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How Heavy Equipment Dealers Use Video to Hire Service Technicians

You can sell a machine you cannot service. You just cannot do it twice to the same customer.

Every dealer in the country is short on technicians, and the shortage does not show up as an empty bay. It shows up as a four-week backlog, a service manager turning down work, a field truck that cannot get to a customer until Thursday, and a salesman who stops promising uptime because he has been made a liar twice already.

The hiring problem is a sales problem wearing different clothes. And the thing most dealers are using to solve it — a job posting — is the weakest tool available.

A posting cannot compete with a shop tour

Open any job board and look at what a heavy equipment technician sees. Twenty listings that use the same eleven words. Competitive pay. Great benefits. Family atmosphere. Growth opportunity.

Every one of those postings is telling him the same thing, which means none of them are telling him anything. He has no way to choose except on the number, and if the number is how he chooses, somebody will always outbid you.

Ninety seconds of your actual shop does something no posting can. It shows him what he would be walking into, and it does it before he has to spend a phone call finding out.

What a tech is actually deciding

He is not deciding whether your company is great. He is deciding whether his day would be better at your place than where he is now.

The things he wants to know:

• What is he going to be working on — what brands, what size, how current is the fleet
• What is the shop like: lifts, lighting, tooling, heat in January, air in July
• Is this bay work, field work, or both, and does he get a truck
• What diagnostic equipment and software does he get, or is he guessing
• Who would he be working next to, and how long have they been there
• Will anybody train him, or is he expected to already know the newer machines
• Is the place busy, because slow shops make slow money

Not one of those is answerable in a job description. All of them are answerable in a short film shot in your own building.

Film the shop the way it is

The temptation is to clean it up until it looks like a commercial. Do not.

A tech watching a spotless empty shop assumes there is no work. A tech watching a busy bay with machines torn down and people moving assumes there is money in the place. Shoot on a normal Tuesday with the shop running.

Show the things he asked about above, in that order. The equipment he would touch. The tooling he would use. The truck he might get. The people he would eat lunch with. If the shop has something genuinely good — a new lift, climate control, an in-house machine shop, a training program with the manufacturer — put it on camera, because your competitors down the road are not showing anything at all.

Put the techs on camera, not the general manager

This is the whole thing, and most dealers get it backwards.

A general manager on camera talking about culture is an advertisement and gets discounted as one. A tech in a shop shirt saying he came over three years ago and has not looked back is testimony, and it is coming from the only person in the building whose opinion the viewer actually trusts.

Pick the ones who have been there a while and the one who just came over from a competitor. Do not hand anybody a script. Ask what they were doing before, why they moved, what surprised them, and what they would tell somebody thinking about it. The ones who did not want to be on camera usually give the best answers, because they are not performing.

That is the same interview approach that works for customer stories, and it works for the same reason. Dynapac's dealer sales manager, Jennifer Bishop — somebody who has spent most of her career behind the camera herself — described the crew that handles it well simply: "In twenty years in this industry, I have never worked with a more professional team." Getting a nervous person comfortable enough to say something real is most of the job.

The tech school pipeline is where the video does the most work

For most dealers the honest pipeline is two or three technical programs within driving distance, and a handful of instructors who quietly decide where their best students end up.

Those instructors cannot bring a class to your shop. They can play a video in a classroom, and they will, because they are trying to place students and a real look at a real dealership helps them do it.

A film built for that room is a slightly different cut than the one built for a job board. It should be honest about what a first-year tech actually does, what the path looks like after two years, and whether the dealership pays for manufacturer training. Students and their parents both want that answer and almost nobody gives it.

The same cut works at a career fair, at a high school program, and on the wall at an open house.

Where to put it

A recruiting film that lives on the careers page and nowhere else is a film nobody watches.

• The careers page, above the listings rather than below them
• Inside the job posting itself, wherever the board allows a link or embed
• Paid social targeted to the drive radius around each branch, because a tech will not relocate for this
• The technical schools and instructors you already know, as a file they can play
• Your own employees, who are your best referral source and currently have nothing to forward
• Trade shows, open houses, and demo days, where techs from other shops are standing in your booth

That last one is underrated. At any equipment show, a meaningful share of the people walking the floor are the exact technicians you are trying to hire.

The same footage does three jobs

The reason this is worth doing is that you are not buying a recruiting video. You are buying a shop day.

The same footage of your bays, your field trucks, and your people cuts into a service capabilities film for customers, a recruiting film for techs, and short social pieces for both. Yancey Bros. Co. built exactly that kind of library — brand video, customer testimonials, capability videos, job-site coverage, and dealership launch events, all tagged and searchable, with every clip and photo handed back, not just the selects. Once the library exists, the next recruiting cut is an edit, not a shoot.

"It's literally adding to your team, and that's the best benefit you can get." — Jenna Farmer, Marketing Supervisor, Yancey Bros. Co.

What actually drives the scope

Recruiting content is usually a smaller job than dealers expect, and the variables are about people rather than production.

• How many branches, since a tech is choosing a commute and wants to see his shop
• How many people go on camera, because each one is a setup and a real conversation
• Whether you need field footage as well as bay footage, which means a second location and a customer's permission
• Whether you want a separate cut for technical schools, which is an edit rather than another shoot day
• Whether it is one film or an ongoing series as people join, which changes cadence rather than day count

The efficient version is one day in the shop that produces the recruiting film, the service capabilities piece, several vertical cuts, and stills for the careers page. You were going to need all of it anyway.

The short version

You cannot outbid everybody for technicians forever, and you should not try. What you can do is be the only dealership in the market that shows a tech what the job actually looks like before he applies.

Shoot the shop busy. Put your own techs on camera instead of your management. Cut a version for the technical schools. Then put it in front of people inside a fifty-mile radius of the bay you need filled.

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