TL;DR: Hardly a week goes by that a shop owner doesn’t tell our team they need to fill a position, and usually they need that person yesterday. What most of them miss is that the answer is already in front of them. Your website, social media, reviews, even the shirt your tech wears into the grocery store all of it is recruiting whether you’re using it that way or not. Here’s how to put it to work on purpose.
Somewhere right now, a good technician is standing in a dark, disorganized shop, working with old, outdated equipment. They aren’t looking for a new job. They aren’t updating a resume on their lunch break. They’re just scrolling, a little tired, a little undervalued, not actively thinking about leaving.
Then they see a post from another shop. The owner took a team member out to lunch. They think, “My boss doesn’t do that.” They don’t apply. Not yet. But a seed just got watered.
That’s recruiting. It didn’t come from a job board. It came from marketing.
Your Marketing Was Never Just for Customers
Most shop owners treat hiring and marketing like two completely separate problems. One is about getting customers in the door. The other is about finding people to work on the cars once they’re in the bay.
Your marketing does the same job for a future team member that it does for a future customer. It helps them get to know you, like you, and trust you, long before they ever fill out an application. Marketing and recruiting are not two different things. It’s the same marketing doing two jobs.
The technician shortage comes up with our clients every single week, and some weeks it comes up in every meeting. Somebody always needs a position filled, and usually they needed it filled yesterday.
Cut the Fancy Words Out of Your Job Listings
Jen Rindflesh, owner of Collinsville Auto Repair in Canton, Connecticut, is a longtime client and a friend of ours, and she cares deeply about her team and her community. Like every shop, hers isn’t immune to team changes. Life happens. She suddenly needed to fill three positions at once. Not eventually. Immediately. She brought it to our team, and it became an all-hands effort. Our social team got the posts and job listings ready, our ads team got ads running for all three roles, and her customer success manager made hiring the focus of their monthly meeting. At first, the listings leaned detailed. That was the direction Jen thought she wanted.
Once the interviews started, she realized the listings weren’t telling the full picture of what the positions were, and they weren’t attracting the right people. The wording was too complicated. Jen knew exactly what she wanted changed, so together we stripped the listings down, cut the fluff, and kept only what a candidate needed to know: the perks, the benefits, and exactly what the job involved. After that, she started having conversations with people who fit and knew what they were walking into. One position filled quickly, and the other two were well on their way.
Less really is more here. I see shop owners post these long, drawn-out job listings that read more like a book than an invitation. Before you post anything, put yourself in the shoes of the technician scrolling at lunch. Would this grab their attention? Would it stop the scroll? Or would it just look like more words to skim past?
What Your Careers Page Should Be Doing
A good careers page answers the questions a candidate is too nervous to ask out loud. Jen’s careers page opens with a video, team members talking about what it’s really like to work there, not a stock photo and a paragraph of corporate language.
From there, it answers what technicians are already wondering. Is there enough work here for me to make good money? She addresses that with a line about a loyal customer base and bays that stay full. Will I be stuck fighting with outdated tools? She covers that with updated, high-quality equipment, and she even names the paperless system her techs work in. What’s the team really like? What are the hours? She lays out the team atmosphere, the four-day work week, her mission, vision, and values, and makes the application easy to access.
None of that is complicated. It’s just complete. A lot of shops never say any of it out loud, let alone put it on a webpage, and then wonder why a great technician working in a dark, under-equipped shop down the street never thinks to apply.
Showing Your Culture Does Double Duty
A technician who already has a job needs a reason to look twice. They want to know what the vibe is. How people treat each other. Whether they’d really belong there.
That’s where behind-the-scenes content comes in. Team birthdays, work anniversaries, a quick bio on each person in the shop, a goofy video asking everyone their favorite and least favorite thing to work on. It’s easy to create, and it tells a candidate exactly what they’re walking into before they ever send a resume.
Here’s the part that makes this worth the effort twice over. Showing real culture doesn’t just help you hire faster. It helps you keep the person you hired longer, because they already knew what they were signing up for. That’s a win on both ends.
Water what you want to grow. Every birthday post, every team lunch, every honest look inside your shop waters the seed you planted with that tech scrolling on their lunch break.
