Assistant Superintendent
Full time · Scottsdale, AZ and the surrounding east valley · On a job site every day
Every hour past forty is paid at time and a half. A normal week here runs 42 to 45 hours, which puts real annual earnings between roughly $63,000 and $84,000 depending on where you start and how the year runs.
The range is wider than the one on our Field Superintendent page, and there is a reason. The people who apply for this seat are in very different places. Somebody two years in and somebody six years in who was never taught the business side of a job.
This is the job where somebody teaches you to run projects instead of expecting you to already know. You will be on real sites, next to superintendents who have done this for a long time, doing work that matters on day one rather than sweeping until somebody trusts you.
You have probably been the guy who does whatever needs doing. You show up, you figure it out, you stay late when the client is upset and nobody above you is answering the phone. And nobody has ever sat down and explained to you why the schedule was built that way, or what the number on the change order actually meant.
You have been learning this trade by accident for years. We would rather teach you on purpose.
You help run the big jobs. You run one small one yourself.
Most assistant positions in this trade are a polite word for helper. You carry things, you clean up, and three years later you still cannot read a schedule. That is not this.
On the big projects
You are alongside a superintendent on two or three remodels in the $200,000 range. Watching how the schedule gets built, sitting in on trade partner conversations, running the parts he hands you, and learning why the decisions get made the way they do. You are not shadowing. You are carrying real pieces of a real job.
On your own project
You get one small job of your own. A bathroom, a single room, something with a real client and a real completion date. You run it. Devan is behind you and available, and you will not be left to sink, but it is yours and the homeowner knows your name.
On the hands on part, because most ads are vague about it. Roughly 90 percent of the work on any job here is performed by trade partners, so this is not a swinging a hammer job. What you do with your hands is the connective tissue. Dust barriers, hauling out what a trade left behind, meeting a delivery, setting up a site before a crew shows up.
You will do more of that than the superintendents do, and that is on purpose. It is how you end up on every job site in the company in your first six months, which is how you learn faster than somebody who sits at a desk.
What you will actually do
- Run one small project start to finish, with a superintendent available the whole way
- Support two or three larger projects: site prep, barriers, deliveries, cleanup, punch list
- Keep daily logs, photos and schedule updates in JobTread. We will teach you the software
- Be a second set of eyes on the site. Notice the thing that is wrong before the client does
- Meet inspectors, deliveries and trade partners when the superintendent cannot be in two places
- Walk your sites at the end of the day and leave them the way you would want your own house left
- Surface problems the day you find them, with a photo, instead of hoping they resolve themselves
- Sit in on scheduling and selections conversations that most assistants never get invited to
What we need you to already have
- Two or more years on residential job sites in any trade. You do not need to have run projects. You need to know what a job site is and how one actually works.
- Enough hands on background to tell whether something was done right. Which trade did what, and what it looks like when it is wrong.
- The ability to talk to a homeowner in her own house without making her nervous. This decides more than your resume does.
- A clean driving record, and a home roughly 35 minutes or less from Scottsdale. Our work sits in Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Phoenix, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa and Ahwatukee, and you are on site early.
- Comfortable on an iPhone, and willing to learn software you have never used.
- An actual interest in the business side of this. If plans and schedules and numbers bore you, this seat will make you miserable and there is a better job for you somewhere.
What we do not need you to have
A degree. A superintendent title on a resume. Experience running $300,000 projects. Every one of those would make the hire easier for us, and none of them is what we are looking for. We are looking for somebody who is already good on a job site and has never been taught the rest of it.
Forty hours guaranteed, every hour past forty at time and a half, and a number you can see from here.
We pay hourly for an unglamorous reason. We close out every project against what we estimated it would cost, and that only works if we know the actual hours. The reason is bookkeeping. The consequence is that we pay for every hour you work.
Forty of those hours are guaranteed in writing, in your offer, whether the work is there that week or not. A slow February is our problem to solve rather than yours to absorb.
Forty hours guaranteed
In writing, in the offer. Paid for forty whether the work is there or not.
Overtime, actually paid
Time and a half past forty. A hard week costs us more and earns you more.
$50 for every five star review, to everybody
Every five star review pays $50 to every person in the company, not just whoever was on that job. You get it in your first month.
