Why Personality-Driven Hiring Changes Safety Outcomes with Victor Buhr

"Brennan's really looking to take a different approach with employee safety. We're gonna start looking at bringing people on who have the personality for it and who are trainable." Victor Buhr, Director of Safety at J.F. Brennan Company OK everyone, this is one of those conversations that really reframes how we think about safety leadership. In this episode of The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management, I sit down with Victor Buhr, Director of Safety at J.F. Brennan Company, a century-old marine construction and environmental remediation firm, operating in the US and Canada with over 600 employees. Together, they explore why the future of safety isn’t about being the “cop on site,” but about earning trust and genuinely caring whether people make it home. Victor breaks down why Brennan hires for personality and trainability before credentials, how they build safety training that actually sticks in a surge-demand, high-risk industry, and what it takes to manage compliance and skills verification at scale. At the heart of it all is a simple truth: safety isn’t paperwork, it’s people, their families, and the responsibility leaders carry every single day. This one’s for anyone ready to move safety from compliance to culture.

"Brennan's really looking to take a different approach with employee safety. We're gonna start looking at bringing people on who have the personality for it and who are trainable." Victor Buhr, Director of Safety at J.F. Brennan Company

OK everyone, this is one of those conversations that really reframes how we think about safety leadership. In this episode of The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management, I sit down with Victor Buhr, Director of Safety at J.F. Brennan Company, a century-old marine construction and environmental remediation firm, operating in the US and Canada with over 600 employees. Together, they explore why the future of safety isn’t about being the “cop on site,” but about earning trust and genuinely caring whether people make it home.

Victor breaks down why Brennan hires for personality and trainability before credentials, how they build safety training that actually sticks in a surge-demand, high-risk industry, and what it takes to manage compliance and skills verification at scale. At the heart of it all is a simple truth: safety isn’t paperwork, it’s people, their families, and the responsibility leaders carry every single day. This one’s for anyone ready to move safety from compliance to culture.

Here are some of the topics that Victor and I explore:

How to reframe safety hiring from credential-first to culture-first
Why your safety program must extend beyond the jobsite to the families at home
The playbook for managing training across a dispersed and unionized workforce
How to operationalize skills verification with real-time
Why Power BI and automated compliance alerts beat spreadsheets
The hidden advantage of niche industries in managing language and cultural complexity

Victor Buhr is Director of Safety at J.F. Brennan Company, a century-old, family-owned marine heavy civil engineering contractor operating across 48 states. With over a decade of experience in marine construction and underwater services, Victor oversees all risk management, training, and compliance initiatives for a workforce of 100+ professional divers and hundreds of additional field personnel. His expertise spans complex regulatory environments, from OSHA and MSHA to Army Corps of Engineers and Coast Guard requirements, across multiple high-risk divisions including environmental remediation, underwater dive operations, and hydroelectric construction.

Episode Resources:

Victor Buhr on LinkedIn
J.F. Brennan Company Website
Michael Zalle on LinkedIn
Yellow Bird Website
The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management on Apple Podcasts
The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management on Spotify
The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management on YouTube