How to hire a restoration coordinator: requirements, pay to offer, where to find them and how to screen

The coordinator is the office side of your production. Between the first call and the final invoice, this desk dispatches crews and equipment, opens and updates every job file, collects the documents that make a file billable, keeps customers informed, and pushes status updates into the systems your insurers and program partners watch. When the seat is empty or overloaded, the crews still work — but files stall, invoices wait on paperwork, and the office can hear about problems after the customer does.

Build the requirements list from your own workflow before you write the posting. The duties that land on this desk include crew dispatch and scheduling, job-file setup and updates, document collection — work authorizations, photos, drying and equipment logs — customer status calls, insurance billing and accounts-receivable follow-up, and the compliance updates your program work requires. Rank them for your shop: a collections-heavy book is a different hire from a dispatch-heavy one.

Program work deserves its own line in the list. Contractor Connection says its network contractors must keep proper state licensing, carry all required insurance, background-check every employee who will be on a job site, and have a solid credit background. Its contractor page also describes a JobTrack system that keeps real-time project progress in front of insurers and policyholders. On program jobs, your coordinator is the person who keeps that record current and the updates moving.

Draw the seams early. Your estimators write estimates; your project managers own jobs, customers and numbers; your crew leads run the field day. The coordinator makes all of it legible — dispatch, the files, the calendars, the paperwork and the portals. If you hire a "coordinator" who is really a second project manager or a data-entry clerk, both the posting and the pay will be wrong.

This page is the employer's view of the seat. The candidate-facing description — the day-to-day work, the routes in, the career path — is the guide to what a restoration coordinator does. Keep the two apart when you write: describe the job you need done, not the career you assume.

Build the requirements from the work — software fluency, documentation discipline, phone manner and insurance-claim vocabulary — and close out the license question first, because the license programs this research verified attach to performing the work in the field rather than to an office seat. The states our research verified as licensing mold work include Texas, where the program sits with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR), and Florida, through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation. New York licenses through the Department of Labor under Labor Law Article 32, Louisiana through the LSLBC for mold remediation projects of $7,500 or more, and Washington, DC through DOEE for residential indoor mold work. None of those programs names a coordinator licence. Louisiana’s is a contractor licence for the project, New York’s law adds a separate abater licence for the individual doing the abatement, and Florida’s and the District’s licenses attach to the assessment and remediation work. If your coordinator will also run mold or asbestos jobs in the field, that is a different role with its own requirements — confirm them with the agency that issues the license in your state.

Industry certifications are credentials, not licenses, and the IICRC is a certifying body — it owns no schools and approves independent schools and instructors that meet its criteria. Its restoration certifications (Water Damage Restoration Technician, Applied Microbial Remediation Technician and the rest) are the names to check for when an application lists one. Treat a current certification as a plus, and verify it with the IICRC rather than trusting the certificate PDF in the application. Certifications lapse: IICRC-certified technicians need 14 CEC hours every four years to stay certified, and master and inspector certifications run on a two-year cycle.

OSHA's own Outreach Training Program page says the 10-hour and 30-hour courses are a voluntary program, do not meet the training requirements of any OSHA standard, and are not a certification. For a desk seat, read them as jobsite vocabulary rather than a qualification — and do not write "OSHA-certified" into your posting, because there is no such certification to verify.

Require the stack specifics instead: the job management platform your files live in, read access to your estimating software, a working level of Excel, and the phone and email volume the seat carries. Name the platforms in the posting.

No Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation line is titled "restoration coordinator" in the sources this research checked, so this page has no coordinator wage to quote in a posting — and the office groups BLS does publish are different jobs in different industries. Two are close enough to bracket the seat, if you label them for what they are.

• Production, planning and expediting clerks (SOC 43-5061) — O*NET describes the group as coordinating and expediting the flow of work and materials according to a production schedule, with production scheduler, expeditor and materials coordinator among its sample titles. This research flagged it as the closest available published occupation to a restoration job-file coordinator. The BLS OEWS May 2025 release puts the group's national median at $59,650 a year ($28.68 an hour).
• Dispatchers, except police, fire and ambulance (SOC 43-5032) — O*NET's definition covers scheduling and dispatching workers, work crews, equipment or service vehicles, including for emergency repairs rendered outside the place of business. The same release puts the group's national median at $50,340 a year ($24.20 an hour).

Both numbers are all-industry medians for adjacent occupations — not coordinator pay, and not restoration pay. Use them as brackets and set the offer from inputs you own: the job volume the desk carries, whether billing and collections sit inside the role, what you already pay your estimators and project managers, and the posted ranges on coordinator ads in your metro.

Structure the offer with wage-and-hour rules in view. If you pay the seat a salary and treat it as exempt under the FLSA, the federal salary level for the executive, administrative and professional exemptions currently reads $684 per week under 29 CFR 541.600. The salary level is one part of the test, not the whole test, and state floors can sit higher. A non-exempt coordinator earns overtime at not less than 1.5 times the regular rate, and any attendance, production or retention bonus you promise is not discretionary, so it must be included in that rate under 29 CFR 778.211. Confirm the classification with the Department of Labor or employment counsel.

The posting may have to carry the range itself. New York requires businesses with four or more employees to list a compensation range — minimum and maximum — in advertised jobs, and to say if a job is commission-based. Washington requires employers with 15 or more employees to disclose the wage scale or salary range, plus a general description of benefits, in each posting. That is the set this research verified, not a complete list of states, so confirm your state's rule with your state labor agency before you publish.

