Hiring and Keeping Good Techs When Everyone Is Short-Staffed

Ask any contractor what's capping their growth and you'll rarely hear "leads." You'll hear that they can't find people, or can't keep the ones they find.

It's a genuine structural shortage — the trades have an ageing workforce and thin replacement pipelines. But a lot of what gets blamed on the market is fixable, and it isn't mostly about money.

Why techs actually leave

Pay gets the blame in the exit conversation because it's the polite answer. The real reasons are usually more mundane:

Chaos. Schedule changes at 7am. Wrong parts on the truck. Turning up to a job with no idea what they're walking into. Good techs will take less money to work somewhere organised, because chaos is exhausting in a way money doesn't compensate for.

Being blamed for systems problems. The customer is angry because nobody told them the window changed. The tech absorbs that, every time, and eventually stops absorbing it.

No visible ladder. A 26-year-old who can't see what year three looks like will take the call from a competitor. Not for the money — for the picture of a future.

Getting reached at 9pm on a Sunday. Sometimes unavoidable. Constantly, and it's a resignation waiting to happen.

Notice that three of those four are operations problems, not compensation problems.

Where to actually find people

The channels that work aren't the ones most contractors try first.

Your own crew. A referral bonus paid in two parts — some at hire, the rest at 90 days — outperforms every job board most companies run. Your techs know who's good and who's unhappy at the competitor down the road, and they won't refer someone who'll embarrass them.

Trade schools and apprenticeship programmes. Slower, and you're training rather than hiring finished. But the loyalty from someone whose career you built is real, and you're not competing on salary against companies twice your size.

Adjacent trades. Someone with mechanical aptitude and a good attitude can be taught your trade. Someone with your trade's certificate and a bad attitude cannot be taught the attitude.

Your own customers. Homeowners occasionally mention a son or nephew looking for work. Worth listening for.

What generally underperforms: generic job boards, where you compete on salary alone against everyone in your metro.

Make the job ad about the job

Most contractor job posts are indistinguishable. "Competitive pay, great team, growing company." That describes every listing on the page.

Say the specific things:

• The actual pay range. Ads without numbers get filtered out by the good candidates, who have options and won't spend an interview finding out.
• What the schedule really is. Including on-call, honestly. Lying here just moves the resignation to month three.
• What the trucks and tools are like. Techs care enormously about this and nobody mentions it.
• What year two and year three look like.

Being honest about the hard parts filters better than dressing them up. Someone who takes the job knowing about the on-call rota stays.

The first two weeks decide retention

Most tech turnover happens early, and it's usually avoidable.

Have the truck, the tools, the uniform, and the phone ready on day one. Turning up to find nothing is prepared tells someone exactly how the rest of the job will go.

Ride along for the first week rather than sending them solo. Assign one person who's responsible for their questions — if it's everyone, it's nobody.

And check in at 30 days with a real conversation. Most people who quit at 90 days had already decided by 45, and nobody asked them anything before it was too late.

Systems are a retention tool

This is the part contractors underrate.

When a tech arrives at a job with the history in front of them — what was done last time, what the customer was told, what was deferred — they look competent. When they arrive blind and get asked about a conversation from March that nobody recorded, they look foolish.

That difference, repeated daily, is a large part of whether someone enjoys the job.

A dispatch board with real job history, photos, and notes isn't only an efficiency tool. It's the difference between a tech feeling supported and feeling set up.

Pay honestly, and structure it

Market pay is table stakes; it doesn't win anyone by itself. But how you structure it matters:

• Clear performance bonuses tied to things techs control — jobs completed, callback rate, review scores. Not to things they don't, like whether the office booked enough work.
• Certification pay bumps. A defined raise for a defined certificate turns a vague ladder into a concrete one.
• Consistent, predictable pay days. Sounds trivial. Isn't. A company that's occasionally late paying is a company people leave.

Avoid pure commission on repairs. It creates the incentive to oversell, which generates the reviews and the callbacks that cost you far more than the commission saved.

Two numbers worth tracking

90-day retention. What share of new hires are still there at 90 days? If it's low, your problem is onboarding, not recruiting, and hiring harder won't fix it.

Callback rate by tech. Not to punish people — to find who needs training and who should be training others.

The uncomfortable truth

You will lose people to companies that pay more. Some of that is unavoidable at your size.

What you can control is whether people leave because of the money, or because of the chaos. The first is a competitive fact. The second is a choice you're making without realising it.

---

We build dispatch CRMs that give techs the job history and context they need in the field. See the home services build.