Your Contractors Represent Your Brand. Are You Treating Them That Way?

Most business owners have spent real time thinking about how their employees represent the brand. How they answer the phone. How they show up on a job site. How they treat a customer when no one is watching. That relationship is understood. It gets managed.

The contractors are a different story.

In construction, oil and gas, and healthcare, contractors aren’t an afterthought — they’re a structural part of how work gets done. They’re contractors: specialty subcontractors, traveling clinicians, pipeline crews, per diem workers hired for a specific scope and released when the work is done.

In oil and gas, specialist contractor establishments now employ over two-thirds of the entire U.S. extraction workforce, according to a BLS analysis. In healthcare, hospital contract labor expenses surged 258% between 2019 and 2022 as chronic staffing shortages forced facilities to rely on traveling nurses, locum physicians and credentialed vendors. In construction, 92% of firms say they can’t find enough qualified workers, making the contractor pool not a supplement to the workforce but the workforce itself.

Before any of these people can begin work, they have to clear a compliance process — drug and alcohol testing, criminal background checks, safety certifications, medical clearances, insurance verification, site-specific orientations.

The requirements are real, federally mandated in many cases, and entirely legitimate. A pipeline welder should be drug-tested. A surgical vendor rep should be vaccinated. Nobody disputes the rules. The problem is what happens when the process for meeting those rules is disorganized, slow and built for the organization’s convenience rather than the contractor’s.

What the data shows

TEAM, a nationally accredited provider of drug and alcohol testing, background checks and compliance monitoring, surveyed 600 U.S.-based contractors across these three industries about their clearance-to-work experience. Ninety-four percent say delays are caused by process failures, not by the requirements themselves — waiting on results, waiting on approvals, discovering new requirements mid-stream after they’d already done everything they were asked.

The brand consequences are direct. Nearly four in ten contractors (39%) say a frustrating site-access experience caused them to avoid that company or operator for future work. Not a complaint. Not a negotiation. A quiet, permanent decision to go elsewhere. On the flip side, 79% say they’d be more likely to accept future work with a company that made the process easier. That is your outside workforce making job-acceptance decisions based on how your back-office process treats them.

Every single respondent reported at least one out-of-pocket cost from the process: travel, lost wages, fees for appointments they had to repeat.

And here’s the detail that stings most: 83% said requirements were clearly communicated upfront, yet 83% also said they encountered additional requirements mid-process, with nearly half saying it happens often or very often. You told someone what to expect, then changed it on them, after they’d already committed their time and money. That’s not a paperwork problem. That’s a trust problem.

The only touchpoint they get

Here’s what makes this data especially pointed. Research from Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Review has documented what they call the “management gap” between contractors and employees: Contractors are routinely excluded from workforce planning, culture-building, and any of the normal mechanisms companies use to create engagement and loyalty.

Deloitte found that only 16% of companies have established policies for managing their contingent workforce — and notes that most employers treat alternative workers as unskilled labor rather than professionals. Much of this is deliberate: Companies keep contractors at arm’s length to avoid worker misclassification liability. The legal incentive structure pushes toward distance.

This means the compliance process — the credentialing portal, the drug test, the clearance queue — is often the only formal, designed experience a contractor ever has with your organization. No onboarding that conveys culture. No manager relationship that builds goodwill. Just the process. If it’s broken, there is nothing else to compensate for it.

Those 39% who walked away didn’t have a bad overall experience with your company. They had one bad experience — the only one they were ever designed to have — and it was enough.

What to do about it

Tim Jenney, president of TEAM, puts the standard simply: “You can have strong compliance standards and still run a process that respects people’s time.” That’s the whole argument. Map the contractor experience from first contact to cleared-to-start. Measure how long it actually takes. Find where handoffs go dark and requirements appear without warning.

Assign ownership — because in most companies, nobody owns the contractor experience end to end, which is exactly why it stays broken. Front-load every requirement before someone starts. Give people visibility into where they stand.

Thirty-nine percent of your contractors are quietly walking away after a bad process experience. It almost certainly isn’t showing up in any report you’re reading, because nobody is measuring it. The question isn’t whether your contractors represent your brand. They already do. The question is whether the way you treat them reflects that.