A company truck for the work
Job site driving and material runs are in a company truck with the fuel on us. Whether one goes home with you depends on where you live and what we have available, and we will tell you which before you start.
A company phone number
A business line on your own phone, the way Devan and I do it. Clients reach the company, not your personal number.
Paid time off
Eight paid holidays plus five days of PTO in year one, and the PTO goes up every year after that.
Now the part you would notice on your own, so I will say it first
Look at this page and then look at the Field Superintendent page and you will find a gap. This job tops out around $34 an hour. That one starts at $40. There is nothing in between.
That gap is not a ceiling. It is the raise.
Six dollars an hour is about $12,000 a year at a straight forty, and closer to $15,000 once a normal week here is counted. If the two ranges touched, getting promoted would feel like a rounding error. They do not touch on purpose.
What has to be true for you to cross it: you can carry two or three projects at once without somebody checking behind you, a $1.5M homeowner trusts you on day one, and you catch what is wrong with a set of plans before anything gets ordered. That is the whole list. It is the same list on the Field Superintendent page, because it is the same job.
How long that takes depends entirely on you. I have seen it happen in eighteen months and I have seen it not happen at all.
Here is my end of it. We are writing the whole advancement path down right now, with the rates and what triggers each one. It is not finished. When it is, it goes on this page in writing the same way the pay did, because a plan nobody can read is not a plan.
And if you are running projects at this level and I have not moved you, that is my failure, not yours. Say it out loud to me. I would rather hear it than lose you.
And the thing we do not offer yet
We do not have company health insurance. I am not going to bury that and let you discover it on your start date.
We are a small company, my wife and I pay for our own family coverage out of pocket like everybody else here does, and I have not yet built a price structure that carries a group plan. I am working on it. I am not going to promise you a date I cannot hold.
If health coverage is the thing your family needs most right now, I understand completely, and you should weigh that carefully before you apply.
This is not the right seat for everybody, and we would rather you find that out here.
We could leave this out and get more applications. We would also spend the next two months in conversations that were never going to work, and so would you.
You should probably not apply for this one if any of these are true:
- You want to be a superintendent by Christmas. The path is real and the number is published, but it is earned and it is not fast. If eighteen months of being the person who also hauls out the demo sounds like a step backward, it will feel like one.
- You want to swing a hammer all day. This is a coordination job with hands on pieces, not a carpentry job. There are good companies where you can build all day and get paid well for it. This is not one of them.
- You think client communication is somebody else's job. It is not a department here. It is the job, and it starts on your first small project rather than when somebody promotes you.
- Your instinct when something goes wrong is to fix it quietly and hope. We can work with almost any mistake made by somebody learning. We cannot work with finding out about it from the homeowner.
- You need somebody to tell you what to do every hour. You will have a superintendent behind you and an owner who walks your job. You will not have somebody standing over you, and on your own project the answer to what happens next is often you.
- You are between things. Most people here have been here a long time. We hire slowly because we are trying to hire once, and this seat in particular is an investment we are making in somebody who intends to stay.
None of that is a character judgment. There are good companies where every one of those is fine, and people who are happier at them.
If you read all six and got more interested rather than less, keep going.
Exactly what happens after you apply for this position.
You have probably applied somewhere and never heard anything back. We are not going to do that to you. Here is the whole thing, start to finish, usually a couple of weeks.
You apply, and you hear back
An email with a short video from me. Not an autoresponder telling you we will be in touch. An actual explanation of what happens next, so you can decide whether you still want it.
A short call, twenty minutes or so
Phone, Zoom or FaceTime, whichever is easiest for you. Usually Devan, our general manager, sometimes me. Short on purpose, because there are three or four things that would end this either way and we would both rather find them out fast. What you are making now, what you need to make, when you could start, and what you actually want to be doing in five years. That last one matters more for this seat than it does for any other job here.
Time at our showroom with an owner
We will walk you through real projects, including the ones that did not go to plan and what we did about them. Come with questions. The people who ask hard questions in this meeting are almost always the ones we end up hiring.
References, then an offer in writing
We call three people, and for this position we are asking them what you are like to work next to rather than what projects you have run. Then the offer comes on paper with the hourly rate, the guaranteed forty, the benefits and the start date on it. Nothing gets negotiated after you say yes.
