Labor Challenges in U.S. Roofing: How to Recruit, Retain, and Optimize Your Workforce in 2025

Written by Hubspot Author | April 3, 2025

The U.S. Roofing industry is facing some tough challenges when it comes to finding and retaining good workers. According to Roofing Contractor’s State of the Industry Report 2025, contractors cite labor shortages as one of their top challenges, with 61% of commercial contractors and 38% of residential roofers reporting difficulties finding qualified workers.

Finding top talent isn’t easy. Traditional recruitment methods that rely on referrals, job boards, and social media don’t always work well and can take up a lot of time and effort. And then there’s the job description. It’s not just about offering good pay. Roofing companies need to think about worker safety and creating a workplace where people feel valued if they want to keep their best employees around.

In this article, we’ll dive further into the labor challenges that US Roofing Contractors are facing, why these problems might be happening, and what you can do to address them with better recruitment and retention practices.

How to Improve Your Recruitment and Retention Practices

To tackle labor challenges and achieve sustainable growth, roofing contractors need more intentional strategies to attract and retain skilled roofing professionals. Here’s how they can adapt:

Stable work pipelines: By outsourcing administrative tasks like invoicing, CRM management, and production support, contractors can free up time to focus on creating a more stable and rewarding work environment. This allows them to prioritize employee recognition, career development, and consistent workflows—all of which are critical for retaining top talent.

Enhanced global recruitment: By leveraging more global recruitment strategies, including outsourcing key office support roles, contractors can attract skilled laborers who value structured CRM and customer engagement workflows and more robust back-office processes and procedures.

Competitive compensation and benefits: Offering competitive wages, and comprehensive benefits—such as healthcare, retirement plans, and paid time off—can make roofing companies more attractive to skilled professionals and boost long-term retention.

For more insights on remote recruitment strategies, download our Roofing Hiring Guide to learn how to design effective training, and retain top talent.

Outsourcing to Reduce Admin Burden

Administrative tasks can feel like a constant weight for roofing contractors. By outsourcing these behind-the-scenes tasks, contractors can save time and money that could be spent on hiring skilled labor and expanding services.

Focus on core operations: By outsourcing tasks like CRM management, estimating, and production support, contractors can avoid burnout from administrative work. Small businesses spend 120 days/year on such tasks, costing $50,000+ annually. This reclaimed time can then be used to focus on your strategic initiatives such as:

✓Strengthening relationships with customers
✓Market expansion
✓Investing in training to improve employee skills
✓Finding new opportunities to grow your business

Scalability: Remote teams enable contractors to both handle backlogs, and support expansion plans, without overextending local crews. Several companies who have worked with DCX have experienced this firsthand and reported doubling revenue capacity by delegating non-core functions.

How DCX Addresses Labor Challenges

At DCX, we’ve helped over 540 growing US businesses overcome their labor and hiring challenges and scale their teams more efficiently as a result. For roofing contractors in particular, we’ve supported them with outsourced administrative and support roles, freeing up their local teams to focus on more high-value tasks like field operations and customer relationships. Companies such as APEX Roofing have benefitted from our global approach to growing their teams with:

Affordable talent: DCX provides full-time, remote team members starting at just $1,995/month—77% cheaper than hiring locally. This low monthly fee means that contractors can allocate budgets to hire multiple remote professionals (e.g., sales assistants, estimators, CSRs) for the cost of one U.S. employee.

Global expertise: We recruit highly qualified candidates with degrees and 2–10 years of experience, available on U.S. hours. It’s an approach that Apex Roofing have really taken advantage of, having leveraged DCX’s remote teams to streamline sales and accounting, and free up their local staff to focus on growth.

End-to-end support: Beyond hiring, we ensure long-term success through structured onboarding, industry-specific training, and ongoing retention strategies. Our US teams collaborate closely with our partners and clients to align workflows, address challenges proactively, and promote trust.

Labor shortages and rising costs threaten roofing contractors’ margins, and administrative burdens—like invoicing and CRM management— can often divert resources from core growth. But proactive recruitment strategies, paired with smart outsourcing, can stabilize operations, putting in place more robust foundations for scalable team and company growth.

DCX offers a proven solution: outsourcing key support roles to cost-effective, highly skilled remote teams. For businesses like Apex Roofing, this model has shown to transform labor challenges into growth opportunities by freeing up bandwidth for customer service, project scaling, and workforce development.

Explore how DCX can help your roofing business thrive in a competitive market, book a meeting with our US team today!

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