Your Careers Page Is Why Nobody Applies

OHM Editorial Team

Open your careers page right now, on your phone, the way a tech would. If your company is like most, here is what he sees: a stock photo of somebody else’s crew, a paragraph about “competitive compensation,” a bulleted wall of requirements, and a form demanding a resume he does not have updated and would not send from a recliner at 9 PM anyway.

Then owners conclude that nobody wants to work anymore. Plenty of people want to work. They just read that page the way a homeowner reads a sketchy contractor website, and they made the same decision the homeowner makes: keep scrolling.

Key takeaways

• A contractor careers page has one reader, an employed tech quietly looking at night, who gives it thirty seconds to learn what the work is like and what it pays.
• The common mistakes that scare good techs away are hidden pay, a wall of requirements with no offer, stock photography, a mandatory resume, and silence about what happens next.
• A careers page that works shows the real crew on real jobs, publishes the pay range, describes the actual week, and lets two or three long-tenured techs explain why they stayed.
• A rough ninety-second phone video of the shop and crew is the one thing to add if nothing else changes this year, because a tech will watch real footage before reading a paragraph.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects steady openings across the trades for years, driven heavily by replacing retiring workers, so every shop in a market will be hiring into that reality.
• The afternoon fix is real photos, a published pay range, requirements cut to the three that matter, a text-a-human option, and a response-time promise, then rereading the page every six months.

Your Careers Page Has One Reader

Picture him, because he is specific. He is employed. He is decent at his job. Something at his current shop has been grinding on him for months: the dispatcher, the truck, the Saturday rotation, the raise that never lands. He is not applying anywhere. He is quietly looking, at night, with the same phone and the same skepticism he uses to buy anything.

He is not going to “submit his materials.” He is going to give you thirty seconds to answer three questions: what is it actually like there, what does it pay, and how much hassle is it to find out more? A page that answers all three keeps him. A page that answers none of them sends him back to the shop he already resents, for another year, while your truck sits unmanned.

What Scares Good Techs Away

The standard contractor careers page commits the same handful of sins, each one fixable in an afternoon.

• Hidden pay. “Competitive compensation” reads as “less than you hope.” The tech comparing three shops at 9 PM skips every one that hides the number, because the shop proud of its pay publishes it.
• A wall of demands before a single offer. Ten requirements, zero reasons. He knows what you want from him. The page never says what he gets from you beyond a job he already has somewhere else.
• Stock photography. A grinning model in a spotless uniform tells him the real shop is not worth showing. Techs read that instantly.
• The resume wall. Demanding a formatted resume from a working tradesman filters for people good at documents, not people good at the trade. The best techs bounce off it hardest.
• Silence about what happens next. No timeline, no name, no phone number. He assumes the application lands in a folder nobody opens, and in most companies he is right.

What a Careers Page That Works Looks Like

Everything a good service page does for a homeowner, done for a tech. It shows the real crew on real jobs, because that is the workplace he is evaluating. It talks about the week honestly: the schedule, the on-call rotation, the trucks, the tools, who stocks them. It names the pay range out loud, plus the parts that separate you, the training budget, the path from apprentice to lead, the fact that nobody gets screamed at over the radio.

Then it lets your people talk. A hundred words from your longest-tenured tech about why he stayed beats a thousand words of ours or yours. Two or three of those, with faces, and the page stops being an ad and starts being evidence.

If you add only one thing this year, make it a rough ninety-second video: a walk through the shop, a hello from the crew, the owner saying plainly what kind of person does well here. Phone quality is fine. Polish is not the point; proof is. A tech will watch a real ninety seconds before he reads a single paragraph, and it answers the question no text can: what does it feel like there?

Finally, it makes the first step tiny: a name and a phone number, or a three-question form that works with thumbs. “Text Mike, he runs the install crews” outperforms every application portal ever built for this audience. The commitment matches the moment, and the moment is a curious man in a recliner, not a job seeker in a career center.

The Page Is the Landing Zone, Not the Campaign

A great careers page with no traffic is a brochure in a drawer. It earns its keep as the destination for everything else: the social posts showing your crews, the referral links your techs share, the geofenced ads around supply houses, the line on every truck wrap. That machinery is the recruiting engine we covered in recruit techs the way you recruit customers, and it is the core of our recruitment marketing work.

The demographics guarantee this stays worth doing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects steady openings across the trades for years, driven heavily by replacement of retiring workers; the outlook for plumbers and pipefitters is typical of the whole sector. Every shop in your market will be hiring into that reality. The one with the honest page and the tiny first step collects the techs; the pattern runs strongest in plumbing, where the emergency rotation makes shop culture the whole ballgame, which is why careers infrastructure is baked into our plumbing marketing playbook.

Fix It This Month

The afternoon version: real photos up, pay range published, requirements cut to the three that matter, a text-a-human option added, and a promise about response time you intend to keep. The deeper version adds the tech testimonials, the day-in-the-life details and the traffic engine behind it.

Either version beats what is up there now, and you will feel the difference in the quality of who reaches out, not just the count. Set a reminder to reread the page every six months, because pay, crews and photos drift stale quietly, and a stale careers page reads exactly like a stale menu taped to a restaurant window.

Final Thoughts

You would never send customers to a page that hid your prices, showed someone else’s work and demanded paperwork before conversation. Your future techs are getting exactly that page, and they are responding exactly the way customers would.

The shortage is real, but the application drought on your end is partly self-inflicted, which is the good news: self-inflicted problems have same-month fixes. Rewrite the page for the man in the recliner. He is out there right now, grinding through another bad Saturday rotation, looking for a reason to text somebody.

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