Using Modern Marketing Techniques to find people in a tight job market

The 2019 hunting season is here and for some of you it’s possibly a tough season ahead. The low national unemployment rate and tight job market is making it increasingly tough to find and retain great people to grow your business and serve your clients. In a perfect world, experienced Guides, Cooks, Packers and others come knocking on your door and you don’t have to find anyone. They have the experience, great-attitude, work with customers well, and reliably help you build your reputation at a pay rate that works for both you and your employee. Unfortunately, in 2019 we’re in a tight job market and finding experienced people or people willing to learn is tough to find. So what do you do?

For us, we know that outfitters work on tight budgets. We know creating amazing experiences to build your reputation is paramount to future business and growth. We also know that finding good talent is just one small part of the many, many things you do every day to keep your business moving forward. We turned to social media to help one of our newest clients - Butte Creek Outfitters.

Butte Creek Outfitters asked us to place an ad for them to locate great people (guides, cooks, and wranglers) to work at their remote hunt camp this fall. We quickly created an ad and posted it to our site. Hunting season is nearly here and we knew we needed to generate some interest quickly, so we also chose to set up a quick Facebook campaign. In this specific case, We didn’t charge Butte Creek for the Facebook campaign because we saw it as an investment. An investment in helping Butte Creek Outfitters successfully find great people and an investment in our site; to strengthen the network of people focused on helping Outfitters.

In just a few days, this one small post has reached over 30,000 people. Over 500 people have re-shared the post with others and over 2,000 people have engaged with the ad in some meaningful way. ‘Engagement’ in this context is modern marketing speak to mean 2,000 people interacted with ad by leaving comments, smiley’s, Likes, shares, etc. Time will tell if it does the job of finding new hires for Butte Creek and we’ll report back here when we have an update. In just four days, we’ve already connected with some good candidates.

Building a network and community is important to us. More than just a small campaign, we started Outfitter Marketplace to build a place for you (Outfitters and Guides) to come and find resources you need to help you better manage your business. Resources for help solving business management issues, hiring, licensing, marketing, permitting, equipment, insurance, supplies, whatever the situation. We’ve only recently started and we look looked forward to hearing from more outfitters, so we can start tackling the challenges you are facing with your business.

Going forward, we’ll do our best to focus this blog on presenting ideas and solutions to help outfitters grow and succeed and we’d like to hear from you. Let us know what some some of the challenges your outfitting business faces? Drop us an email at info@worksprings.com or leave a comment below. We’ll focus future posts on answering these challenges.

Good luck this year. We’re wishing everyone a great 2019 hunting season.