Data centre projects get announced with a megawatt figure and a site. What decides whether they open on time is less glamorous: whether the power arrives, whether the permits clear, and whether you can find the people to build and run the place.
If you are an owner, plant manager or operations leader anywhere near this work, whether you build facilities, supply them, or run a business that is about to host AI workloads, the hiring side deserves the same planning as the capital side.
Power sets the timeline, and the timeline sets your hiring
Site selection now starts with grid capacity. A site with cheap land and no committed power is a liability. Projects tend to cluster where electricity is available, which means labour demand lands in a handful of regions at once: northern Virginia, Texas, the Midwest, Quebec, Alberta, and the Greater Toronto Area among them.
When several large projects hit one region, they compete for the same electricians, controls technicians and project managers. Wage pressure follows. If your project plan assumes you can hire locally at last year's rates, test that assumption early.
Four phases, four different labour needs
Most employers plan for the build and forget the rest. The work changes shape across the life of a facility.
- Pre-construction: project managers, estimators, permitting and compliance specialists, utility coordinators.
- Construction: journeyman electricians, mechanical and refrigeration trades, commissioning technicians, site safety leads, schedulers.
- Commissioning and turn-up: controls and BMS specialists, network engineers, testing and quality staff.
- Operations: facility technicians, critical-environment engineers, security, procurement, finance and contract administration.
Each phase needs a different hiring approach. Construction is largely contract and project based. Operations is permanent and hard to backfill. Treat them separately.
The roles that run short first
In our experience filling skilled and technical roles, the tight spots are predictable:
- Electrical trades and high-voltage specialists. Apprenticeship pipelines are slow, and the same people are wanted for utilities, manufacturing and housing.
- Commissioning and controls staff. Few people have done it at scale, and projects cannot close without them.
- Critical facilities engineers. Uptime expectations make employers cautious, so they want proven experience.
- Data and AI infrastructure staff. Employers adding AI capacity need people who can manage the compute, the data pipelines and the cost, not only the hardware.
Credentials matter. Confirm licensing, provincial or state recognition, and safety certification before an offer, not after. In Canada, interprovincial trade recognition can add weeks if you hire across borders.
Use contract labour where the work is finite
A build has a start and an end. Hiring permanent staff for peak construction demand leaves you with a cost problem once the project ends. Contract and contract-to-hire arrangements fit better for:
- commissioning and turn-up crews
- project coordination and document control
- temporary finance and procurement support during the build
- short-term technical roles tied to a vendor delivery
Keep permanent hiring for the people who will run the facility for years. A good contract worker who fits your site can be converted, and you will have seen the work first.
Do not forget the office
Projects of this size create heavy back-office load. Someone has to reconcile milestone billing, manage vendor contracts, track capital spend and handle utility agreements. Controllers and finance leads in mid-sized firms often find the project arrives before the accounting capacity does. Plan for an analyst or project accountant early.
Sales teams feel it too. If you sell into this market, buyers want people who understand power, cooling and lead times, not generalists reading a catalogue.
A practical sequence
- Map the phases and the headcount for each, with dates.
- Identify the 5 to 10 roles that would stall the project if empty.
- Check local wage levels against your budget, and expect to adjust.
- Decide which roles are contract and which are permanent.
- Start sourcing the scarce roles months before they are needed, not weeks.
- Plan retention for the operations team before the build crew leaves.
We have seen the same pattern with a food manufacturer in the GTA that needed over 20 hires in 18 months across production, skilled trades and office roles. The lesson carried over: the employers who staged hiring against the plant schedule, and did not react to it, kept their start dates.
What to do next
Take your project schedule and mark the first date each scarce role must be on site. Work backward by the time it realistically takes to find, clear and onboard that person. Wherever that date has already passed, you have your first hiring priority.
A Traverse recruiter can help you scope the roles, split contract from permanent, and start sourcing the hard-to-fill ones.