Recruiting technical staff is the clearest test case for recruitment marketing. The market is empty, good tradespeople are locked into an employer, and on job boards you see the same handful of profiles land at every agency in the region. Yet technical recruitment scales well, as long as you stop advertising where all your competitors are.

The mechanic you want isn't searching

Someone working as a mechanic today rarely opens a job site. He works, he drives, and he scrolls on his phone in the evening. That means you only reach him on channels he already uses, with a message that interrupts that scroll. Not a job description, but a concrete offer: hourly rate, region, type of work, and what's different from his current employer.

What makes a technical campaign different

  • Pay and region in the ad itself. Without those two a tradesperson scrolls on.
  • Imagery of real work: workshop, van, tools. Stock photos of offices backfire.
  • An application funnel without a CV: tradespeople often have no up-to-date CV and drop out there.
  • Call, don't email. Follow-up decides whether a lead becomes an intake.

What you can expect

For Bureau In Techniek our campaigns delivered 107 candidates in 90 days. At De Klusbaas, 46 candidates came in for mechanics and foremen at €12.76 each with a 3.12% CTR. Both run on the same principle: narrow audience, concrete offer, low barrier, fast follow-up.

“In technical recruitment you don't win with the prettiest job ad, but with the clearest offer at the right moment.”

Cost per candidate is the number that matters

Agencies often steer on ad budget instead of cost per candidate. That's an expensive habit. Once you know what a usable candidate costs per campaign, recruitment becomes arithmetic instead of guesswork: with a known placement margin and conversion rate you know exactly how much you can invest per role.

Volume alone isn't enough

A hundred leads without a process produce fewer placements than thirty leads with a tight intake process. The biggest leak in technical recruitment is almost always between lead and intake: called too late, no second attempt, no fixed route to an appointment. That isn't a marketing problem, but it determines the return on your marketing.