16d • ✍️Job Ads✍️
I sent my client an email. A dealer competitor wrote it for me.
Last week I sent Jeff this email.
Hey Jeff,
I just saw an ad posted on LinkedIn for a tech at a Jaguar Land Rover dealer.
For the heck of it, I copied and pasted the full ad into the Ian Caldwell GPT to see what he thought of it.
This is one of the cool things you can do with this GPT avatar.
Most dealers make these same mistakes. You can beat them for top talent by avoiding them.
Take care,
- Chris
Then I paste in what the GPT sent back.
Ian opens like this:
"It is not a bad dealership ad. It is a bad ad for a technician like me."
He keeps going.
"Flat rate tells me speed pressure, and speed pressure usually means compromised standards."
"$25/hr to $65/hr is such a wide range that it doesn't build trust."
"There is nothing here about heritage work, owner expertise, tooling, team standards, or the kinds of vehicles in the bays."
And the line that closed it:
"A technician like Ian would not feel seen by this. He'd feel marketed to. And that usually means keep scrolling."
Here's what matters about that moment.
Jeff didn't get a pep talk.
He didn't get a "five hiring tips" email.
He got something closer to a real-time intelligence report on what his biggest regional competitor was doing wrong — delivered in the voice of the exact technician Jeff is trying to hire.
And the person who wrote that intelligence report isn't a consultant.
It's Ian.
Ian isn't real.
But he's real enough.
Let me back up.
Jeff owns a specialty shop. Heritage work. Restorations most shops won't touch. He's not competing with Midas. He's competing with a handful of dealerships and a smaller handful of specialty shops scattered across the country.
His hiring problem isn't volume. It's precision.
He doesn't need ten applicants. He needs one — a specific kind of technician you could probably count on both hands in each state. A craftsman who's been burned by dealers, burned by flat rate, burned by shops that talk about quality and then rush the work.
Writing a job ad for that technician isn't copywriting.
It's target acquisition.
In cases like this, before we write a single ad, we build someone like Ian.
Ian Caldwell is a construct.
Built from deep research — what this specific kind of technician believes, what hurts, what they're afraid of, what they dream about, what they want in a shop, and how they'd describe the perfect opportunity to a friend at midnight.
Then I loaded all of that into a custom GPT.
Now Jeff has something most shop owners have never had access to.
He has an interactive simulation of the person he's trying to hire.
He can paste a job ad into it and ask Ian what he thinks.
He can paste a competitor's ad into it and find out whether the competitor is a real threat or writing themselves out of the race.
He can test headlines. Interview questions. Onboarding scripts. Website copy. Benefits language.
And Ian will tell him, in Ian's voice, what a technician like that would actually think.
The mechanics aren't magic.
They're just thorough.
Five components go into building an avatar that works.
Beliefs — not demographics. What this person believes about their craft, their place in the world, what "doing it right" means to them. This is what separates your ideal tech from every other tech in the market.
Pain in their exact language — not summarized pain, not the HR-friendly version. The sentences this person would say to their spouse at 10pm after a long day. Verbatim. Because verbatim beats paraphrase every time.
The dream future — what "solved" looks like for them in their body, their relationships, their sense of self. Not perks. Not pay bands. Identity-level outcomes.
Buying psychology — how they decide. How long they take. What they check before they apply. What makes them skeptical. What earns their trust.
Media and rhythm — when they're on their phone. What they read. What they ignore. What they share.
Those five, built on real field research and assembled into a single voice, become the avatar.
The GPT is the tool. The voice inside it is the work.
Here's the part most shop owners miss.
The dealers within driving distance of Jeff are publishing ads his ideal technician would scroll past in under three seconds.
Every month Jeff doesn't run the right ad is a month a dealership fails to recruit the person Jeff could have hired.
That's not marketing theory.
That's his actual competitive position.
And he only knows it because Ian told him.
Most shop owners describe their ideal technician in three sentences or less.
Experienced. Good attitude. Shows up.
That's not an avatar. That's a wish list you could tape to any job ad in any shop in any city in the country.
Which is exactly why the ad doesn't work.
You can't write to a person you haven't met.
Sameness in means sameness out.
Btw, Ian has a photo too. Check it out below.
3
0 comments
I sent my client an email. A dealer competitor wrote it for me.
skool.com/technicianfind
Proven templates, strategies, training and top-level networking to help independent auto repair shops hire quality staff faster.
Leaderboard (30-day)
1
+25
2
+14
3
+4
4
+3
5
+3
Powered by