Every March the same thing happens. The schedule fills up, you need three more bodies, and you go post on a job board. Then you spend six weeks discovering that the people who apply to job boards for laborer roles and the people who are actually good at this work are two barely overlapping groups.
The person you want is already employed
The guy you actually want has a job. He is on a competitor’s crew right now. He is decent, he shows up, and he is mildly annoyed — about last Friday’s paycheck, about the foreman, about driving ninety minutes to a site. He is not unhappy enough to build a resume and start an account on a job board. He is exactly unhappy enough to send one text message at a red light.
That is the entire insight. The friction of applying is the filter, and it filters out precisely the wrong people. Resume upload keeps out the good tradesman who has not written a resume since 2009 and lets in the person who has applied to four hundred jobs this month.
Your trucks are already parked in front of your applicants
Think about where your vehicles sit. In driveways in the neighborhoods you work. At the supply house at 6:45am, next to every other crew in the county. At the gas station. At the light.
Every one of those is an impression on somebody who works in the trades, in your market, and knows what your work looks like. You are already paying for that advertising. Most contractors put a phone number on the door and nothing else.
Change it to: NOW HIRING — Text CREW to (555) 010-4477. Your texting number, your keyword. Same magnet, different job.
Where to put the keyword
Screen by text, before you spend a minute
The reason this does not drown you is that the screening happens before you look at anything. Someone texts CREW and gets an automatic screening conversation — ours runs today as a web link the applicant taps, and it moves onto text itself once carrier registration clears:
Six questions, answered in a text thread in ninety seconds. The ones who fail get a polite decline immediately, which is more respect than most job boards manage. The ones who pass get offered interview slots and pick one. You see a short list of screened people with times already on your calendar.
Then text them the night before
The single highest-return thing in trade hiring is a reminder the evening before the interview. No-show rates for walk-in trade interviews are ugly, and a reminder cuts them roughly in half for the cost of nothing. If you take one thing from this post and ignore the rest, take that one.
To be straight about our own build: automatic reminders are on the list, not in the product. What CrewFunnel gives you today is the booked slot and a calendar invite the applicant can add. Until the reminder ships, send it yourself — it is worth the ninety seconds.
Keep the list warm
The applicant you could not use in June is often exactly who you need in September. Keep the pool. When you need someone, one message to twenty screened people who already know your company beats starting from zero every time.
That is what CrewFunnel does for $69 a month — roughly what a job board charges you in clicks in a week.
