Why AEC Firms Are Turning to Freelance Talent | GigBench

The AEC industry has a staffing problem that raises are not solving.

Despite construction employment growing in 28 states and the District of Columbia between August 2024 and August 2025, the gap between project demand and available talent keeps widening. Budgets are stretched, timelines are slipping, and firms are being forced to make difficult decisions — delay projects, turn down work, or push already-strained teams past their limits.

More firms are arriving at the same conclusion: flexible, contract-based hiring isn't just a stopgap. It's becoming a core workforce strategy.

The Numbers Paint a Clear Picture

According to the 2025 AGC-NCCER Workforce Survey, 92% of construction firms report having a hard time filling open positions, and 45% have had to delay at least one project because of labor shortages (Source: Associated General Contractors of America). This isn't concentrated in one region or one type of firm. It's industry-wide, and it's getting worse.

A 2024 survey by the Associated General Contractors of America and Autodesk found that 85% of AEC firms reported open craft positions, with 88% saying they are struggling to fill them. The problem extends beyond the field: 52% of firms are also having trouble finding salaried professionals like project managers and engineers, and 61% are facing project delays as a direct result (Source: Workspire).

These aren't entry-level positions sitting unfilled. The hardest roles to fill are senior and specialized ones — exactly the roles where a hiring mistake or a prolonged vacancy causes the most damage.

A Quire survey found 84% of AEC firms are having challenges recruiting new employees — with some firms reaching out to retired colleagues and bringing them back just to meet project requirements (Source: Quire). That last detail is telling. Firms are already tapping into a pool of experienced, semi-retired professionals out of necessity. The freelance marketplace formalizes and scales what some firms are already doing informally.

What Zweig Group's Data Tells Us About Retention

The staffing challenge isn't only about bringing people in. Keeping them is proving just as difficult. Zweig Group's 2025 Recruitment and Retention Report draws a clear picture of how the retention side of the equation is playing out across the industry.

The median overall turnover rate across AEC firms is around 13%, with voluntary departures outpacing involuntary ones by a wide margin. For firms operating at a loss, that turnover rate spikes above 40%. Environmental consulting firms are experiencing the steepest challenge, with a median turnover rate of 19% (Source: Zweig Group). Even a single voluntary departure at a smaller firm can disrupt an entire project team and strain client relationships.

What this data makes clear is that the talent pipeline has two leaks, not one. Firms are struggling to recruit, and they're struggling to retain. When experienced professionals leave, they don't disappear — many move into contract and independent work, where they have more control over their schedules and the projects they take on. The freelance marketplace isn't taking talent away from AEC firms. It's where that talent is going on its own. The smarter move is to meet it there.

The Roles Most at Risk

Leadership and technical field roles — including project managers, schedulers, and experienced engineering support — remain among the hardest to fill across the AEC industry (Source: STERLING). These are the roles that can't be left vacant without direct consequences to project delivery. A missing project manager doesn't just mean one task goes undone. It means coordination breaks down, timelines drift, and client relationships take the hit.

PSMJ's compensation benchmarking data highlights another dimension of this pressure. AEC firms competing for electrical engineers aren't just competing against other consulting firms — they're competing against the likes of Tesla and NVIDIA. Entry-level electrical engineers now command a median salary 23% higher than entry-level architects, a gap that has widened over three consecutive years (Source: PSMJ). For firms that can't match those salary levels, contract arrangements offer a way to access specialized expertise on a project basis without the overhead of a full-time hire they can't sustain.

The same dynamic applies to niche technical specialists across disciplines. A firm that wins a data center project and needs a commissioning engineer with specific systems experience doesn't have three months to run a traditional search. They need someone qualified, vetted, and available — now.

Why Traditional Hiring Is No Longer Enough

The conventional approach to staffing — post a job, review applications, run interviews, extend an offer, wait for a start date — was designed for a world where talent was more abundant and project timelines were more forgiving. Neither of those conditions applies to AEC right now.

ENR's reporting on the labor market makes the structural nature of this challenge clear. The imbalance between labor supply and demand in AEC, combined with restrictive qualification requirements for serving on projects, has made filling available roles consistently difficult — and firm leaders expect the gap to persist as demand grows in high-activity markets like manufacturing and data centers (Source: Engineering News-Record). Posting more job listings isn't the answer when the qualified candidates simply aren't in the applicant pool.

Following the corporate restructuring of 2024-2025, 69% of employers hired freelancers to fill specialized gaps left by full-time staff, with 78% citing flexibility as the primary reason (Source: DemandSage). Flexibility here means something specific: the ability to scale a project team up or down based on actual workload, without the overhead of carrying full-time headcount through slow periods or the lag time of traditional recruiting during busy ones.

The Verification Question

One reason AEC has been slower than other industries to embrace freelance hiring is a legitimate concern that general platforms haven't addressed: how do you know the person you're hiring is actually qualified?

In architecture, engineering, and construction, credentials aren't optional. A structural engineer needs to be licensed. A project manager needs verifiable experience on the right types of projects. An MEP specialist working in a specific state needs to meet that state's requirements. Getting this wrong isn't just operationally costly — it creates legal exposure.

Most freelance platforms leave credential verification entirely to the hiring firm. That means adding a vetting process on top of an already-strained internal workflow, or taking on risk that shouldn't have to exist.

How GigBench Changes the Equation

GigBench was built specifically to solve this problem for AEC firms. Every professional on the platform goes through a vetting and verification process before they're accessible to firms — so when a project manager shows up in search results, the firm already knows the fundamentals check out.

The result is a faster, lower-risk path to the specialized talent firms need most. No sifting through unqualified applicants. No starting from scratch every time a niche role opens up. Just direct access to credentialed AEC professionals who are available for project-based work.

The staffing challenge in AEC isn't going away on its own. But firms that build flexible, verified talent pipelines now — rather than waiting for the traditional hiring market to recover — will be the ones positioned to take on more work, deliver on time, and grow without the bottleneck.