A permit is filed before the crew is hired
Construction and trades recruiters work a market that barely advertises. A roofing contractor with three crews does not post on a job board when a fourth job comes in. They call people they know, and the role is filled or left empty long before anyone outside hears about it.
What that contractor cannot avoid is the permit. Most building work needs one, it is filed before the work begins, and it is a public record. It tells you who is doing the work, what kind of work it is, where, and when. A firm pulling a run of permits has work starting that somebody has to staff.
Shovels collects those US permit records and ties them to the contractors behind them. This play reads that data for one area and one set of trades, keeps the firms that fit your desk, and finds the person who decides on labour.
What you get back
A table of contractors, most recent permit first: firm name and trading name, trade, licence, headcount and revenue where Shovels holds them, permit activity in your date range, and rating. For the firms that qualify, the owner or hiring lead with title and verified work email, and a short draft note.
Above it, the numbers that matter for the budget: contractors returned, contractors that passed, and what the pull cost on your Shovels account.
Variations worth knowing
Search permits instead of contractors. A permit search for the same place and dates returns the projects themselves, and can be narrowed by status, property type, tag or job value. It is the view to use when you want the large projects first and then the firms on them.
Follow one contractor's work. A firm's own permits can be pulled to see what it is building. Shovels bills that per permit and returns all of them, so on a busy contractor it is a cost trap unless capped.
Other markets without job adverts. Map a market that lives on a public register covers the same idea for sectors where the membership list is public.
Where this goes wrong
Guessing the trade value. Trade and tag are fixed lists. A free-text guess returns nothing, which looks like an empty market. The tags are read before the search for that reason.
Sparse records. Small operators come back thin, and the people databases are thin on them too. Some firms will stay on the list with no named contact. That is a property of the firm, not something more spend fixes.
Too wide an area. A whole state across a long date range is a large pull, billed per record to your Shovels account. Start with one county and a short window.
Treating a permit as a vacancy. It is evidence of workload. Qualify the firm against your ideal client before you write, and say something about the work, not about hiring you have only inferred.
