Gary A. Cohen, Executive Vice President, Certified Contractors Network (CCN) - September 2026
Hiring is one of the most consequential decisions a roofing contractor makes and one of the most costly to get wrong. Industry estimates consistently put the total cost of a bad hire at one to three times that person’s annual salary when you factor in recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity and team disruption. For a manager-level position, that number can easily reach six figures.
The people who fail in management roles rarely fail because they lack technical knowledge. They fail because they were never a good fit for the environment, the culture or the demands of the role. The best roofing companies have figured out that hiring well is a science, not a gut feeling. And it starts long before the first resume crosses your desk.
Before you can hire the right person, you have to know what “right” looks like inside your specific company. Your mission statement and core values cannot just be words on a wall. They have to be a genuine filter.
If your culture is built on integrity and accountability, you need people who are naturally wired that way. If it is collaborative and team-first, a lone wolf with great individual results may quietly damage the environment you have worked hard to build. Get honest about what your organization actually values in practice, not just in theory, and use those values as your hiring North Star. Every candidate should be measured against them.
Every person has a natural behavioral style that shapes how they communicate, make decisions, handle conflict and respond to pressure. A production manager who needs to solve problems fast on jobsites, communicate constantly with crews and adjust on the fly is a completely different behavioral fit than an estimator
who needs to be precise, patient and methodical. Putting the wrong style in either seat creates friction, frustration and eventual failure.
Behavioral assessments rooted in validated frameworks like DISC give you an objective window into how a candidate naturally operates. The goal is not to reject people who differ from your expectations. It is to understand who you are hiring before they are sitting in your morning meeting.
A candidate can have the right behavioral style and still be a poor long-term fit if the role does not satisfy what motivates them at a deeper level. Some people are driven by money. Others are motivated by achievement, recognition, influence, helping others or the opportunity to build something meaningful. When motivational drivers are fed, people give everything. When they are starved, people disengage and eventually leave.
For a manager-level hire, you want someone whose motivational profile aligns with what the role actually delivers. Mismatches in motivation are one of the top reasons high-potential candidates underperform or exit within their first year.
Technical skills will get a person hired. Emotional intelligence (EQ) is what determines whether they succeed as a leader. EQ is the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions while reading and responding effectively to the emotions of others. A manager with low EQ will struggle under pressure, lash out during conflict, fail to connect with their crew and create an environment that drives turnover.
The most critical dimension of EQ is self-awareness. A self-aware manager knows how they come across, understands their triggers and can regulate their behavior in difficult moments. They hold tough conversations without making them personal and stay steady when things go sideways on a jobsite. EQ can
be measured accurately with validated tools, giving you information that no interview question can reliably surface.
The roofing business does not wait for anyone. Problems happen fast and managers need to think clearly and decide quickly, often with incomplete information. Critical thinking assessments measure how a person processes information, evaluates competing priorities and reaches conclusions under pressure. They reveal whether a candidate identifies root causes or just treats symptoms. A candidate who interviews brilliantly but struggles with a critical thinking assessment is telling you something important. Do not skip this piece.
Assessments are most powerful at the finalist stage. By then, you have already confirmed experience and credentials. The question now is a different one: which of these people is actually going to thrive here?
That is exactly the problem HirePro AI from CCN was built to solve. It brings together behavioral style analysis, motivational driver profiles, emotional intelligence assessment and critical thinking measurement into one integrated platform designed specifically for the contractor market. Rather than sending candidates to multiple separate tools and trying to piece the results together yourself, HirePro AI delivers a comprehensive picture of each finalist in a single, structured report.
The reports are readable and actionable, not buried in psychological jargon. You can sit down with your leadership team, compare finalists side by side and have a data-informed conversation about who is the best fit for the role, the team and the culture you have built. That conversation, grounded in real assessment data rather than impressions and instincts, is what leads to better decisions.
A manager-level bad hire in a roofing company does not just cost money. It costs morale. It costs your best crew members, who have options and will not stay in a broken environment. It costs customer relationships when jobsite leadership breaks down. And it costs time, your most irreplaceable resource, as you manage the fallout, restart the search and repair the damage.
Assessment tools exist to make warning signs visible before the hire, not after. The investment in that level of diligence on your finalists is a fraction of what a bad hire will cost you. It is not an expense. It is insurance.
The most successful roofing contractors share a common trait: they are intentional about who they bring into their organization. They have defined what their company stands for and use that definition as a filter at every stage of the hiring process. They do not rely on gut instinct alone. They use validated tools
to understand the whole person before making a
commitment.
The next time you have a manager-level seat to fill, resist the temptation to move fast just because someone looks good in the interview. Take the extra step with your finalists. Run the assessments. Read the data. Have the conversation. The right hire is worth finding and now you have the tools to find them.
Gary Cohen is Executive Vice President of Certified Contractors Network (CCN), a membership organization dedicated to helping independent home improvement contractors build more profitable, professionally run businesses. CCN provides training, coaching and business development resources to contractors across North America. To learn more, visit www.contractors.net