction on their own. "when the brilliant jerks do make their way in they honestly they don't last very long because those values are so prevalent in the way that we're working"
But values only filter if they are actually tested at the hiring stage. Heidmiller's advice for any firm — five people or five hundred — is to "ask questions built around that right find out how does whatever individual how have they behaved in the past when it comes to leading a project working with a team." Behavioural interview questions tied to the values you actually hold. Not culture-fit rhetoric. Not vibes. Specific, answerable questions about what the candidate did.
For a construction firm with no HR department, this is not complicated. Pick the two things you actually care about on a job site — say, cleaning up at the end of the day and calling ahead when something changes — and ask every candidate about a time they did or did not do exactly that.
The diversity gap is real, and it is a hiring pipeline problem
Canada's construction industry employs women at roughly 11 to 12 percent of the total workforce. On-site, the number drops to around five percent. Those figures come from industry data Heidmiller cites directly, and they have not moved fast.
"women in construction in Canada I think is like 11 or 12 or something like that and then actually women on the job site is like five percent"
For context: women represent about 32 percent of the tech workforce broadly. Procore, operating at the intersection of tech and construction, has reached 38 percent women. That gap does not close through job postings. It closes through what Heidmiller calls active outreach — showing up at schools, newcomer-community channels, apprenticeship fairs, and conversations with populations who have never been told the trades are an option for them.
The resource she points to for small firms looking to reach apprentice-age candidates in Canada is ApprenticeSearch.com, a free platform focused specifically on skilled trades placement. The broader principle is the same one that applies to persona-based recruiting: do not wait for the right candidates to find you. "don't be afraid to go volunteer and do something and talk to grade seven students right and tell them about what life is like"
The construction sector's persistent representation gap is a hiring problem with a sourcing solution. If the industry keeps recruiting from the same channels it has always used, it will keep getting the same pool.
Construction experience is a credential at Procore
For trades professionals and project managers who have spent years on job sites and are wondering whether a move into construction technology makes sense, Heidmiller is direct: that background is one of the most sought-after profiles Procore hires.
The reason is simple. A sales or customer success hire who has never been on a construction project faces a long learning curve before they can speak credibly to the product's value. Someone who has run a site already knows why the documentation matters, why scheduling coordination is painful, and what the field actually looks like. "we absolutely love people that are coming in with construction industry because then you know exactly who you're talking to and why the product is so valuable"
The roles that attract the most construction-professional applicants at Procore are the Solution Pre-sales Consultant and Solution Value Consultant positions — SPC and SVC. They get flooded with applicants because the background transfer is direct. But Heidmiller's advice is to think more broadly: sales, customer success, and in some cases engineering re-entry are all viable paths. The question she encourages candidates to ask is not just what they can do at Procore but what they can do with the platform and the network.
The most credible hiring asset you have costs nothing
The section of this conversation that applies most directly to a small Atlantic Canada contracting firm comes near the end. Host Daniel Arsenault poses the core SMB question: at what point does a five-person shop need to think about culture and employer brand?
Heidmiller's answer: always. Not when you post a job. Not when you get to fifty people. Always.
The reason is that the voice of your employees is what a candidate actually trusts. A polished careers page is background noise. An employee who will genuinely tell a friend this is a good place to work — that is the signal that moves people. "the voice of the employees is what wins so just like the voice of the customer is what wins"
For a small firm, this means two things. First, the culture you have right now — at five or eight or twelve people — is your employer brand, whether or not you have named it. Second, the single highest-value hiring action you can take is creating the conditions where the people already working for you will talk about it.
That does not require a careers page, a LinkedIn strategy, or a budget. It requires that the people working for you have a reason to tell the truth about the job in a way that reflects well on it.
Keep communicating when you are not hiring
Heidmiller's closing point is the most counterintuitive for smaller firms: the time to communicate your employer brand is when you do not have open roles.
When a hiring surge hits — a new contract, an expansion, a sudden retirement to backfill — the firms that have been consistently visible in the market will have a warm pipeline. The firms that went dark during the slow period will be starting from zero, competing in a hot market for candidates who have never heard of them.
"even when you're in a highly hiring lull it's even more important right now to be communicating out there that this is who we are"
For a construction firm, this might mean nothing more than occasional posts from job sites, a consistent presence at a regional trades event, or a relationship with a local college's co-op program maintained even in years without a placement. The point is continuity. Employer brand, like any brand, compounds over time — but only if you stay in the conversation.
The labour shortage in Atlantic Canada construction is structural, not temporary. The firms that build the habits now — persona-based sourcing, values-embedded interviews, continuous visibility, genuine employee advocacy — will have a material advantage when the next hiring surge hits.
Procore built those habits at scale. There is no reason a firm with five people cannot run the same principles with five people.
Guest: Melissa Macfarlane Heidmiller, Senior Talent Marketing Manager, Procore Technologies. Procore is a publicly traded (NYSE: PCOR) cloud construction-management platform connecting owners, general contractors, and specialty contractors across the full project lifecycle — preconstruction, project execution, financials, quality, safety, and resource management. Featured on Episode 57 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Also referenced: ApprenticeSearch.com — Canada's free skilled-trades job and apprenticeship matching platform. Receipt source for women-in-construction figures: ConstructConnect / DCN.