Bridging Office and Field with HR Leadership at a South Florida Construction Group

Privately held construction group in Delray Beach, Florida, with nearly $150 million in annual revenue and three entities: a core South Florida construction business, a drywall company, and an office in central and northern Florida. The four principals were not executive overseers. Instead they were hands-on, working on site with project teams and running the business through relationships, delivery, and direct accountability.

The business had about 100 employees, a largely Spanish-speaking field workforce, and no corporate infrastructure between the leadership and the work.

Human resources in a construction business is not a back-office function. The company runs payroll over 3 legal entities. In a project-based environment, friction in people operations shows up fast on site. Field employees need onboarding, timekeeping, and compliance managed accurately and quickly. The HR Manager would do it all themselves: benefits and 401K administration, full-cycle recruiting, employee relations, handbook compliance, and the day-to-day nitty-gritty of keeping a multi-entity workforce running smoothly.

Most of all, the role needed range. The principals ran things in a straightforward, informal way. They had no taste for the complexity of processes that would slow them down. The workforce on site was Spanish speaking. The right person needed to be able to go easily from a conversation with a principal about a compliance issue to a conversation on a job site in the field employee’s first language. The search was built around that combination of operational depth and real bilingual credibility in a construction environment.

Keller Executive Search targeted HR professionals with practical generalist experience in construction, trades, or field-heavy industries. They looked for people who had owned the whole HR function themselves, and who understood the culture of a business where the leaders are never far from the work. Bilingual capability was also considered a core competency.

We recruited a bilingual HR professional with a history of leading end-to-end HR operations in both operational and corporate workplaces. The newly placed Human Resources Manager had built HR foundations from the ground up at prior employers with direct ownership of payroll coordination, compliance, policy documentation, full-cycle recruiting, and bilingual employee relations across diverse workforces.