How to hire a bricklayer

To hire a bricklayer, test the work before you trust the resume. Ask for a scored practical task on the wall type you actually build, check the tickets that let someone onto your site, and call two supervisors who watched them lay brick every day. Years on a CV tell you far less than one morning of measured work.

That sounds obvious. Most hiring for the trade still runs the other way round: a phone call, a gut read, a start date on Monday, and a rebuild in week three because the vertical joints are ragged and the rows of brick drift out of line. This guide covers what a bricklayer does, what qualifications are worth asking for, where the candidates actually are, what masonry work pays now, and how to screen skill so the first wall is the last conversation about it.

TL;DR

• Screen for demonstrated trade skills. Look at setting out, bonding, joint finishing, accuracy, safety awareness, and the ability to work to the required standard.
• Verify qualifications and site requirements. Check relevant apprenticeship experience, site credentials, and safety training where required.
• Use a practical task alongside interviews and references. A standardised task gives you direct evidence of how a candidate performs work relevant to your projects.
• Build your candidate pool beyond experienced bricklayers. Apprenticeship programmes, trade schools, referrals, unions, associations, and job boards can all provide relevant candidates.
• Budget against current wage data and your actual staffing requirements. Published wage figures provide a useful benchmark, but location, experience, project type, and employment arrangements affect what you pay.
• Write the job ad around the work. Specify the wall type, bond, project type, hours, tools, site conditions, and experience required so candidates can assess their fit before applying.

What does a bricklayer actually do?

A bricklayer builds and repairs structures from brick, block and stone: laying units to a line, mixing and applying mortar, cutting to fit, setting out corners and openings, and keeping everything plumb, level and square. Job ads use bricklayer, brick layer and brickmason more or less interchangeably, and the federal occupation code is the same one.

The detail that matters for hiring is how physical and how precise the work is at the same time. The occupational profile for brickmasons and blockmasons lists arm-hand steadiness, manual dexterity, trunk strength and static strength alongside critical thinking, active listening and monitoring. That combination is why a paper screen fails so often. Someone can describe a cavity wall perfectly and still be unable to hold a consistent bed joint for six hours.

Break the role into the competencies you are actually buying:

• Setting out. Reading a drawing, establishing gauge, getting corners right before a single brick is bedded.
• Bonding and finish. Stretcher, English, Flemish, whatever your work demands, plus clean, consistent joint finishing.
• Mortar judgment. Mixing to spec and adjusting for weather without being told.
• Speed under standard. Output that holds up when the quality bar does not move.
• Site behaviour. Safety, tidiness, and whether the labourer next to them wants to work with them again.

Where can you find bricklayers for hire?

Ranked by what actually converts for small and mid-sized contractors:

1. Your own crews. Referral from a bricklayer you already trust is the highest-yield channel in the trade, because the referrer's reputation is on the line every day on your site. Pay the bonus on the 90-day mark, not on the start date.
2. Apprenticeship sponsors and trade schools. Slower, but you get people at the start of a career instead of competing for the same forty experienced hands everyone else is chasing.
3. Union halls and local masonry contractors' associations, where your work is unionised or your region is dense with commercial masonry.
4. Job boards, last. They work, but only if the ad is specific. "Bricklayer wanted, competitive pay" gets you volume and noise.

The ad is the part most contractors underinvest in. Name the wall. "Facing brickwork on two-storey residential, Flemish bond, 8 to 10 hour days, own hand tools, mixer provided" pulls a tighter, better-qualified pool than any amount of adjective. If writing the ad is the bottleneck, start from a structured job description template and swap in your own project detail.

How do you recruit reliable bricklayers?

Reliability is a separate trait from skill, and it is the one that actually wrecks schedules. A brilliant bricklayer who turns up three days out of five is worse for a programme than a competent one who turns up every day. Screen for it deliberately.

Three questions do most of the work, asked the same way of every candidate and scored against the same notes:

• "Walk through the last full week you worked. What did you lay each day?" Vagueness here is the tell.
• "Tell me about a wall you had to take down and rebuild. What went wrong?" Candidates who have never rebuilt anything have either never worked much or are not telling you the truth.
• "Who was your foreman on that job, and can we call them?" The answer to the second half matters more than the first.

