TEQ Connect

Hiring for skilled trade roles has traditionally relied on resumes, applications, and interviews, which consume valuable time. These require coordination, depend on subjective judgment, and offer limited insight into how a candidate will actually perform. Hiring cycles lengthen, effort increases, and decisions are often made with incomplete information.

In industries like construction and manufacturing, where the stakes of a bad hire can be high in terms of performance, retention, and productivity, this approach is no longer sufficient. The process is often driven by urgency, which can lead to rushed decisions that miss key factors like an applicant’s ability to adapt, collaborate and fit into the company culture.

This is the hiring reality TEQ Connect solves. Designed specifically for skilled trade and manufacturing roles the company offers a premier hiring tool from Piccadilly Software Group. It addresses a long-standing gap in trade workforce hiring and provides far more insight into a candidate’s employability than traditional methods. By improving clarity around fit and performance expectations early in the process, the company helps organizations reduce turnover and build more stable, higher-performing trade workforces.

“We looked at how much time, money, and analysis go into hiring at the executive level and asked why that same rigor does not exist for the trade workforce,” says Raymond Dick, co-founder and CEO. “TEQ Connect takes that level of assessment and makes it practical to use at scale for skilled and hourly workers.”

Bringing a C-Suite Hiring Mindset to Skilled Trades

The inspiration for TEQ Connect came from observing the difference between how executive-level hiring is done and how trade hiring is handled. At the executive level, organizations invest deeply in assessments that evaluate behavior, motivation, psychological traits, and technical abilities. This level of analysis has historically been unavailable to trade hiring due to cost and scale limitations. Rather than relying solely on resumes or interviews, the platform evaluates employability factors that influence long-term performance and retention. This gives employers meaningful insight early in the hiring process without the cost, time, or complexity traditionally associated with executive-level assessments.

Experience gained by Raymond through years of industrial workforce work, including leadership of Project Manufacturing, a national program that ran large-scale trade competitions across the U.S., highlighted a critical insight. Strong technical skills did not always translate into strong job performance, while individuals with weaker skills trade skills performed better due to traits like dependability, coachability, and organizational fit.

This realization led to the creation of TEQ Connect, which moves beyond simply evaluating technical skills to assessing whether a candidate is likely to succeed and adapt over time within a specific company. There are very few full persona-based assessment tools in the market, and almost none designed specifically for the trade workforce. TEQ Connect addresses that gap by making structured, employability-focused assessments accessible and scalable.

How the Platform Works in Real Hiring Scenarios

TEQ Connect solves this problem by introducing an employability assessment early in the hiring process, allowing employers to immediately identify top candidates and streamline their decision-making. With a mobile-first platform, candidates complete a short, tailored assessment that ranks them based on alignment with the role. This reduces the hiring cycle and allows employers to focus their time on the candidates most likely to succeed, making the process much more efficient than traditional methods.

In situations where only one candidate applies, TEQ Connect’s insights become even more crucial. The platform helps employers gain a deeper understanding of the candidate’s motivations, behaviors, and performance expectations, enabling them to make more informed decisions. From high-volume and low-volume perspectives, TEQ Connect supports faster decisions while improving performance outcomes. The emphasis is not on eliminating candidates, but on giving both employers and applicants a clearer view of fit and expectations.

“Companies are under urgency to fill positions quickly, but they cannot afford to sacrifice quality,” says Ryan McIntosh, VP of sales and business development. “What consistently stands out is the time saved in the hiring process and the positive candidate experience, especially being mobile-responsive and easy to complete. We focus on making sure both employers and candidates have a great experience.”

Total Employability, Validation, and Experience

At the foundation of TEQ Connect is its Total Employability model, which is fully validated and defensible from an HR and legal standpoint. The research underlying the platform demonstrates predictive outcomes related to job performance and retention.

Employability is not defined by a single trait but by a combination of seven core abilities that shape how someone works. It begins with coachability—the willingness to receive feedback and grow—which underpins dependability, or the ability to consistently follow through and be accountable. As roles and environments shift, adaptability determines how well a person responds to change, while capability reflects whether they have the skills and credentials to do the work itself. Beyond execution, solvability speaks to initiative and problem-solving, how challenges are approached rather than avoided. Relatability influences measures collaboration and fit within a team, and motive-ability reveals what drives sustained effort and performance over time.

For each role, TEQ Connect builds a baseline employability blueprint using research data, then allows employers to tailor the weighting of these abilities to reflect job requirements and company culture. This ensures predictive outputs are organization-specific rather than generic. On the employer side, the SaaS platform supports collaboration across hiring managers, operations leaders, and executives through shared dashboards and integrations with leading applicant tracking systems. On the candidate side, the experience is mobile-first, with typed or voice-to-text responses and adaptive follow-up questions that give candidates a fair opportunity to present their strengths.

Scale, Industry Focus, and the Road Ahead

TEQ Connect serves a wide range of skilled trade roles, with particular strength in construction and manufacturing. The platform supports more than 2,000 job profiles and is scaling toward more than 20,000. It is designed for roles with defined skill requirements, ranging from entry-level trade positions to advanced journeyman roles and select engineering functions. This flexibility has made the platform well suited for large, time-sensitive hiring efforts.

One notable example is an U.S.-based manufacturing facility that needed to hire between 300 and 400 technicians within a 90-day window. By embedding TEQ Connect into its applicant tracking system, the organization was able to assess and rank thousands of applicants efficiently, supporting high-velocity hiring aligned with its operational needs.

Looking ahead, TEQ Connect plans to expand its reach across the skilled trades and into more verticals, aiming to support organizations from entry-level positions to executive leadership. The company is also focused on deeper enterprise integration with large manufacturing and construction firms, scaling the platform to meet the needs of larger firms.

Grounded in a people-first culture based in Kansas City, TEQ Connect’s team emphasizes responsiveness, accountability, and customer success for both employers and candidates. By centering hiring decisions on employability rather than assumptions, TEQ Connect is reshaping the hiring landscape for the trade workforce and setting a new standard for what hiring in this space can and should look like.