Then, if it would help you decide, come spend a paid half day with us
Devan will take you to a job site or two, you will look at a working schedule, and you can see how we actually run a project rather than how we describe it. Paid either way. For this position in particular it is worth doing, because half of what we are offering you is what you will learn, and that is hard to describe and easy to see.
Most companies make you audition. We would rather put the offer on the table and then let you check our work.
And if we go a different direction at any point, you will hear that from a person and not from silence. You took the time to apply. The least we can do is close the loop.
Questions we get about this position
If yours is not here, call the office at 602.451.0323 and ask for Devan. You do not have to apply first to ask a question.
It depends on you, and anybody who gives you a number in an interview is guessing. What I can tell you is what has to be true: you can carry two or three projects at once without somebody checking behind you, a homeowner spending $300,000 trusts you on day one, and you catch what is wrong with a set of plans before anything gets ordered. I have seen that take eighteen months. I have also seen it not happen, because the person turned out to like building more than running. Both are honest outcomes.
Because they are two different jobs, not two points on a line. If the ranges touched, a promotion would feel like a rounding error instead of a raise. Six dollars an hour is about $12,000 a year at a straight forty and closer to $15,000 in a normal week here. The gap is the reason to get good fast, and it is published on both pages so you can see it before you take the job rather than after.
Then you are still an assistant superintendent making $28 to $34 an hour with paid overtime and a guaranteed forty, which is a real job that supports a real life. This is not an up or out position and nobody gets shown the door for not being promoted. But I am also not going to pretend it would be the plan working. If a year in it is clear the seat above you is not where you are headed, we will have that conversation directly instead of letting you find out from a raise that does not come.
No. That is the point of the position. You need two or more years on residential job sites in any trade, enough hands on background to tell whether something was done right, and the ability to talk to a homeowner in her own house without making her nervous. The project running is what we teach you. If you had already learned it somewhere else you would be applying for the other page.
More than the superintendents do, and less than a helper job. Dust barriers, hauling out what a trade left, meeting deliveries, setting up a site before a crew arrives. That work is real and somebody has to do it. It is also how you end up on every job site in the company inside six months, which is how you learn faster than somebody sitting at a desk. If it is all you ever did here, we would have failed you. It will not be.
Devan, our general manager. He came up running our projects himself, so he has done every part of what you would be learning. You will work day to day alongside the field superintendents, and Lorrie runs design, so you will be in front of her on every project before it starts. Scott walks the jobs. It is a small company and there is nobody here you will not know by name in a month.
Your day starts early, on a job site. We tell homeowners the work window is 7 to 5, but that is about when trade partners may arrive rather than a shift you work. Most weeks land between 42 and 45 hours. Forty are guaranteed and everything past forty is paid at time and a half. Weekends are not a normal part of this job. If we are working a Saturday, something has gone wrong, and that is on us to fix rather than on you to absorb.
Job site driving and material runs are in a company truck with the fuel on us. Whether one goes home with you depends on where you live and what is available, and we will tell you which before you start rather than after. Bring your own hand tools and we pay to maintain them. Job site consumables are ours. You should not be funding our projects out of your own pocket and waiting to be paid back.
If you already run projects and this seat looks a step down, the one you want is Field Superintendent. Broader questions about the company and the values are answered on the careers page.
If you are still reading, we should talk.
Everything about this position is on this page. What it pays, what the next seat pays, what has to be true for you to get there, how much of it is cleanup, what we do not offer yet, and every step of what happens after you hit submit. You should be able to decide without a single phone call.
You have been learning this trade by accident for years. We would rather teach you on purpose.
Not ready to fill out a form yet?
That is fine. Call the office at 602.451.0323 and ask for Devan, our general manager. He came up running these projects himself, so he has already done every part of what you would be learning, and he can answer anything you want before you put your name on something.
You do not have to apply to ask a question. If you are working somewhere now and you would rather nobody knew you were looking, I understand that completely and it stays between us.
Apply below
Ten minutes. You will hear back within one business day with a short video from me explaining exactly what happens next. No resume required if you would rather just tell us where you have worked and what you can already do.
Scott Hochuli, Founder. Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team, Scottsdale. Est. 2001.