Then actually call. Two supervisors who watched the candidate work daily will tell you more in ten minutes than an hour of interview. Ask about attendance and about whether they would take the person back, which is the only reference question that reliably produces an honest pause.

How should you screen and test bricklayers?

Run a scored practical, identical for every candidate, before an offer. Sixty to ninety minutes on a small panel is enough: set out a corner, lay four or five courses to a line in the bond you use, strike the joints, clean up. Score it on a written sheet, not on impressions.

What each screening step actually proves:

Nothing on that list is sufficient alone, which is the whole point. The Testlify Competency-to-Evidence Matrix works the other way from a typical hiring process: start with the role, list the competencies that decide success in it, then attach each competency to a piece of evidence you will actually collect.

Setting out maps to the practical. Materials and safety knowledge map to a written or online bricklayer skills test. Reliability maps to references. When a competency has no evidence source next to it, you are guessing about it, and you will find out which one you guessed about in month two.

For volume hiring, put the knowledge test first and the practical second. A short online assessment covering materials, drawings, sequencing and site safety can sit in the application step and cut a field of thirty down to the eight worth a morning of your foreman's time.

Related roles are worth testing on their own terms too: block and stone work is a different skill set from facing brick, so a brick mason assessment is not interchangeable with the bricklayer one. Precision-heavy finishing work can also justify an attention to detail test alongside the trade content.

What does it cost to hire a bricklayer?

Budget from published wage data rather than from what the last person accepted. The median annual wage for masonry workers is $58,270, or $28.02 an hour, and about 277,700 people held those jobs in the most recent federal count. Employment is projected to grow 1 percent over the decade, slower than the average for all occupations, with roughly 18,400 openings a year as workers retire or move on.

Read those three numbers together, because they say something a single wage figure does not. Demand is flat, but the replacement need is large and steady. The pressure in this market is not a hiring boom. It is retirement. The people leaving the trade are the ones who can set out a complicated corner without being asked twice, and they are not being replaced one for one.

The cost that does not appear on any wage table is the bad hire. A wall that has to come down is the mortar, the brick, the labour to demolish, the labour to rebuild, and the programme slip that follows it. Against that, a ninety-minute paid trial is the cheapest insurance in construction hiring.

Common mistakes when hiring bricklayers

Using years of experience as the main filter
Ten years in the trade tells you how long someone has worked, not how well they lay. Use experience as context, then ask about the types of masonry they have worked on and verify their practical skills.

Skipping a practical assessment
A strong interview can confirm communication and experience, but it cannot show whether someone can produce consistent, accurate work. Include a practical task that reflects the work they will actually do.

Changing the task between candidates
Give candidates the same task and the same instructions wherever possible. This makes it easier to compare workmanship against consistent criteria.

Scoring without defined criteria
Decide what good work looks like before assessments begin. Score areas such as alignment, level, joint consistency, measurement, finish, material handling, and adherence to instructions.

Treating safety as paperwork
Safety knowledge should be part of the selection process, not only the induction. Check whether candidates understand relevant controls for tasks such as silica exposure, manual handling, scaffolding, and working at height.

Relying on a single reference
Ask references specific questions about workmanship, reliability, safety practices, teamwork, and the type of masonry the candidate performed. Where possible, verify experience with more than one relevant source.

Hire your next bricklayer with confidence

Put the evidence in front of the decision. Add a short, role-relevant skills assessment to your application step, keep the scored practical for the shortlist, and take two references on everyone you are serious about. You can browse the full test library to see what a trade assessment covers, or book a demo and we will set the screening step up against your own role. If you are still comparing approaches, the assessment buyers guide walks through what to ask before you commit to any process.

Key takeaways

Hire bricklayers based on evidence of the work, not just years on a CV. Define the skills your project requires, use a consistent practical and knowledge assessment, verify reliability and safety through structured references, and benchmark pay against current market rates. With Testlify, you can standardise skills assessments and compare candidates against the same criteria before moving them to the practical stage, making the hiring process more consistent and easier to evaluate.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)