Forty applicants and nobody hireable is not a hiring market problem. It is usually a posting that described an idea of a job rather than the job, and so attracted people who wanted the idea. The cost of that is not the advertising. It is the twelve hours of phone calls, the two interviews with people who were never going to take it, and the six weeks you spend back where you started.
A posting has one job, which is to make the wrong people close the tab. Everything below serves that.
Put the pay in the ad
An hourly range or a salary band, stated. Not competitive, not depends on experience. Roughly a third of the people who would have applied will not apply to a posting with no number in it, and they are disproportionately the ones already employed and doing fine, which is to say the ones you want.
A range costs you nothing you were not going to pay anyway. If the top of your range is below what the work commands locally, the ad has told you that before you wasted anyone's afternoon, which is cheaper than learning it at the offer stage. A growing number of states now require a range in the posting outright, so check whether the question is even yours to decide.
Say whether the role is exempt or non exempt, which is the distinction between a salaried position with no overtime owed and an hourly one where extra hours have to be paid at a premium. Get this wrong on purpose and it is expensive later, because the classification follows from duties and pay measured against a federal standard, not from what the posting decides to call the job. An evening with the Department of Labor's own explanation of exempt status settles it for most small operations.
One more line belongs near the pay. Say what the schedule is. Forty hours, four tens, twenty five hours with the possibility of more, seasonal from March to November. Hours are the second thing every applicant wants to know and the thing postings hide most often, usually because the honest answer is that it varies. Say that it varies, and say what the low weeks look like. Someone who needs a steady forty will not apply, which saves you the conversation in week three when they find out.
Describe the week, not the mission
Nobody chooses a job on the strength of a sentence about a passion for excellence. They choose on Tuesday. So write Tuesday.
- What time the day starts and where.
- What the person will physically be doing for the first three hours.
- Who they talk to, and how often somebody is looking over their shoulder.
- What the busiest stretch of the year looks like and how long it lasts.
- What they will be trusted to decide alone by month three.
- What comes next if they are good, and how long that usually takes.
Six short blocks. A person reading that either pictures themselves in it or does not, and both outcomes save you money.
Name the three things people quit over
Every job has them. Early starts. Weekend rotation. Driving in weather. A customer base that is often having a bad day by the time it reaches you. Lifting. A stretch of the year where days run long and nobody gets vacation.
Write them down in the ad, plainly, without apologizing for them. Two things happen. The people for whom that is a dealbreaker screen themselves out for free. And the people who apply anyway have already accepted the hardest part of the job before they ever spoke to you, which is worth more in month four than anything you can say in an interview.
Ask for one thing that takes ten minutes
Not a portfolio, not a cover letter, not a personality assessment. One short specific task. Send a photo of a tool you own and use. Answer one question in three sentences: what would you do if you arrived and the customer was not home. Reply with your availability for the week after next.
The point is not the answer, though the answer is occasionally revealing. The point is that a person who cannot spend ten minutes on the application will not spend ten minutes on a job either. Applicants who mass apply to sixty postings a day will skip yours, which is the whole idea.
What to leave out
Leave out the phrase about wearing many hats, which reads to anyone experienced as a warning that the role is undefined. Leave out the list of software you might use one day. Leave out any adjective about the culture, because culture claims in postings are worth nothing and everyone knows it.
Leave out the wish list too. A posting demanding five years, a certification, a clean record, and open availability, offered at a starting wage, will be answered mostly by people who read none of it. Ask for what the job actually requires on day one and say what you are willing to train.
Where you put it matters as much as what it says
A first hire in a trade rarely comes from a national job board. The reliable channels are narrower and mostly free. The counter at the supply house. The instructor at the community college program that trains people in exactly this. Your own customers, who know who did good work for them last year. The person who applied eighteen months ago and took something else.
Leave the posting up for a fixed window and say so in it. Two weeks, closing on a stated date. An open ended posting drifts, the good applicants who applied in week one go cold waiting, and you end up choosing from whoever happened to be available in week six. A closing date also gives you a reason to reply to everyone, which costs an hour and buys you a reputation that pays off the next time you are hiring.
What a good posting produces
Fewer applicants. Six or eight instead of forty, and most of them worth a phone call. The screening happened while you were asleep, done by the applicants themselves, using the information you gave them.
That is a better trade than it sounds. The first hire sets what the second one expects, and a person who arrived knowing exactly what the work was tends to still be there when you need to make that second hire.