The builders in these episodes who actually scaled — across envelope contracting, general contracting, design, and vertical development — keep landing on the same counter-intuitive rule: the trade is teachable, character is not. So they recruit where character already lives. Veterans. Retirees. People from other industries. Immigrants. Indigenous community members. The screen that matters is no longer the credential on the résumé. It's the values check that happens before the trade is ever taught. Here is how they run it, and how a smaller shop can copy the move.
Why did the old hiring playbook stop working?
Start with the thing every operator in Atlantic Canada already feels: the job ad is dead. Elliot MacNeil of Bruno Builders puts it without hedging: "people don't really respond to job ads anymore, and so you have to find other ways of attracting these unicorns now" (Elliot MacNeil, EP 50). That is not a marketing complaint. It is the symptom of a structural shortage that no posting can fix.
The numbers behind it are not subtle. BuildForce Canada projects that nearly 270,000 experienced construction workers — roughly a fifth of the 2024 national labour force — will retire over the next decade, with total hiring requirements reaching about 380,500 by 2034 and a possible shortfall of 108,300 even after recruiting the under-30 cohort. In Atlantic Canada specifically, BuildForce estimates 23 percent of the regional workforce will retire over the same window. Meanwhile the Job Bank's 2024 sectoral profile shows employment growth projected across all three Maritime provinces through 2027, driven by projects like the Halifax Infirmary Expansion, with Q1 2025 vacancy rates as low as 1.8 percent in P.E.I.
So the pool is shrinking on one end and the demand is growing on the other. The traditional apprenticeship funnel — post a job, hope a young person with a high-school shop class walks in — was built for a labour market that no longer exists. The operators who figured this out early stopped fishing in the same shrinking pond. They went and found new ponds. And to fish those ponds, they needed a different hook: not do you have the ticket? but "do you have the character we can build a tradesperson around?"
What does hire for character actually mean on a job site?
It is easy to say hire for attitude. It is harder to define what you are actually screening for at 7 a.m. with a hard hat in hand. The operators here are specific about it.
Amin Tran of Dura Seal runs the cleanest version of the test. For a technical role he will normally insist on, he flips the order of priority: "if the soft skills are there, if the attitude is there, if they can fill that side, then yeah, I'm not worried about the other stuff" (Amin Tran, EP 70). The technical other stuff is the part he is confident his crew can teach. The attitude is the part he cannot install after hire. Cory Bell of Lindsay Construction draws the same line even more sharply: "The physical experience of construction can be taught. It's all of those other intangible characteristics that will define who the highest performers are going to be" (Cory Bell, EP 30). Note what he is claiming — not that character is nice to have, but that it is the variable that separates the top performers from everyone else. The skill is the floor. The character is the ceiling.
For Arides Cabreira, leading a design-and-build shop, the screen collapses to a single non-negotiable threshold: "they have to have respect for the team. They have to be a team player. Nobody's better than anybody" (Arides Cabreira, EP 58). One disqualifier, applied to everyone, regardless of how good the portfolio is. And MacNeil systematizes it into four words his company hires and exits people on — be open, be better, be kind, be bold — under one operating principle: get the values right and "you can coach, you can develop, you can fill in the gap, because the key is the alignment around the people and your core values" (Elliot MacNeil, EP 50).
Read those four operators together and the convergence is the story. Rivals in overlapping markets, working different trades, all arriving independently at the same screen: values first, coach the skill second. There is even a body of evidence behind the instinct — a widely cited Leadership IQ study found that 46 percent of new hires fail within 18 months, and 89 percent of those failures trace to attitude, not skills. On a job site, where an attitude failure shows up as a safety shortcut or a subcontractor blow-up, that ratio is plausibly worse.
Which non-traditional pools are actually working?
