Timesheets
A twelve-week job can be staffed off a spreadsheet and a phone. A three-year build cannot. The labour requirement changes shape several times, attrition is guaranteed, and the market moves underneath you. We cover stage-based planning, splitting your core workforce from your flex, and why retention is the biggest lever on a long job.
A twelve-week job can be staffed off a spreadsheet and a phone. A three-year build cannot. The labour requirement changes shape several times over the life of the project, the market you are recruiting from changes underneath you, and the people you mobilised in year one may not be the people you need in year three.
We work on multi-year infrastructure and building projects across New Zealand, and the pattern is consistent. The workforce risk on long jobs is not finding people at the start. It is holding the right capability together across the whole programme.
Demand rises and falls with the stages. Earthworks and civil need operators and labourers. Structure needs a different trade mix again. Fit out and commissioning shift the balance towards specialist trades and smaller, more technical crews. Planning to an average headcount will leave you short at every peak and carrying cost at every trough.
Over three years, a portion of your workforce will leave regardless of how well the project is run. People move cities, change trades, retire, or take an offer elsewhere. On a long job, attrition is a planning input rather than a problem to be surprised by.
The labour market you recruited into at mobilisation will not be the market you face in year two. Other projects start and finish nearby, immigration settings change, and rates move. A plan that assumed the conditions of the tender period ages quickly.
The longer a project runs, the more project-specific knowledge accumulates in a small number of people. Losing one experienced supervisor two years in costs far more than losing them in week three.
Attach a labour requirement to each programme stage, broken down by trade, ticket and quantity. Stage-based planning surfaces the peaks and the transitions, which is where the recruitment work actually sits. Our article on workforce planning for major construction projects sets out a practical way to structure this.
Identify the roles that must be continuous for the life of the project: supervisors, leading hands, key operators and anyone holding critical project knowledge. Those are your core, and they justify permanent or long fixed-term engagement plus real retention effort. Everything else is flex, scaled to the stage.
This distinction does most of the work in a long-term plan. It tells you where to spend retention effort and where to buy flexibility.
The riskiest weeks on a long project are the handovers between stages, when one trade mix is demobilising and another is mobilising. Those weeks need explicit planning: notice periods, inductions, PPE, site access and supervision for the incoming crews, all scheduled rather than assumed.
Apply a realistic attrition assumption to each year and build the replacement recruitment into the plan. It is far cheaper to be recruiting steadily than to be reacting to a resignation in a peak week.
For every role where one person's departure would slow the job, name a second person who could step up and give them exposure before you need them. On a three-year project you have time to develop that depth, which is a luxury short jobs do not offer.
Where a project depends on skills that are thin domestically, immigration processing time makes early planning essential. Accreditation, job checks and visa timeframes are set externally and cannot be compressed to suit a programme. Our overseas hiring service is built around getting that work started well before the labour is needed on site.
On a short project, retention barely registers. On a multi-year build it is the single biggest determinant of your labour cost and your programme risk. The things that keep people on long projects are not complicated.
The supervision point in particular is worth auditing on any long job.
We recruit across construction and civil infrastructure and have supplied labour to multi-year projects for some of the country's larger contractors. On long jobs our role tends to broaden beyond supplying workers into holding the pipeline itself: maintaining screened and ticketed pools against the forward programme, managing replacement recruitment as attrition occurs, and carrying the employment, payroll and compliance administration for flex crews.
Our labour hire recruitment solutions can also be structured as managed teams where a scope is large enough to warrant its own supervision, which reduces the coordination load on your project team. Our guide to labour hire for civil infrastructure projects covers how these arrangements usually work.
Multi-year projects need a labour plan that moves with the programme rather than a headcount figure. Break the requirement down by stage, separate your continuous core from your flexible workforce, plan the transitions between stages explicitly, assume attrition and recruit against it, and build succession depth for the roles that would slow the job. Then put serious effort into retention, because over three years it is worth more than any other lever available to you.
If you have a programme coming up and would like help building the labour plan behind it, send us a recruitment enquiry and we will work through it with you.
Our mission is to deliver unparalleled service, tailored to your unique recruitment needs. Trust us to find the right people for the right results.
