Writing a Job Posting That Attracts Skilled Trades
Skilled welders, machinists, and fabricators are not short of options. They read a posting for about fifteen seconds and decide whether it is worth the effort, and most postings fail that test for reasons that are easy to fix.
Post the Pay Range
This is the single highest-leverage thing in a trades posting, and the most common omission.
The instinct against it is understandable: you want room to negotiate, and you do not want current employees comparing. But leaving it out costs more than it protects.
An experienced machinist with a job already has no reason to spend an evening applying to find out whether the pay is competitive. They skip it and apply to the one that told them. Meanwhile the applications you do get skew toward people with less leverage — which is the opposite of what you wanted.
A range does the screening for you before either side spends time. Both mismatched candidates and mismatched employers self-select out.
Describe the Work, Not the Company
Most postings open with a paragraph about the company's values and years in business. A tradesperson deciding where to spend their next five years wants to know what the days look like.
Write the description as what they will actually do:
- What they will work on — structural, sheet metal, precision parts, repair work, production runs, one-offs
- What equipment they will run — machines by name. A machinist knows the difference between a Haas and a Mazak, and a posting that names them signals a shop that knows what it has.
- What the shop is like — crew size, shift structure, whether it is production or job shop work
Specificity reads as honesty. A vague posting reads like it was copied from a template, and to somebody choosing between three offers it suggests a shop that has not thought about the role.
The Two Fields That Are Required, and the Ones That Earn Their Place
In FabWise a posting needs only a job title and a description. Everything else is optional — but the optional fields are where postings get qualified applicants.
- Requirements — experience, certifications, physical requirements, work eligibility
- Employment type — full time, part time, and so on
- Pay range — minimum, maximum, and pay period
- Trade / role — the category, so applicants can filter to their trade
- Location — city or shop address
Title conventions matter more than they should. "Welder (TIG/MIG)" tells a welder immediately whether to keep reading. "Fabrication Team Member" does not, and the people you most want are the ones who scroll past it.
Give Them Somewhere of Yours to Apply
Job boards are how someone who has never heard of your shop learns you are hiring. Keep using them — that reach is real.
What they do not give you is anywhere that belongs to you. Your listing sits beside three competitors hiring the same welder, the applicant's details live in someone else's system, and the whole thing ends when you stop paying.
A careers page on your own shop address is the other half. It is somewhere to point a board posting, a sign on the door, a truck, or a current employee who knows somebody — and applications arrive as your records, in the system you already work in.
That last channel is worth naming specifically. In trades, the best hires often come through existing employees. Those people are not browsing job boards; they are being told about you by someone they trust. Before, they had to find your board posting or call and hope. Now there is an address.
Watch the Postings That Are Collecting Nothing
The posting list shows each opening with its type, status, and applicant count.
That count is the useful part. A posting quietly attracting nobody for three weeks is a signal — usually the title, the missing pay range, or a requirements list that screened out everyone. Without a visible count, that posting just sits there while you assume hiring is hard.
Hiring is hard. But a posting getting zero applicants is a different problem than a posting getting the wrong ones, and it is worth being able to tell them apart.
Where It Fits
Hiring sits at the front of the same line as everything else in FabWise: someone applies, gets hired, goes on the schedule, clocks in at the kiosk, and works jobs that produce real labor data.
The careers page shares your shop website's address, so the same URL that takes quote requests takes applications.