Construction isn't short of applicants. It loses them.

I spoke recently to an early careers lead at a tier-one contractor, and one line from that conversation has stayed with me. I was showing her a shared construction careers resource and asking how her team might use it. Her first worry was not whether young people would come. It was whether anyone could answer them. For work experience alone, her team is "inundated with thousands and thousands of requests".

That is not the picture most of us carry around. The skills gap conversation assumes an empty pipeline: too few young people, too few applicants, a sector nobody wants to join. The people who actually run the front door describe something closer to the opposite. The door is jammed. The requests arrive in their thousands, mostly from people who already know the industry exists and already know how to apply, and behind the door sits a small team whose colleagues are, as she put it, absorbed in their projects and pulled left, right and centre.

What struck me most was what she said she would actually want. Not more applications. A different pool: people who would never have thought to apply in the first place. She also pointed to fewer people starting construction courses, and less diversity among those who do.

So the industry has two problems that look like one. It cannot handle the interest it already has, and the interest it has is the wrong shape.

Where the rest of them go

Here is the part I think we should be uncomfortable about. Most schemes turn away far more people than they take on. Many of those people did everything we ask of them. They found the scheme, understood the role, wrote the application and turned up. When they are not selected, the relationship simply ends. Nobody passes the name on. The subcontractor down the road who could never afford a recruitment campaign does not hear about them. Neither does the college with spare places on a trade course.

We spend a fortune on outreach to find young people who are interested in construction, then throw away the list of young people who have already proved it.

Some of the best people I have helped into this industry came in through a side door after the front one had closed on them. That should not depend on someone happening to know someone.

What would help

None of this needs a new national scheme. It needs the larger contractors to stop treating a rejected applicant as a closed file.

• With the applicant's permission, pass the strongest people you could not take to your supply chain, local colleges and community programmes.
• Put the routine questions (what does a QS actually do, what do I need, what does it pay) somewhere shared and public, so your team's time goes on the people who stand out.
• Judge your early careers effort partly by how many interested people end up in construction, not only by how many end up with you.

If you run a scheme, ask yourself one question when this year's intake closes: what happens to everyone you said no to? If the honest answer is nothing, you are sitting on the cheapest talent pipeline in the industry and throwing it away every year.