Hire the journeypersons and apprentices your BC jobs need

Recruiting is selling a job to a skeptical buyer

The direct answer: a strong electrician or carpenter is choosing between employers the way a homeowner chooses between quotes. They compare, they check you out online, and they move only when the offer looks better and believable.

That changes how a job ad should be written. "Hiring, competitive pay, apply now" tells a candidate nothing they can compare. What moves people is specific:

• The work itself. New construction or service? Residential, commercial or industrial? Same crew every week, or a rotating roster?
• The path. Who supervises apprentices, how hours get logged, and when people go to school.
• The proof. A careers page with real photos, a Google profile that shows the company is active, and a phone that someone answers.

We plan and produce that material, run the campaigns and track the replies. You keep every decision about who to hire and what to pay.

The Red Seal angle most BC employers under-use

For many candidates, the most valuable thing you can offer is a credible route to certification. The Red Seal Program puts an interprovincial endorsement on a provincial or territorial trade certificate once the holder passes the Red Seal exam, which tells any future employer in Canada they meet the national standard.

In BC, that matters even more in the trades covered by Skilled Trades Certification. As of October 2026, SkilledTradesBC lists seven compulsory electrical and mechanical trades, including construction electrician, sheet metal worker and steamfitter/pipefitter. In those trades, the work must be done by certified journeypersons, registered apprentices under supervision, or people SkilledTradesBC has designated, and employers keep to a two-apprentices-per-journeyperson supervision ratio. Confirm the current rules with SkilledTradesBC; we summarise them, we don't interpret them for your shop.

The marketing point is simple. If every journeyperson you hire lets you supervise more apprentices, then a clear, honest "here is how you become certified with us" story is worth more than another job-board boost. Our apprenticeship and Red Seal pathway service is built around exactly that.

Five services, chosen in order

Most shops start with one service and add the next once the first is producing applicants. The services overview explains the order we usually recommend.

1. Employer brand for trades shops: the reasons to join you, written down and backed with proof.
2. Apprenticeship and Red Seal pathway marketing: your training route, explained so an apprentice and their parents can follow it.
3. Regional hiring campaigns: reach planned around BC's real travel distances and ferry crossings.
4. Crew photo and video content: your people and equipment, shown as they are.
5. Applicant response and tracking: fast replies and a clear record of which source produced each hire.

Work out what an empty seat costs before you spend

Put a number on the vacancy first. The figures below are placeholders; replace them with your own.

Say a fully staffed crew brings in $6,000 of billable work a week, and you are declining enough work to keep one more crew busy. Over a month that is roughly $24,000 of revenue you are not booking. At a 35% gross margin, the gap costs about $8,400 a month in margin. Against that, a recruiting budget of a few thousand dollars a month is easy to justify if it fills the seat within a quarter, and hard to justify if it doesn't. That is why we track cost per qualified applicant and cost per hire, not clicks. Our hiring-funnel guide walks through the full calculation.

Proof from our HVAC work

Our published results come from marketing HVAC and heating companies, and they measure customer leads and traffic, not hires. We show them as results from our HVAC work because the same mechanics drive a recruiting funnel: pages that answer real questions, local visibility and quick follow-up. BCWide.ca reached 3× leads in 90 days. HeatLand recorded a 300% lead increase in 6 months, backed by 850+ SEO articles. The results page explains what transfers to recruiting and what does not.

Who's behind BC.Works

BC.Works is a Canadian service, part of the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group, headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. It is led by Ali Sedighi, MBA in Technology Management, who has 17+ years in digital marketing since founding his first agency in 2007 and has built 150+ live HVAC websites. The about page has the full background. We market and advise trades employers; we are not a contractor and we never do trade work. Our parent brand for trades marketing is Trades.Agency.

Every region of the province

BC hires differently from one valley to the next. A Surrey roofer is competing with dozens of employers within a half-hour drive; a Prince George electrical shop may be asking someone to move. Our areas we serve page covers the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island, the Okanagan, the southern Interior and the North, each with its own hiring realities.