RunCabin Blog · For working contractors

How do I find good help for my trade business?

August 27, 2026 · 7 min read

There is a specific week that happens to almost every one-truck business that is going well. You turn down a job because you cannot physically get to it. Then you turn down another one. You start quoting two weeks out, then three, and you can feel customers deciding to call somebody else while you are still typing the estimate. The work is there. You are the bottleneck.

So you post a help-wanted ad, and one of two things happens. Nothing at all, or a pile of people who have never held the tool. Either way you conclude that nobody wants to work, put the ad away, and go back to sixty-hour weeks.

Here is the part that reframes the whole problem. The people you actually want already have a job. They are not sitting at home refreshing a job board. They are on somebody's truck right now, getting paid every Friday. So your ad is not competing with other ads. It is competing with a paycheck they already trust, from a boss they already know, and the entire decision is whether your shop is a safer bet than the one they are standing in.

They vet you exactly like a customer does

A homeowner who gets your name looks you up before they call. We wrote a whole piece on the quiet check customers run before they hire you, and the same thing happens in hiring, except the stakes for the person doing the looking are much higher. A customer is risking one job. A tech thinking about leaving a steady position is risking their mortgage on whether your company is still around in eighteen months.

So they do the search. They read your Google reviews, and they are not reading them the way a customer does. They are reading for whether you fight with people, whether jobs go sideways, whether the owner sounds like someone who would blame a tech in public. They look at whether your trucks and your site look like a company or like a side gig. Then they ask around, because in most towns every trade knows every other trade, and your reputation with the supply house counter is already public information.

Nothing about that check is unfair. It is the same due diligence you would do. But it means the version of your business that exists online is doing the recruiting whether you meant it to or not.

What has to be on the page

The single highest-value thing you can build here is one page you can send everybody to. Not a PDF, not a Facebook post that scrolls away in a day. A page with a link you can put in every job ad, text to a guy you met on a job site, and print on a card for the counter at the supply house.

Put the answers on it. Specifically, the answers people are embarrassed to ask on a first phone call:

• A pay range in actual dollars. "Competitive pay" is read as "below market, and he knows it." A range with a reason attached is better: what the low end is for, what the high end takes.
• Hours, start time and how overtime works. Whether Saturdays happen. Whether there is on-call, and roughly how often.
• Weekly or every two weeks. This matters more to people than owners expect.
• Take-home truck or not. A truck is worth real money to somebody with a long commute, and it also says the company owns equipment.
• Whose tools, and whether you cover boots or a tool allowance.
• How far the work travels. A ninety-minute drive to a job site is a dealbreaker for some good people, and better found out now.
• Time off, and whether it exists in practice. If it is unpaid and flexible, say that instead of implying more.
• Licensing, continuing education and apprentice hours. If you will sign off on hours or pay for a renewal or a class, that is one of the strongest things a small shop can offer, and almost nobody puts it in writing.
• Who the crew actually is. If it is you and one other person, say so. Some of the best techs are actively trying to leave a company where they are a number.

Be honest about the parts that are not great. A small shop cannot out-benefit a hundred-truck company, and pretending otherwise just means the person quits in month three when they find out. What you can offer is real: no layers, no dispatcher fighting you, the owner on the job, a say in how work gets done, and a straight line to more responsibility. Say that plainly. Owners who write the honest version get fewer applicants and better ones.

Make applying take two minutes

The way most small shops accidentally kill their own hiring is by asking for a resume. Most working tradespeople do not have one, have not updated one since 2014, and will simply not do it from a phone at 8pm. Asking for it does not filter for skill. It filters for people who are comfortable with paperwork, which is not the same thing at all.

Take applications the way people actually communicate. A short form on the page that lands in your inbox, plus a number they can text. Five questions is plenty: name, phone, what trade work they have done and for how long, whether they have a valid driver's license, and when they could start. That is enough to decide whether to call.

Then call fast. The same speed rule that governs how quickly you should answer a website lead applies here, and arguably harder. Somebody who is quietly looking is talking to two or three shops, and the one who calls back that afternoon is the one who gets the conversation. Waiting four days to reply tells them exactly what it is like to work for you.

One practical note: use an email address at your own domain for this. A hiring email at a free provider undercuts the whole "we are a real company" argument you are making on that page. Here is how to get an email address at your business name if you are still on a personal one.

Where to actually post it

Point everything at the one page. The channels are just traffic.

• Your own crew, first. A referral bonus that is real money, paid in two pieces: some at hire, the rest at ninety days. Good techs know other good techs, and they will not refer someone who will make them look bad.
• The supply house. The counter staff know who is unhappy, who just got laid off, and who is about to go out on their own. This is the highest-signal channel in the trades and it costs nothing but conversation.
• The local trade school or apprenticeship program. For a helper rather than a lead tech, this is the pipeline, and instructors will tell you which students actually show up on time.
• Other trades on your job sites. The electrician on a remodel knows a plumber who is fed up. Trades cross-refer people constantly.
• Local trades groups on Facebook, the ones where your area actually talks, not the national ones.
• The big job boards, because they do bring volume. Just expect to do the screening yourself, and send everyone to your page for the details.

The trial day, and the part that bites

An hour across a table tells you almost nothing. A day on a real job tells you everything: whether they take their boots off in somebody's house, whether they clean up without being asked, whether they can be corrected twice without getting sore about it.

Pay them for that day, at the rate you quoted. An unpaid tryout reads as cheap to exactly the person you are trying to recruit, and wage and hour rules on unpaid work are not a good place to improvise.

And before anyone rides along, make the two calls that protect you: your insurance agent, and whoever handles your payroll or your state's labor and workers' compensation rules. Whether this person is an employee, what coverage has to be in place before they set foot on a job site, and how the payroll gets handled are questions with real answers in your state. Getting them wrong is how a mediocre hire turns into a genuinely bad year. Make those calls before the ad goes up, not after somebody says yes.

Why late August is the moment

There is a calendar reason not to file this under someday. Heating season, fall roofing and gutter work, and the pre-holiday remodel rush all land within a couple of months, and a tech hired in October is still learning your trucks and your customers when the phone starts ringing. Hiring runs slower than you want it to: a person who is quietly looking usually needs two weeks to give notice, and then a few weeks before they are worth what you are paying them. The crew you want in November is the one you start talking to now.

Where RunCabin fits

RunCabin builds and runs the site for $39.99/mo, flat, and a hiring page is one sentence of work. You ask for it in plain English - the position, the pay range, the hours, the truck, what you want them to send you - and the page exists, with a form that drops applications straight into your inbox. When the pay range changes, or the job is filled, or you want the page down for six months and back up in the spring, you ask again and it changes in moments. No ticket, no designer, no paying somebody for an hour of work to edit one number.

Your domain, professional email at that domain and a logo are included, so the hiring email lands from your business name rather than a personal account. No setup fee, no contract, and the site and domain are yours to take with you whenever you want. The point is that the week you decide to hire, you should be spending your evenings calling people back, not waiting on a website change.

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Related reading: do customers really check your website before they hire you · how to make a one-person business look professional online · how to get work from property managers and GCs