Once the screen is character first, the candidate map widens dramatically. Here is where the Atlantic operators are actually finding people, and the institutional channel that feeds each pool.
| Pool | What they arrive with | The channel that feeds it |
|---|---|---|
| Veterans & retirees | Discipline, mentorship capacity, professional networks | NS Skills Bridge / Helmets to Hardhats |
| Indigenous community members | Community trust, long-horizon loyalty | NSAA Mi'kmaw/Indigenous committee, MEBO |
| Immigrants & internationally trained | Deep transferable skill, hunger to integrate | Atlantic Immigration Program |
| Career-changers from other industries | Communication, accountability, customer instinct | Apprenticeship registration (open to any adult) |
Tran is explicit about where he goes first: "I'm a big fan of going out there to look for people from other industries, and also veterans or recently retired folks" (Amin Tran, EP 70). The logic is that a retired tradesperson or a veteran arrives with the one thing a 19-year-old apprentice cannot have yet — a network and the capacity to mentor the people you hire after them. That pool now has a structurally embedded character filter behind it. Nova Scotia launched Skills Bridge in January 2026, a $480,000, three-year program run by Helmets to Hardhats that either trains veterans in a classroom or refers them straight to employers — building on a national track record of more than 2,600 military-community members placed into the building trades since 2012. The candidate has already been screened for discipline before you meet them.
The Indigenous channel is where Bell and Lindsay Construction have invested the most deliberately. Lindsay was, in Bell's telling, "the first Atlantic Canadian contractor to hire an Indigenous relationship coordinator — to learn more, just to teach us" (Cory Bell, EP 30) — note the humility in just to teach us, hiring a guide before hiring the talent. And the goal is not extraction; it is generative: "Our goal is always to bring people on, help train and mentor, and then have them either stay with us and continue to work on anything that we do, or even better, go back into their community and start a small business" (Cory Bell, EP 30). That is character-first hiring taken to its logical end — you are not just filling a slot, you are seeding a future subcontractor. The community-trust work is done by intermediaries like the Mi'kmaw Economic Benefits Office, which trained over 700 people in one 2013–2016 initiative alone, so a contractor plugs into a referral stream that has already vetted for fit.
Then there is the immigrant and career-changer pool, where Cabreira's experience is blunt. Hiring for a design role, he recalls: "I think I got like about 20 resumes — nobody in Canada" — everybody who answered was outside the country (Arides Cabreira, EP 58). Twenty candidates, zero local. For a shop that refuses to look beyond the local pool, that is the whole ballgame — they are choosing from an empty table. The structural backbone exists here too: the Atlantic Immigration Program requires designated employers to complete onboarding and intercultural-competency training before their first endorsement, which doubles as the firm's own character-calibration exercise.
What does it cost to get the screen wrong?
The argument for spending more time on the values screen is not sentimental. It is a cost-avoidance calculation, and MacNeil tells the story that makes it concrete. A peer of his, under pressure and short on time, believed a slick pitch and hired a project manager who looked perfect on paper. The result, in MacNeil's words: "he ran three jobs into the ground within a year, and that is detrimental to everyone" (Elliot MacNeil, EP 50). One values-misaligned hire, three jobs, twelve months.
Put a number on that. SHRM's recruitment-cost model puts a bad mid-level or managerial hire at 100 to 150 percent of annual salary once you count lost productivity, onboarding, and management drain. For a site superintendent earning $120,000 to $150,000 in Atlantic Canada, that is a $120,000-to-$225,000 mistake — before the schedule slips. And the slip is its own line item: construction rework averages 5 to 8 percent of total project cost, which on a $5M build is $250,000 to $400,000 of exposure. A single misaligned senior hire who generates even a fraction of that rework pays for a much longer, much more careful search.
The corrective Bell describes is a culture that surfaces problems early instead of burying them. His company manufactures disagreement on purpose — the opposite of the polite-and-quiet site. The brand-protection logic follows directly: the discipline to decline work you are not staffed to deliver well is the same discipline as declining a candidate who does not fit. As MacNeil frames the constraint, the senior field people are the bottleneck — the site supers are pretty key, and they're the rate limiter to growth (Elliot MacNeil, EP 50). If the supers are the rate limiter, hiring the wrong one does not just cost one salary. It caps how fast and how safely the whole company can grow.
