I Walked Away From a National Recruiter This Morning

They had the budget. They had the brand. They had every channel money can buy. They were still striking out.

A national recruiting agency called me this morning.

Their client runs reconditioning shops across the country. Hundreds of bays. Eight-figure ad budget. Every channel — Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, a dozen job boards I'd never heard of.

They were stuck.

Seventeen days into one of their campaigns, they had 65 applications.

Four had more than five years of experience.

Eight figures of ad budget. Every channel a recruiter could dream of. Six percent qualified.

The same rate you're pulling on your Indeed spend.

If you've been wondering why your ad money isn't working — it's not you. The model is broken.

The techs worth hiring aren't on job boards.

The senior recruiter on the call said it himself: the best ones send a text to somebody in their network and have a new job by Friday.

They never see your ad. They never see anyone's ad.

Job boards reach the techs who are actively unhappy enough to be looking. Everyone else — the ones you actually want — gets placed before they ever touch Indeed.

Which means more spend on the same model just buys you more access to the same shallow pond.

The empty bay keeps costing you $175K in gross profit a year. The Indeed bill keeps climbing. Nothing changes.

Reach and resonance are not the same thing.

Reach gets eyeballs. Resonance gets applications from techs who can actually do the work and fit in with your culture.

Money buys reach. Resonance is different. It takes the right ad — written to the conversation already running in a working tech's head — dropped where they hang out when they're not looking for work.

The agency had infinite reach. Zero resonance.

Four things came up fast.

One. No avatar. They were running ads without knowing who the ad was supposed to talk to.

Two. They were treating a small town in Southern California like a labor market. It isn't a labor market. It's a town. The conversation a tech is having with himself in a place like that is not the same one a tech is having in Boston.

Three. Every ad was getting filtered through two power centers — the agency's recruiters and the client's internal team. Every voice in the room wanted a say. By the time the ad went live, it sounded like everyone wrote it and no one meant it.

Four. They were measuring volume. They needed to measure fit.

I told them this wasn't going to work.

Not because I couldn't help. Because I knew I couldn't fix what was broken without fixing the way decisions were made.

So I passed.

Here's the pattern I see in every shop that wins at hiring.

The owner is the one making the call. Not a committee. Not a corporate office. Not a layer of recruiters between them and the ad.

Them.

In some cases there's a general manager involved.

If the GM is a strong leader and has been given the power to make decisions (A GM with no power is basically a babysitter) this arrangement can work out great as well.

The shops that win at hiring aren't the ones with the most money. They're the ones with the shortest distance between the diagnosis and the decision.

The giants are weaker than you are in your own zip code.

They don't know which dealer down the street just cut their flat-rate hours.

They don't know which shop just lost a tech to a divorce.

They don't know that the best technician in your town is currently miserable at the Firestone on Main Street.

You do. Or you could.

That's not a disadvantage. That's the entire game.

If you're tired of pouring money into a model the biggest spenders in the country are quietly admitting doesn't work — let's talk.

I take 4 Hiring Strategy Calls a week. We'll look at your market, your ads, and your pipeline — and I'll tell you exactly what I'd change. If we're a fit, we'll talk about working together. If we're not, you'll still walk away with a plan.

Apply here: [Talk to Chris]

0 comments