Recruiting ad campaigns aimed at your real commute zone

What it is

It is paid advertising for hiring, run with the same discipline as customer advertising. We build a small set of ads per role, send them to a role page on your careers section, and track every applicant back to the ad that produced them.

The difference from customer ads is the audience. You aren't selling a repair to a homeowner; you're asking a skilled person to change employers. That calls for different creative (people and tools, not discounts), different timing (evenings and weekends, when people scroll), and different follow-up (a phone call within hours).

Who it's for

Toronto trades companies whose job ads and careers pages are in decent shape but still produce too few qualified applicants. It also suits owners opening a second yard or moving to a new location, who need to build awareness in a part of the city where nobody knows the name yet.

If your ads are weak or you have no careers page, start with job ads and the careers site first. Sending paid traffic to a weak page wastes money.

How we target in Toronto

We draw the target area around the yard, not around the city. For each shop we ask: where do your current employees live, how do they get to work, and where do the first calls of the day usually start? A tech who drives a take-home van has a different tolerance for distance than an apprentice who relies on the TTC.

In practice that means a shop near the Etobicoke industrial areas may target the west end plus Mississauga and Brampton, while a Scarborough shop leans on the east end, Markham and Pickering. A downtown shop with a transit-friendly start location can recruit from much further along the subway lines. Our Toronto areas page and commute recruiting guide explain this district by district.

What's included

1. A short audit of past hires: where they live, how they heard about you, how long they stayed.
2. Campaign setup in accounts that you own, with you as the account holder and us as a user.
3. Ad creative per role: two to four variations using your real photos and short clips.
4. Landing on a role page that includes the items your posting needs, linked from every ad.
5. Applicant tracking by ad, with a weekly note during the first month.
6. A monthly report: spend, applicants, phone screens, interviews and the cost of each.

Timeline

• Week 1: audit, targeting map, creative brief.
• Week 2: ads built and approved, accounts connected, tracking tested.
• Weeks 3–6: live testing. We pause weak ads quickly and move budget to the ones producing phone screens.
• Month 2 onward: steady running, seasonal refresh, and expansion to a second role if the first is working.

How results are measured

The number we care about is cost per phone screen: total ad spend divided by the number of applicants your office actually spoke to. Clicks and raw applications are early signals, but they can mislead. An ad that brings 40 applicants nobody can reach is worse than one that brings 8 you can call the same day.

Here is a worked example with placeholder numbers. If you spend $1,200 in a month and your office completes 15 phone screens, your cost per screen is $80. If 3 of those become interviews, each interview cost $400. Compare that with the monthly margin an empty truck costs you, and the decision about whether to keep going becomes simple.

Mistakes to avoid

• Targeting all of Toronto. It wastes budget on people who will never make the drive.
• Ads that look like customer ads. A van photo with a phone number reads as a sales pitch. Show people.
• Slow follow-up. An applicant contacted three days later has often accepted something else. Have someone ready to call within hours.
• Ignoring the posting rules on landing pages. Under Ontario's guide, linked pages can be treated as part of the posting, so keep role pages complete. See the official requirements and our posting rules guide.

Plan costs and what's included are on the pricing page.