HR and Recruiting
Onboarding and Contractor Paperwork for roofing companies
Everybody answers a paperwork request in the week they start. Almost nobody answers the same request a month after their first cheque cleared.
A set that is finished, not nearly finished
A checklist built from what this particular engagement needs, rather than from whatever the last one happened to involve. A collected set, gathered while the engagement is new. And a short standing list of anything still outstanding, naming the item and the person it is owed by.
The last of the three does the work that the first two cannot. A file that is nearly complete looks identical to a complete one from the outside, and the difference only becomes visible when somebody goes looking for the missing item under pressure. Keeping the gap named and in view is what stops nearly-complete from quietly becoming permanent.
The window closes when the money moves
There is a short period at the start of any engagement when asking somebody for a document is easy. They are expecting to be asked, the request is obviously part of starting, and there is an immediate reason to deal with it. A crew member joining before a busy stretch, or a subcontractor about to take a first job, will return what is needed within a day.
After the first payment, that reason is gone. The request now competes with everything else in that person’s week and carries nothing behind it. This is not about anybody behaving badly — it is a plain description of what changes. The paperwork was a condition of starting and it becomes a favour, and favours are answered at the speed favours get answered.
Which puts this desk in an unusual position within the department. Almost everything else here can be caught up later at some cost in effort. This cannot really be caught up at all: it can only be redone worse, from whoever still bothers to reply. So the discipline is entirely at the front — knowing what the set is before the engagement starts, and asking while asking still works. Companies that get this right are not more diligent than the ones that do not. They are earlier.
What makes a set hold up
A checklist drawn from the kind of engagement rather than from habit. What a company needs from somebody joining a crew and what it needs from a trade it is subcontracting to are different sets, and running one list for both guarantees that one of the two is wrong, and it stays wrong until the day somebody goes looking.
Requests made as part of starting, not as an administrative afterthought that arrives a fortnight later. The timing is the mechanism, and it is the only part of this that cannot be improved by working harder afterwards.
A named gap rather than a general sense that something is outstanding. “We are still waiting on two things from one person” is actionable; “the files need a tidy-up” has been true in most contracting companies for years and has never once caused anybody to do anything.
And a boundary this desk holds without exception: we collect, chase and file, and we do not make any of the calls the documents exist to record. Whether somebody is properly an employee or a contractor, and any statement the company itself has to make about a person joining, are not ours and could not be made valid by our making them. Those sit on the department page, drawn against the specific federal instruments that define them.
The last desk before the work starts
Onboarding and contractor paperwork is one desk inside HR and Recruiting, and the three things that cannot be delegated at all are set out there rather than repeated here. This page covers only the collection. Keeping a subcontractor’s certificates current once the engagement is running is a different desk again, in a different department.
What owners ask when somebody starts Monday
Do you complete the forms for us?
We prepare, request, chase and file. What we do not do is complete or sign anything that is somebody else’s statement to make — a form that carries a declaration by the company or by the person joining has to be completed by them for it to be worth anything. The department page sets out exactly where that line falls and what it is drawn against, because it is the boundary this desk sits closest to.
Why does it matter whether the file is finished this week or next month?
Because willingness falls off a cliff once somebody has been paid. Before the first payment there is a natural reason to return a document and a natural moment to ask for it. Afterwards the request competes with everything else in that person’s week, and the person chasing has nothing left to attach it to. The same email sent at two different times has two completely different response rates.
Does this cover subcontractors as well as people joining the payroll?
Both, and they were deliberately brought onto one page. The document sets differ and the window does not: in each case the moment to collect is before money has moved. Treating them as two separate exercises is what produces a company with a tidy employee file and a subcontractor whose paperwork nobody can locate.
What happens to a set that is still incomplete?
It stays visible as a short list of what is missing and who it is missing from, in front of somebody who can do something about it. The failure mode we see most is not a company that refused to collect something — it is a company that collected most of it, filed what arrived, and lost track of the gap. An outstanding item that nobody is looking at is indistinguishable from a complete file until the day it matters.
Do you decide whether somebody is an employee or a contractor?
No, and that is not a modesty statement. It is a determination with tax and wage consequences that sits with you and your advisers, and there is a federal process for getting a formal answer to it — the department page covers that. Our obligation is narrower and more practical: whichever answer you hold, the paperwork consistently matches it. In our experience that is what fails, far more often than the determination itself.
Where does the paperwork actually live afterwards?
In your systems, organised so the next person who needs it can find it without asking. A document that exists but cannot be located is functionally a document you do not have, and the discovery usually happens at the worst possible moment. Filing is not the boring end of this job — it is most of the value of having done it at all.
Every document here belongs to another desk
Some pages here close with the law they argue from; this one cannot, and the absence is itself the disclosure. A page that quietly skipped the section would read exactly like one that had nothing to declare. Every document this desk collects is governed by somebody, and none of those obligations is this desk's. The employment eligibility attestation belongs to the employer and is argued on the department page. Whether a worker is an employee or a contractor is a determination with its own federal process, also on the department page. The subcontractor tax form is the accounts-payable desk's axis, because the consequence of not holding one lands on a payment. What is left here is the collection — a complete set, from the right person, before it is needed — and nothing published governs completeness as distinct from the duties underneath it.
What it is held to instead: A set that is complete before the first payment, held where the person who needs it can find it, and a list of what is still outstanding that somebody actually reads.
Where the regulated part of this subject lives: the hr-recruiting department page for the eligibility attestation and the worker-status determination; finance-bookkeeping/accounts-payable for the subcontractor tax form; compliance-documentation/coi-and-certificate-tracking for what happens to a subcontractor's certificate after engagement.
Pick the last person who started and find their file
If anything is missing from it, the moment to have collected that was the week they began, and it has already passed.