Don't make the trades sexy. Make them fair.

Every couple of years a new campaign sets out to make the trades cool. There are influencers in hard hats, a slow-motion video of someone welding, a line about plumbers earning more than lawyers. It gets shared, it gets forgotten, and the shortage is still there.

The campaigns miss the point. Young people aren't avoiding physical work because it lacks glamour. Plenty of them already do hard, physical jobs, in warehouses, on delivery bikes, in kitchens. What they're avoiding is work where you can do well for ten years and have nothing to show for it.

What people are actually avoiding

Talk to anyone who left a trade in their twenties and the reasons are rarely about the work itself. They're about everything around it.

There's no progression. You start on a day rate and, unless you set up on your own, you finish on a slightly higher one. The route from labourer to supervisor to manager exists on paper, but in practice it depends on who happened to notice you.

There's no record. Change employer and you start again. Your reputation lives in the heads of three supervisors, two of whom have retired.

And there's no respect, or not the kind that shows up in how you're treated. Being booked by headcount. Being called by your trade rather than your name. Welfare cabins nobody would put up with in an office. Payment terms that leave you waiting six weeks for money you've already earned.

A video can't fix any of that.

Fairness is the pitch

The thing that would actually bring people in is dull to put in an advert. It's a fair deal, made visible.

Pay for performance, openly. If someone is faster, more careful and more reliable, pay them more and say why. Nothing tells a nineteen-year-old there's a future quicker than seeing someone a few years older earning more because they're good at it.

Carry the record between employers. Every job should add something permanent: a review, a certificate, an inspection passed. After five years, a good tradesperson should have a record as solid as any graduate's, and the next employer should be able to read it in a minute.

Let referrals mean something. Most people get into the trades because someone they knew vouched for them. That's a good system. It would be a far better one if the vouching were written down, and if the person who made a good referral got something for it.

Make progression a ladder people can see. Write down what separates an improver from a lead hand, and a lead hand from a supervisor, and what each rung pays. Then let people climb it on evidence rather than on who likes them. Most sites already have an unwritten version of this. Writing it down costs nothing and changes how a first-year sees the next ten years.

The marketing writes itself

If a trade offers progression you can see, a record you own and pay that follows quality, you don't need to make it sexy. People will tell each other. The best recruitment channel the trades have ever had is word of mouth, and word of mouth is honest: it spreads when the deal is good and dies when it isn't.

You can see it on any big job. The contractor that pays its best people properly, and tells them why, rarely needs to advertise, because its crews bring their mates. The one running a recruitment drive every spring is usually the one still paying everyone the same.

That's the uncomfortable truth for everyone who has commissioned a campaign. The problem was never the image. It was the deal, and the image was just people describing it accurately.

So spend the budget differently. Spend it on the things that make the deal fair, and let the workers do the talking. They're far more persuasive than anyone in a hard hat on a billboard.