i.e. Where to advertise or recruit tradespeople

Hint: They aren’t all on SEEK, looking at your ad!

It’s hard to find good tradespeople, isn’t it?

In the old days (whenever they were!), all you had to do was say, “Universe, I want to hire another skilled tradesperson to grow my team,” and people would appear by word of mouth or from a simple ad on SEEK or Indeed, or a post on your Facebook page.

But for the last few years, there’s been a shortage of tradespeople, and that hasn’t worked very well, has it? 

For some time now, a half-ar**d effort to attract good people has resulted in a trickle of useless losers you wouldn’t want on your team.

So I’m here today, and I’ve created a guide to help you not be half-ar**d about it. 

It’s like marketing. 

You can’t be half-ar**d about that anymore either, can you?

It is marketing, isn’t it? 

Instead of marketing to get work, you can market to get workers.

You need to have a good job that people will want to jump ship for, and you need to run ads that will grab people’s attention and make them want that job and apply.

And you need to get people to see your ad, too. That’s important, and that’s what I’m focusing on today.

You need to run your ads in different places or make your enquiries in different places. Actually, additional places.

You should still go to your network and tell people you’re hiring – put the word out, if you like.

And you should still write a good ad and put it on SEEK and Indeed, and maybe in the local paper. The people who are looking for jobs will look there.

But as we’ve said (well, I’ve said), there aren’t as many of those people as there used to be.

So you have to look elsewhere. You need to tempt people who aren’t necessarily already looking for a job to consider jumping ship from their current job to yours.

So you have to run your ads where those people are – on Facebook and Instagram, and maybe LinkedIn.

Let’s start with locals. 

You could run a local ad on Facebook (or Meta) – one that is general, showcasing your lovely job and its attractions, and maybe some others with a different headline or hook aimed at appealing to people who might want to move from specific jobs to yours.

Maybe your business is in the suburbs, and you know that people make long commutes into the city – you could run an ad saying, “Sick of the commute?”

If you run a 9-day fortnight or have flexible working, you could lead with that. You could try to attract people who work on large commercial jobs and might enjoy residential construction or the other way around – people who are bored of resi and want the excitement and challenge of bigger jobs (depends what you do, right?).

You could spread the net wider and see if you can attract people to move from where they live now to where your business is.

Tree change and sea change are both popular – people will move from expensive cities to regions or from one city to another for all sorts of reasons (property prices, weather, beaches, lifestyle).

People even move from NZ to AUS and vice-versa. So run ads in those places and see who you attract. They’re easy to do and easy to write, and you can spend $30 a day for a few days, so the risk is small.

I understand there’s work involved, but hey, the easy way isn’t very productive.

There are two more: Europeans wanting to come here on working holiday visas (called Work and Travel now because new names are important) and Europeans (mostly UK and Ireland) wanting permanent moves.

There are specialist recruitment agencies that will help with both.

I’ve listed the agencies in the guide and recapped your options. Grab the guide! My clients get help writing ads, posting, and managing Facebook ads, so if you need help there, you might have to book a call and buy some coaching.

Otherwise, ask for the guide.