This is not a case study with an invented client and an impressive result underneath it. This is the build itself: how a campaign for scarce technical profiles — mechanics, welders, electricians, service technicians — is put together, from client intake to the first candidate interviews. Week by week, including the choices that actually matter and the things that simply do not work for roles like these.

Week 0 — The intake: three questions that decide whether the vacancy is fillable

Before a single euro goes into ads, you need to know whether this vacancy can be filled at all. Three questions decide that, and none of the three is about marketing.

  1. How does the whole package compare to similar employers within thirty minutes of travel? Not just the hourly rate: shift allowance, travel compensation, overtime, contract type. If it sits structurally below the market with nothing to offset it, no advertisement will sell it.
  2. Who calls the applicant, and within how many hours? If the answer is ‘we check it daily’, you already know where the campaign will break.
  3. What is the applicant allowed to skip? Can they apply without a CV? How many interviews sit between application and offer? Every extra step costs you candidates who could start somewhere else tomorrow.

If you do not get concrete answers to those questions, this is not a campaign brief yet, it is a sales conversation. How to organise that kind of conversation with new clients is covered in cold outreach for staffing agencies.

Week 1 — Research: what this profile actually wants to know

The vacancy text almost always says the same thing: dynamic organisation, competitive salary, great team. A mechanic with five years of experience reads nothing into that. He judges a job on six things, and they are rarely in the text.

  • Shift pattern — days, two shifts, on-call? What time do you get up and when are you home?
  • Travel distance — in minutes, not kilometres, and with or without rush hour.
  • Equipment — which tools, machines and brands do you work with, and do you get your own van?
  • Progression and certification — does the employer pay for welding certificates, electrical safety standards, advanced safety training or a service technician course?
  • Shift allowance and overtime — the percentage, and whether overtime is paid out or taken as time off.
  • The team — how many colleagues, how old is the crew, do you work alone or in pairs.

You do not get those answers from the vacancy text but from the intake, from the recruiter’s notes on why earlier candidates dropped out, and from the vacancies of the four competitors within the same travel time. That last one is free market research: if three of the four mention a 20% shift allowance and your client does not, you know which angle is not yours.

Week 1 — Building three angles, not three colour variants

A test with three ads that differ only in background colour is not a test. You want to know which motive moves this audience, and that means three substantively different angles:

  • The time angle — day shift, fixed hours, home by four. Lands with people who just had kids or want out of rotating shifts.
  • The work angle — what you actually work on, which equipment, which installations. Lands with skilled people who are bored at their current employer.
  • The step-up angle — paid certifications, from mechanic to service technician, more responsibility. Lands mostly with the 25 to 35 age group.

Each angle gets its own image and its own first line. Footage from the workshop — a phone video with real sound, real people, a real van — almost always outperforms polished stock material with this audience, simply because it is recognisable and verifiable. What you are testing is the angle; keep format and structure as similar as you can, or you will not know afterwards what made the difference.

Week 2 — Targeting on travel time and the landing page

Geo based on travel time instead of province

A mechanic does not think in provinces, he thinks in minutes. An entire province is as useless a target as an entire country: you pay for impressions to people facing a ninety-minute drive. Draw your radius around the work location — not the head office, because he will never go there — and correct for reality: 25 kilometres along a two-lane road with two bridges is fifty minutes, 25 kilometres along the motorway is twenty. Start tight around the location and widen if volume stays too low. That beats going broad on day one and spending half your budget on candidates who would never make the trip.

The landing page and the application flow

The page has to repeat the angle from the ad literally. If someone clicks the time angle and lands on a generic company page, that is a drop-off. Above the fold you put the facts he was looking for: location, shift pattern, salary range, contract type. No company history. The form has four fields at most, does not ask for a CV, and offers WhatsApp as an alternative. Everything you ask for before the first conversation costs you applications — the full treatment of that is in a vacancy landing page that converts.

Week 2 — The first 72 hours

In the first three days you look at plumbing, not at winners. What you are allowed to conclude:

  • Whether the ads are being delivered at all, and at what CPM.
  • Whether the landing page works technically on mobile, including the form and the thank-you page.
  • Whether there is an obvious leak: a hundred clicks and zero form starts is not chance, it is a bug.
  • Whether one angle gets no clicks at all — that one can go.

What you cannot conclude yet:

  • Which angle wins. With four applications per angle you are measuring noise, not preference.
  • What a placement costs. You only know that once the first interviews have happened.
  • Whether quality is disappointing. Two weak applications say little about the audience and a lot about chance.

In practice that means: in 72 hours you fix what is broken, switch off what demonstrably does nothing, and leave the rest alone. Touching the controls every day is the fastest way to make sure a campaign never learns anything.

Week 2-3 — The handover to the recruiter

This is where the campaign is won or given away. A mechanic applies to three or four vacancies in one evening. Whoever gets him on the phone first has the conversation; the rest talk to someone who is already interviewing elsewhere.

  • Call, do not email. A Tuesday evening application gets called on Wednesday morning, not Friday.
  • Not reachable? Send a WhatsApp immediately with your name, the agency and which vacancy he applied to — otherwise he will not pick up an unknown number.
  • The first call is short and concrete: shift pattern, travel time, availability, expectations. Not a full intake.
  • Measure the time between application and first contact as a campaign KPI, because that is what it is.

In our Job Acquisition Marketing engagements a campaign is live within seven days; that is the delivery guarantee. But those seven days only matter if the follow-up on the agency side is just as tight. A campaign that produces applications on day eight which are called on day eleven does not have a campaign problem.

What does not work for scarce technical roles

Being honest about this saves you months:

  • Running a campaign on an offer that does not stack up. If the vacancy has been open for two years and nothing changes about shift, pay or travel time, marketing only accelerates the disappointment.
  • LinkedIn only, for hands-on technicians. They are on it, but they do not look for work there.
  • A form that asks for a CV. Many mechanics do not have one, or not on their phone.
  • One angle with the entire budget. You cannot know in advance which motive wins, and that certainty is only bought with variants.
  • Forwarding to a general phone number or an info@ address.
  • Waiting for ‘enough data’ while applications sit there and nobody calls them.

Conclusion

A campaign for scarce technical profiles is not a creative gamble but a chain: an intake that tests fillability, research into what this profile actually weighs, three substantive angles, targeting on travel time, a page that finishes what the ad started, three days of restraint, and a recruiter who calls the same morning. Drop one link and you see it in the number of interviews — not in the number of clicks.

Want to work this through for a specific vacancy? Book a call and bring the vacancy that has been open the longest — we will put the three intake questions to it straight away.