Marketing your firm to the people you need to hire
For most firms in this sector the constraint is not enquiries, it is people. Almost nobody treats hiring as a marketing problem, which is exactly why it stays one.
Ask most construction, manufacturing and design businesses what their biggest constraint is and the answer is rarely enquiries. It is people. Estimators, site managers, engineers, skilled trades, technical staff: the pipeline of work is frequently less of a problem than the pipeline of people to deliver it.
Almost nobody treats that as a marketing problem, which is why it stays a problem. Recruitment gets handed to agencies and job boards, both of which reach people who are already actively looking, and misses entirely the far larger group who would move for the right firm but are not searching today.
Why the careers page fails
Look at the careers page on most websites in this sector. It lists vacancies, adds a generic paragraph about being a great place to work, and gives an email address. It is written as an application form rather than as a piece of persuasion, and it is competing against every other firm that wrote the same page.
The person you actually want to hire is employed, reasonably content and mildly curious. They are not filling in forms. They are forming an impression of your firm from whatever they happen to come across, and then either bringing you up in a conversation or not.
What actually persuades a good hire
The work itself
Skilled people want interesting jobs. Project write-ups and site film do more recruitment work than any careers page, because they show what somebody would actually be doing all day.
The people they would work with
Named individuals, in photographs, doing the job. Anonymous stock imagery of hard hats says nothing, and every competitor is using the same library.
Whether it is a decent firm
How you talk about safety, training, apprenticeships and retention. Not as claims: as specifics, with numbers and names wherever you have them.
What progression looks like
The most common reason good people leave is that they cannot see the next step. Showing somebody who started where this candidate is now, and where they are today, does more than any list of benefits.
Honesty about the downsides
Travel, hours, the kind of sites you work on. Being straight about it filters correctly and is considerably more persuasive than pretending otherwise.
Where to put it
The channels that work for recruitment in this sector are not the ones that work for sales, with one exception. Paid social is consistently cheaper for reaching skilled trades and site staff than job boards, because you can target by location and interest and reach people who are not looking for anything.
LinkedIn works for technical and professional roles, and it works best from named people rather than the company page. A site manager posting about a job going well reaches more of the right people than a corporate vacancy post, and it is read as true rather than as advertising.
The careers page still matters, but as a destination rather than a channel. Its job is to convert somebody who has already become curious, which means it needs to answer the five things above rather than list what is currently vacant.
The measurement problem
Recruitment marketing is hard to attribute and easy to cancel for exactly that reason. The useful measures are indirect: how many applicants arrive directly rather than through an agency, what cost per hire looks like across a full year, and how often new starters say they had come across the firm before applying.
Ask that last question at every induction. It is the cheapest attribution available to you, and it usually reveals that the content people claim not to read is the content that brought them in.
Where to start if you are hiring now
None of this helps a vacancy that has to be filled this month, so it is worth separating the two jobs. The long job is becoming a firm people have heard of and think well of. The short job is filling the role, and a few things help immediately.
Write the advert like a person
Most job adverts in this sector are a copied job description with a salary band underneath. Say what the work actually involves, who they would report to, and what the first six months look like.
Put a real number on the pay
Competitive salary is read as below market, because the firms paying well tend to say so. It is the fastest single improvement available to any job advert.
Ask your own team
Referral schemes work in this sector because good trades and technical staff know other good trades and technical staff. Make it worth their while and remind them it exists.
Reply to everyone, quickly
The candidate market has long memories and small circles. A firm known for never replying earns a reputation that outlasts the vacancy by years.
Do those four while the longer work builds underneath. Inside a year the balance shifts, and roles start being filled by people who came to you rather than people an agency had to find.
The firms who solve this treat hiring as an audience to market to rather than a vacancy to fill. It is slower than an agency and considerably cheaper, and unlike a placement fee, the work keeps paying for the hire after next.
It is also worth photographing your own people properly at least once. Almost every firm in this sector is using either nothing or a stock image, and a set of real photographs of real staff on real jobs improves every recruitment asset you produce for the next three years.
Losing jobs for lack of people?
Tell us the roles you cannot fill. We will show you what the people you want would find if they looked you up today.
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