Hiring When There Are Only Four of Them and Everybody Knows Which Four

Danny needed a second tech in April and did what people do, which was write a job posting. It ran for three weeks. It produced four applications: two from ninety minutes away, one from somebody who had been let go by Brennan Paving for reasons everybody in the county already knew, and one that appeared to have been written for a warehouse job in a different state.

At the diner he laid this out as a problem. Walt Brennan, who had been hiring in Maple Run for thirty years, did not treat it as one.

"How many guys in this county can do what you need doing?"

Danny thought about it honestly. "Maybe six."

"Right. And you know all six by name, and five of them have jobs. So what exactly was the posting supposed to do?"

The pool is not unknown, it is known and employed

This is the fact that makes small town hiring different, and almost all recruiting advice assumes it away. Advice written for companies is about attracting applicants from a large pool: better job descriptions, wider postings, faster response times. Those things matter when there are two hundred plausible candidates and your problem is sorting them.

Your problem is the opposite. There are six, you can list them, and the reason they are not applying is not that they missed your advertisement. It is that they are already working somewhere.

So hiring here is not a search. It is a slower thing, closer to how the work itself arrives: relationships kept warm until a moment comes.

Where the people actually come from

Your own crew. The single best source, and the one most owners never explicitly ask. The people doing the work know who is good, who is unhappy where they are, and whose nephew is about to finish school. Ask directly, ask more than once, and make it worth their while when it works.

The counter and the yard. The supply house counter sees every tradesperson in the county several times a month and forms accurate opinions. So does the equipment dealer. These people know who shows up early, who is careful, and who is quietly looking.

The vocational program. The teacher at the career and technical center spends two years watching young people work with their hands and knows exactly which ones will be reliable. Almost nobody bothers to build that relationship, which is why it is available. It pays two years later, which is why it has to be started before you need it.

The other trades. The electrician and the plumber are not competitors, they are the two other people in town with the same problem and a different applicant flow. Somebody they interviewed and could not use may be exactly right for you.

Hire for the thing you cannot teach

In a county with six capable tradespeople and five of them employed, insisting on experience means hiring nobody. The alternative is not lowering the bar, it is moving it: hire for reliability, care and the willingness to be taught, and teach the trade.

That is only honest advice if the business can actually teach. Training is not the same as supervising, and a shop where everyone is running flat out has no capacity to do it, which is how businesses end up permanently unable to hire and permanently blaming the labor market. If the plan is to train, somebody's week has to have room in it. That is a real cost and it should be planned like one.

Your reputation as an employer is public here

Every workplace in a small town has a known character, and it is known accurately. Whether you pay on time, whether the trucks are safe, whether the boss shouts, whether last winter's hours were honest, all of that circulates without your participation and long before anybody considers applying.

The uncomfortable and useful version of that fact is this: if hiring is impossible for you and possible for the outfit two towns over, the labor market may not be the variable. The good news, as with everything else in a place this size, is that the reputation is repairable and the repair is visible to everyone.

Three readings to take this week

• Write down every person in your county who could do the work. If the list is short, accept that a job posting is the wrong instrument and stop spending weeks on one.
• Ask each person on your crew, individually, who they would want to work with. Then ask what would have to be true for that person to leave where they are.
• Call the vocational instructor and offer to show up. Not to hire today, to be known there. It is the cheapest thing on this list and the slowest to pay, which is exactly why the opening is still open.

Adapted from Small Town Strategy: Simple Marketing for People with Real Work to Do, out now on Amazon in paperback ($14.99) and Kindle ($6.99).