Why Is It So Hard To Hire A Contractor?

It is quite overwhelming, the number of people who tell me in a given week that nobody will call them back. I will admit that I forget sometimes, but 99% of the time I will drop what I'm doing to take a call. I will listen to what they have to say and if I don't have the time or desire to perform said task, I simply tell them the truth. The vast majority of those saying they couldn't get a call back are polite with reasonable requests, at least from my POV (and I'm probably more judgemental that I should be), so it's doubtful that they were being ignored due to something they said in the voicemail. Sure I can move that spigot, but I have to charge it as a service call and it's going to be expensive despite being a "simple" job. If I have to spend 2 hours driving to and from your location and another hour swapping a circulator and purging your system, that's not a "simple job" anymore. Most people understand that, but I've learned to be upfront with everybody that calls for service and just say it's $$ for my first hour and $ per hour after that including windshield time round trip, plus parts. Some will have a conniption and call somebody else, but most just want it fixed. Once in awhile it even turns into a $$$$ job with a whole new system, though I'm not the "oh my gosh this is going to start a fire, you need a whole new system ASAP or we're going to have to red tag it" kind of person. We can throw parts at this and limp it along if you want, but I'll leave it entirely up to you. Very seldom do they want to limp it, and I think many of them trust my opinion more because I made the effort to take their call and get over there tomorrow to assess rather than have Harriett write up a proposal when she gets to it next month.

I had this thought the other day, I think it is a lot more people in project management roles and higher up management that either should know better or aer intentionally scamming trades that don't budget enough time or money or both for the work they need done in their project then expect the trades to fix it by either sacrificing their personal life or being paid fairly for their work. This makes people who are considering trades that would be good at it see this happening early on and run the other way to do something else where they get threated better. Until the industry fixes the way it treats trades they will not be recruiting new people which just makes the problem worse.