Search adjacent desks alongside the restoration boards — the seat runs on skills several office jobs already train. The pools worth working:

• Dispatch and scheduling desks in other trades — HVAC, plumbing, roofing, cleaning and service companies, whose coordinators already juggle crews, trucks and same-day emergencies.
• Insurance and medical office roles — claims support, billing and prior-authorization staff who already live inside documentation deadlines and portal updates.
• Property management and construction offices — project coordination, warranty administration and vendor scheduling backgrounds.
• Your own bench — a technician or crew lead with solid reasons to come off the trucks, or your front-desk admin ready for a production seat. They already know your customers, your standards and your software.

Write the posting around the work, and keep it lawful while you do. Under EEOC rules, a job ad may not show a preference for, or discourage, applicants based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. The EEOC's own example is a help-wanted ad seeking "females" or "recent college graduates," which may discourage men and people over 40 from applying. State the duties, the platform, the pay range and the on-call reality plainly, and let the requirements screen the candidates.

Pick the channels from where to post the job, and read the candidate-facing side of the seat in the restoration coordinator job listings before you publish — it is a cheap check on whether your posting reads like the job you actually run.

Screen this seat on the work rather than the interview voice — the job is measurable, so make the stages measurable. A workable sequence: work-history screen, structured interview, skills test on your own files, a half-day sitting with the desk, then checks. Keep each stage cheap to fail.

Build the skills test from a real, redacted job file. Ask the candidate to set the file up — in your platform or a spreadsheet mock-up: open the job, enter the loss date and the contacts, attach the photos, draft the status update, and list everything missing before the file can be billed. Hand over a deliberately messy sample: wrong dates, a missing signature, unlabeled photos. What they catch is the exact habit the seat lives on — nothing missing, nothing stale.

Run a phone exercise next. Give them two scenarios: a customer calling angry because the crew has not arrived, and a program portal showing a document your office never uploaded. Listen for what they ask, what they promise and what they write down. The seat lives on the phone; a short structured exercise shows you more than any resume line.

The ride-along becomes a sit-along for this seat. Sit the finalist with your current coordinator or office manager for a morning of live dispatch and file updates, and have them ride one job with a crew lead so they see what the field actually hands the office. Pay for the session — you are asking for real work product — and note that the FLSA's suffered-or-permitted rule reaches work an employer merely permits, so whether any unpaid trial work counts as employment is fact-specific. Confirm the details with counsel before you run unpaid previews of the job.

Build interview questions around the seat's real scenarios — the stalled claim file, the adjuster who needs documentation by end of day, the crew that no-shows — and score every candidate on the same sheet so the comparison survives a week of hiring haze. Keep the interview itself clean: before an offer, EEOC guidance under the ADA bars medical and disability questions and medical exams, though you may ask whether and how the candidate can perform the job's functions.

Checks come last, and the federal process is exact. A background report from a screening company is a consumer report under the FCRA: before you order it, the FTC requires a written, stand-alone disclosure — not a line inside the job application — and the candidate's written permission. If you are considering rejection based on the report, the pre-adverse-action notice comes first, with a copy of the report and "A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act" attached. The EEOC lets you consider criminal records in hiring but not treat applicants differently by race or national origin when you do. Your state may also restrict when in the hiring process criminal history may be asked — confirm your state's screening rules before you build the forms.

Onboard a coordinator like a system handover, because that is what it is. Sequence the first weeks in stages. Platform logins come first — job management, estimating read access, program portals, phone and email. Your job-file standards come next, written down as the checklist that defines a complete file at your company. Then shadowing for the desk they inherit, then live files — starting with the simplest active jobs and widening from there.

Two clocks start on day one. The paperwork clock: Form I-9, Section 2, must be completed within three business days of the employee's first day, or by the first day for a job lasting fewer than three business days. The program clock: hand over the compliance files your networks require together with the portal logins. For Contractor Connection work, that means the records its contractor requirements describe: proper state licensing, required insurance, background checks on every job-site employee and a solid credit background. Your coordinator keeps those current and feeds the status updates its JobTrack system puts in front of insurers and policyholders.

Write the seat down while you train it. The checklist that defines "a complete file" — authorization signed, photos labeled, drying logs current, invoice items matched to the estimate, portal status current — should be a document the coordinator owns and you review. That document doubles as your retention tool: it turns "whatever the office does" into a role with a defined bar, and a defined bar is something the next hire can inherit and the current one can be promoted on.

Keep the seat by giving it a ladder — somewhere to go toward estimating, toward project management or toward the office-manager seat. Build the training steps for whichever track fits your org chart, and let the coordinator see the ladder exists. Tie the growth to credentials that compound — deeper platform mastery, IICRC coursework that makes the files legible, ownership of the billing queue. And watch the load: when the seat overloads, files tend to go stale first, and stale files reach your invoices before they reach your desk.

Hiring the coordinator is one decision inside the whole people-side operation. The guide to hiring for your restoration company pulls the employer topics together — pay structures, background checks, safety programs, onboarding and retention — and the file standards you set for this desk are the ones every later office hire inherits.

Employer information, not licensing, legal, insurance, health, safety or tax advice. Confirm requirements with the state agency or certifying body named, and classification, screening and pay questions with the Department of Labor or counsel.