Your Reviews Are Doing More Recruiting Than You Think
Before a technician applies anywhere, there’s a good chance they’re reading your reviews, and not only the ones from customers. They’re trying to answer a simple question: is this place honest, and is it well run?
Customer reviews tell that story whether you want them to or not. A string of complaints about slow service, upselling, or dishonesty says plenty to a technician deciding where to send a resume. The details people share about the shop itself say just as much: clean or dirty, organized or chaotic, well equipped or falling apart.
The more honest detail you can put in front of people, in reviews, on your site, in your social content, the less a prospective hire has to guess. They can find the truth about your shop without digging for it, and if that truth is good, it works in your favor every single time.
Keep Your Hiring Ads Simple
A good technician hiring ad isn’t complicated. It’s clear. A bright, eye-catching graphic. A direct link to the careers page. The job title, a few bullet points on what you’re looking for, and your benefits. That’s it.
The moment an ad turns into paragraphs of text, people scroll right past it. It looks like work to read, and nobody wants more work on their lunch break. Jen chose to have an ad for each open position, so that’s what we ran. Some shops prefer one ad that covers several roles. It’s the shop owner’s call. Either way, keep each one simple, make it intriguing enough to earn the click, and turn it off the moment that seat gets filled.
Put Hiring on Your Marketing Meeting Agenda
Whether you work with an agency or handle marketing in-house, hiring needs a standing seat at that table. Too many shop owners run a promotion their own service advisors have never heard about, and hiring gets the same treatment. Staffing changes often don’t come up until there’s already a crisis.
A good marketing partner should be asking about team changes every time you meet. If they don’t, bring it up yourself, even when the answer is just “we may need to hire soon.” A few consistent minutes spent on staffing can mean the difference between getting ahead of an opening and scrambling to fill seats out of nowhere.
Stop Waiting Until You’re Desperate to Start Recruiting
Most shops start recruiting the day someone quits or the day they let someone go. By then, you’re behind.
We changed our own careers page so people could apply even when nothing was posted. It says something like, ” Don’t see the job you want? Apply for your dream job anyway. We’re always recruiting, whether we have an opening or not, because the best people rarely show up exactly when you need them.
I think about a young woman who followed up with me twenty-seven times before we ever had a position open. I actually went back through my inbox and counted. I remember telling Brian, “This girl wants to be here so bad.” When we finally did have the right seat, she turned out to be a tremendous fit.
If you meet someone great and you don’t have an opening, talk to them anyway. Build the relationship now. You may find your next great hire, or you may learn they’re not the right fit after all, and either way you’re better off than if you’d waited.
Know Exactly Who You’re Looking For Before You Post Anything
The shops that hire well aren’t posting “now hiring, warm body needed.” They know precisely who they want before they write a single word of the listing.
Jen’s shop lays it out in specific, almost blunt detail. Five or more years of experience. Comfort with a wide range of maintenance, testing, and general repair. Someone who takes ownership of their work, wants to keep learning, and moves with purpose instead of dragging through the day. When you’re that clear, the right people see themselves in it immediately, and the wrong people self-select out before they ever apply.
We do the same thing here. Our core values describe who we are as a company, and we pair that with what we call our PRO Team Charter, which describes who you are as a person. We go over it in the very first interview, and we make sure candidates see it before that interview even happens. Clarity up front keeps you from landing right back in the hiring process a few weeks later.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can my regular marketing help me hire better technicians?
What should my shop's careers page include?
How simple should my job ad really be?
Should I keep recruiting even when I don't have an open position?
How do reviews affect whether a technician wants to work for me?
Marketing for Auto Repair Shops Should Work on Both Sides of the Counter
Most conversations about auto repair shop marketing focus entirely on customers. More calls, more cars, more reviews. That matters. The shops getting the most out of their marketing have figured out it works just as hard for hiring as it does for growth.
Treat your careers page, your reviews, and your culture content as seriously as your ad spend. If you work with a marketing partner, ask how they think about recruiting, not just advertising. The technician scrolling your social media at lunch today might be the hire who changes your whole shop a year from now.
Your marketing is already recruiting for you, whether you’re paying attention or not. So here’s the question worth sitting with: has losing people changed the way you think about telling your story and intentionally attracting the right next person?
