Hiring a Tradesperson? Your Website Does Half the Work
A renovation company near Radom, two crews, work booked six months ahead. The advert for a tiler has been live on a job board for three weeks: three hundred views, four calls, two interviews arranged, one person actually turned up. The owner closes the case with the line you hear on every building site these days. There are no tradespeople left.
There are. They are simply the ones doing the choosing now. A good tiler has three offers in front of him and rejects two of them before he rings anybody back. He rejects them based on what he finds about your company on his phone in about five minutes. So the hiring process starts long before the interview, and for the first few days it runs entirely without you.
A candidate checks you out exactly the way a customer does
Someone who has seen your advert types your company name into Google. Same reason a customer does it before handing over a bathroom job: they want to know whether there is a real business behind the phone number. The difference is that the candidate is risking more. A customer risks a deposit, he risks six months of his working life and a steady job he would have to give up first.
He usually finds one of three things. Nothing at all, just a company registration and a number in some directory, which reads as „here today, gone next season”. A Facebook page whose last post is two years old, which is worse, because abandoned looks deliberate. Or a website with finished jobs, faces and specifics, which is evidence that there is money coming in to pay wages from. The third one does not guarantee he calls. It is the only one where he seriously considers it.
What a tradesperson reads in an advert, and what they scroll past
Small company adverts often read like they were copied from a corporate template, because that is what the templates online look like. A tradesperson reads them from the bottom up, hunting for numbers, and skips anything that sounds like a slogan.
| What the advert usually says | What the candidate actually wants to know |
|---|---|
| „A dynamic, close-knit team” | How many people are in the crew and who runs it |
| „Competitive pay” | The range, and which day of the month the money lands |
| „Experience welcome” | What sort of jobs, what size, whose tools |
| „Work on site” | Where exactly, is there a company van, who pays for overnight stays |
| „Room to grow” | Whether you pay for tickets and certification |
The right-hand column is your advert. A sentence like „four-person crew, jobs mostly within 40 km of Radom, company van with fuel, pay lands on the tenth, every month” tells a tradesperson more than a paragraph about passion and commitment. It reads less polished and it can be verified, which is the whole point of this conversation.
Pay ranges, and what leaving them out costs you
A candidate who already has a job will not ring you to ask about the rate. He assumes that a missing number means a low one, or one that gets negotiated downwards, and moves to the next advert. You lose him without a single click that would ever show up in your statistics.
Give a range and say plainly what moves someone up inside it: certification, working unsupervised, willingness to travel. If you pay by the square metre or by the job, write down what the crew actually earned last month and how many working days that took. He will do the maths in half a minute and either ring or spare you both an afternoon. An honest range also filters out the people you would not have hired anyway, so you get fewer conversations and better ones.
A careers page, not just a listing on a job board
A job board advert disappears after thirty days and takes everything you wrote in it with you. A careers page on your own site stays, and after a few months it starts collecting people who search for „tiler job Radom” or the local equivalent for your trade. It works in the months when you are not hiring at all, which is why it pays off even with one recruitment round a year.
What belongs on it:
- current roles, each with a pay range, the scope of the work and the certification required;
- a short description of what a week looks like: hours, where the crew meets, who sorts the materials;
- the vans you drive and the tools you work with, brand names included, because to a tradesperson that is a specific;
- what someone gets beyond the wage: workwear, a phone, training, insurance;
- one sentence on what happens after they apply and how quickly you reply.
You do not have to write this from scratch. If your services are already described in plain language, half the text exists, because a description of real jobs is also a description of the work. There is more on writing sections like this in our post on what to write on a business website.
An application form with an attachment, not „email us your CV”
An email address in an advert performs worse than you would think. People read adverts on a phone, during a break, on site. Copying the address, opening the mail app and attaching a file is three separate jobs, two of which get postponed until the evening, and the evening never comes. A form with a file field closes all of it on one screen.
In practice you need a name, a phone number, a box for a short message and an attachment for a CV or photos of finished work, because in the trades the photos count for more. Under the form goes a privacy notice: who controls the data, why you collect it, how long you keep an application and how someone asks you to delete it. If you want to keep details for future openings, add a separate, optional consent box rather than a line buried in your terms. How to handle that without a solicitor reviewing every sentence is covered in our post on GDPR and your privacy policy. The delivery side, including how to stop applications landing in spam, works the same way as it does for a contact form.
Photos of people and tools do the work of three paragraphs
A candidate wants to see where he would be working and who with. A shot of the crew by the van, the workshop, a finished bathroom with clean grout lines say more about your standards than any claim about attention to quality. Something else happens too, and it rarely gets mentioned: he sees faces and understands he would be joining a specific group of people, not an abstraction.
Stock photos do the opposite. A tradesperson spots them instantly, because he has seen the same grinning fitter in five other adverts. A phone camera from the last few years is plenty, which we go into properly in the post on photos for your business website.
Job boards bring the traffic, your site closes the deal
None of this means dropping job boards. They have reach you will not build yourself in a month. It is about the division of labour: the board brings a person in, your site answers the questions they were not going to ask out loud. So put the address of your careers page in the advert itself and say what they will find there, like photos of recent jobs and a description of the working week. Anyone who clicks is genuinely interested, and you get that signal before the first phone call.
You will reuse the same address in a trade group on Facebook, in a message to a mate in the business and every time somebody asks on behalf of a friend. One place to send everybody saves you explaining the same five things fifteen times over.
When a website will not help
If you pay noticeably less than the company two towns over, no careers page is going to make up the difference. If wages sometimes run two weeks late, word is already out and it travels faster than your advert. If you have been through four people in the same role this year, the problem sits in how the work is organised, not in how it is communicated. A website will only show what is there, and it will do it more efficiently than you would like.
The good news is that with a fair rate and a well-run crew, a website really does shorten hiring. Not because it pulls in crowds, but because the people who do ring already know what they are signing up for.
How this works with Sitario
The Start plan costs PLN 249 as a one-off, first year of hosting included, and gives you a multi-page site with a contact form that takes attachments, so you add the careers page yourself in the editor, with no message to us and no extra charge. Changes publish in about a minute, which matters while you are hiring: rates and roles get updated when you need them updated, not when somebody answers your email. Applications go to your own inbox and are counted in the panel like any other lead, so after a month you can see whether anyone is finding that page at all. You order the site through a form, look at the finished version after roughly an hour, and if it is not right you get your money back.
The short version
Hiring in a small service business is usually lost during the five minutes when a candidate is checking you out on his phone and you have no idea it is happening. A pay range instead of „competitive salary”, specifics about tools and jobs instead of slogans, a form with an attachment instead of an address to copy out, your own crew instead of stock images: you do these once and they keep working through every round of hiring after that. The job board will bring people to your door. Whether they stay is decided on your website.