Recruiting technicians - Why untargeted advertising stalls and targeted media does work

Ask an installation company, a machine builder or a car dealership what their biggest bottleneck is and the answer is almost always the same: we cannot get enough technicians. The numbers back that up. The Dutch UWV tension indicator showed that in the first quarter of 2026, 94 percent of occupational groups were tight or very tight, with machine fitters and vehicle technicians among the roles expected to get tighter still towards 2030. Recruiting technicians is not a problem that disappears once the economy cools down.

Most employers still respond in the same way: post more vacancies, push more budget into job boards, add another staffing agency. Understandable, and it rarely works. Not because advertising does not work, but because untargeted advertising does not work. When everyone is competing for the same few thousand people, you win with sharper targeting, an honest picture of the work, a process nobody gets lost in and attention for the technicians you already have.

Why doesn’t posting more vacancies bring in technicians?

The technicians you want are not looking. They have a job, they earn a reasonable wage and they have no appetite for hassle. A vacancy only reaches the small share actively searching right now, and that share is being approached by all your competitors at once. You are paying into an auction where the price rises every quarter, while the group you actually want is not even looking. That same budget does deliver once it reaches the right people with a message that holds up.

What you need is visibility with people who are not searching at all. So show what the work actually looks like, who is on the team and what kind of jobs you do, all year round, on the channels technicians already use. Not a six week campaign, but something that stays up.

And sometimes the conclusion is uncomfortable: not every hiring problem is a campaign problem. If your process takes three weeks, more media budget is just a more expensive way to lose the same people. The reverse holds just as firmly: once the story and the process are right, media pays for itself. That is why we only open it up fully when the foundation is in place.

Who is the technician you are looking for, and what do they look at?

Start with the person, not with yourself. A 24 year old who has just qualified, a 38 year old service technician with two young children and a 55 year old craftsman protecting his back look at completely different things. Travel time, shift patterns, the state of your van, whether you get called on a Saturday morning: that decides the conversation at the kitchen table. Not your mission statement.

Working outside-in means finding out what moves this group first, through real conversations and behavioural data rather than assumptions, and only then writing and advertising.

Be honest about who you are competing with. A mid-sized machine builder competes not only with the company on the next industrial estate, but with employers like ASML, who pull technicians in from a far wider radius. You do not win that fight on salary. You win it on what you genuinely have: short lines, varied work and a manager who knows your name.

Why is your job ad a bigger bottleneck than your salary?

Most job ads for technicians are role profiles with a thin layer of marketing on top: no figure, the work in abstractions, and a list of requirements half your current team would fail. The text itself is your biggest leak.

Naming the salary is the easiest win available. Indeed data shows that vacancies including salary information attract around 25 percent more applications and carry roughly 40 percent lower cost per application. For an audience that knows the going hourly rate, an ad without a figure is less credible.

And do not write “varied duties”. Describe a Tuesday: where you start, which systems you work on, who you call when something goes wrong. There is more on that in our article on employer branding and vacancies.

What can you learn about recruiting technicians in Germany and the UK?

The problem is not a Dutch one. In Germany, the shortage analysis by the Bundesagentur für Arbeit counts 163 occupations with structural shortages, explicitly including construction and skilled trades, while the ZDH points to more than 200.000 unfilled positions in the Handwerk. German installation and automotive firms therefore started training their own people earlier, with apprenticeship routes built into their employer brand.

The UK offers a different lesson. Health and Safety Executive figures show that stress and physical strain account for a large share of absence in construction and technical trades. British employers see skilled people leave for companies that pay slightly less but offer a predictable rota and a shorter commute. Where the market is tightest, the conversation shifts fastest to how the work is organised.

How do you stop a new technician from leaving within a year?

This is where the biggest and cheapest win sits. The labour market forecast by Wij Techniek for the Dutch installation sector assumes around 121.000 new people are needed over the next five years, against an outflow of roughly 118.000. You are running hard to stand still. And it contains the number that really matters: nearly half of workers under 25 leave the sector within their first year.

That is not a recruitment problem, it is a promise problem. Anyone who joins with a picture that does not match reality leaves again. Recruitment does not stop at the signature: the first weeks and the coaching in the van are part of the same journey. A job is not a product you buy. A job comes home with you, and the promise you make in a campaign has to be delivered by real colleagues every Monday morning.

It pays off directly. Research by Burks, Cowgill, Hoffman and Housman in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that people hired through a colleague are substantially less likely to leave and deliver more profit per hire. Technicians who enjoy their work bring in new ones. Not a referral bonus, but the result of a story that holds up.

Why is an honest picture of the work your best filter?

Many employers do not dare show the hard part of the job: early starts, working outside in the rain, being on call at weekends. The fear is that it puts people off. It does, and that is exactly the point. Research on realistic job previews has pointed the same way for decades. Meta-analyses by Phillips and later Earnest and colleagues show that candidates given a realistic picture up front are less likely to leave, mainly because it signals that the employer is honest. Video scores well on both offer acceptance and that sense of honesty.

So your employer brand does two things at once: it attracts and it filters. The candidate who drops out over the on-call rota would have found it after three months anyway, except by then you would have paid for their onboarding and their van. How to film that without turning it into an advert is covered in our article on creating a recruitment video.

Where does AI help with recruiting technicians, and where does it not?

AI is excellent for scale. Twenty ad variants across three regions and four age groups, faster testing, copy that fits each branch: work that used to take weeks, now an afternoon.

Something is shifting on the candidate side too. Research by Gdoc.io among 500 American job seekers, carried out via Pollfish in April 2026, found that roughly a third use AI in their job search, with ChatGPT leading. Candidates increasingly ask a model what kind of employer you are. If your careers content is thin, the model fills the answer with what others have written about you.

What AI is not for: faking people. A generated technician in a generated workshop convinces nobody who knows the trade. Why rebuild someone synthetically when you can film them, with their own accent and their own story about that call-out at half past eleven at night? AI for scale, people for substance.

How does MonFri approach recruiting technicians?

We do not start with a campaign, but with the question of which number has to move. Applicant volume, the throughput time of your process, the quality of what comes in, or first year turnover? We fix that up front with a baseline, so you can show internally afterwards what it delivered.

Then we build outside-in: research among the target group, an honest employer story, content made on the shop floor instead of in a studio, and paid media we steer per region, audience and vacancy based on what actually comes in. That last part is exactly where generic campaigns stall and where we make the difference. We stay involved during the first months too, because a hire who leaves after ten months does not count for us. More on our services page and in our article on recruiting tech talent.

Want to talk through your own hiring challenge? Call 020 23 38 587 or email hi@mon-fri.com.