How do you actually teach the trade once you've hired the person?
Hiring for character only works if the second half — teaching the trade — is real and not a slogan. The operators treat onboarding as deliberately as recruiting, and the first move is almost always credibility on the tools.
Tran puts new technical hires on the tools before they ever run a desk, and he is precise about why: "I need you to forge these relationships with the guys on site — the foremen, the superintendents, the trades" (Amin Tran, EP 70). The point is not to make a project manager into a glazier. It is that a manager who has handed materials up a scaffold has earned the standing to give direction later. Bell's version of trade transfer is the apprenticeship of presence — his most-repeated piece of advice is to "show up to the site with a cup of coffee — it's amazing what you learn by handing someone a cup" (Cory Bell, EP 30). Field time with veteran superintendents, he argues, is the fastest leadership accelerant a young hire can get, and it costs nothing but the coffee.
A word of caution that the operators' optimism should not paper over: not every trade is teachable on day one. Construction Electrician is a compulsory certified trade in Nova Scotia — you cannot hire for attitude and let someone work unsupervised on high-voltage without the ticket. And Working at Heights certification is a legal minimum before a worker stands on an elevated site exposed to a fall of three metres or more. The right reading of hire for character is therefore narrower and more honest: you hire for character at the apprentice-selection gate, then carry that person through a supported 2-to-5-year apprenticeship — where, given that the Red Seal first-attempt pass rate sits at 47 percent, the technical development has to be taken as seriously as the values screen.
The economics of carrying that learner are also better than a small shop fears. The federal Apprenticeship Service pays employers with under 500 staff $5,000 per first-year apprentice — $10,000 if the apprentice comes from an equity-deserving group, which most of these non-traditional pools qualify under. A three-person framing shop hiring one veteran or newcomer apprentice can recover $10,000 of the slower-productivity cost. The grant is, in effect, a subsidy for hiring character and teaching the trade.
How does hiring connect to keeping people?
The flip side of recruiting for character is that character-first hires stay — if you give them somewhere to go. Bell ties the company's entire growth strategy to retention pressure from below: "our growth is a product of our young, smart, energetic staff pushing us, and us saying, well, we're not leaving and we're not losing them. So what do we need to do?" (Cory Bell, EP 30). Growth, in that frame, is not an ambition. It is the obligation you take on when you hire people too good to stand still.
Tran reaches the same conclusion through a different door — the danger of building around one irreplaceable expert. His rule: "it's better to build a team around different people's strengths around the table than it is on one person" (Amin Tran, EP 70). And for that to work, the founder has to do the hardest thing: let go. "if you don't let go of that, you're not going to allow people to grow, you're not going to develop anybody" (Amin Tran, EP 70). Retention is not a perk program. It is the daily decision to hand real responsibility to the people whose character you bet on at hire — and MacNeil's coaching-and-development model is exactly that bet, paid forward.
The structural takeaway
The labour shortage in Atlantic construction is not going to be solved by competing on wages alone — the pool is too small and retiring too fast for a bidding war to fix. A May 2026 ConstructConnect analysis reached the same verdict at national scale: even $6 billion in federal training money will not close the gap, because credential pipelines without character and retention upstream are a leaky bucket. The operators in these episodes are running the only play the math allows. They have stopped treating the credential as the gate and started treating it as the thing they build, once they have found the accountability, the communication, and the team respect that no school issues. Hire the character. Teach the trade. Trust that the ticket follows — and build the culture, the pipeline, and the onboarding that make that trust pay off. This is part of the Workforce & People hub; for the demand side of the same problem, see the Atlantic construction labour shortage guide, and for keeping crews productive year-round, how to cross-train crews for winter.