The same stack, pointed at applicants
An empty truck costs more than a slow phone.
Every system in the kit works exactly as well on applicants as it does on customers. Almost nobody has pointed it that way, which is strange, because the labour shortage is the worst problem in the trades right now.
01 — Why
You cannot grow past the people you can hire.
A shop can fix its phone, fill its pipeline, and still be stuck, because there is nobody to put in the third truck. That is not a marketing problem and most marketing companies will simply shrug at it.
But the mechanics are identical. An applicant is a lead. A careers page is a landing page. Nobody following up on an application is exactly the same failure as nobody following up on a quote.
Two technicians at the back of a van at the start of a day, loading up, talking. This photograph is doing recruitment work, so it needs to look like somewhere a good tech would want to work.
02 — The numbers
The arithmetic of the shortage
- 20 to 1 skilled-trade job openings for every one new worker entering, projected through 2032 by McKinsey.
- 0.6 new workers enter the trades for every one who retires. The pool is not tight, it is shrinking.
- 68% of technicians are over 45, so the retirement side of that equation accelerates.
- $25k to $50k is the cost of losing one trained technician. Forty-five to sixty days is the cost of replacing them.
Every figure above is sourced in our own research file. We do not put a number on this site we cannot point at.
03 — How it runs
What gets installed
-
01
A careers page that sells the job
Pay range, real. Schedule, real. Truck, tools, training, path. Written for somebody deciding whether to leave a job they already have, which is who you are actually recruiting.
-
02
An application that takes 90 seconds
On a phone, in a parking lot, between jobs. Every extra field costs you a candidate and the good ones are the busiest.
-
03
A hiring pipeline
Applied, screened, interviewed, offered, hired. Same board as your leads, so nobody sits for a week because it was a busy week.
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04
Follow-up that runs itself
Auto-reply inside minutes, then a real cadence. The candidate who feels chased is the candidate who shows up.
In
- A careers page built to convert, not a PDF of a job ad
- Application form wired to a hiring pipeline
- Automatic acknowledgement and follow-up sequence
- Job posts written and distributed
- Recruiting content from your Content Day
- A monthly line on applicants, interviews and hires
Out
- Recruiting on commission. We build the machine, you choose the people
- Background checks, screening calls or reference checks
- Anything that puts us between you and someone you might employ
04 — Questions
The ones that decide it.
No. We are not a staffing agency and we will not pretend to be one. We build and run the system that stops good applicants falling through the floor. Who you hire is entirely yours.
One avoided turnover event is $25,000 to $50,000. Two hires a year at $6,000 of annual cost is the cheapest insurance on this page. If you hire nobody, cancel it, it is an add-on.
No. It runs on the same CRM and the same site, so there has to be a kit underneath it. That is a real constraint and not an upsell.
It matters more at two trucks. A ten-truck shop loses a technician and absorbs it. You lose one and you lose a route.
Related
The Hiring Kit.
$500 per month. Twenty minutes on the phone and you will know whether it is worth doing.