Recruiting for hard-to-fill jobs: bakers, roofers, mechanics are not on LinkedIn. The local media plan that reaches them where they actually are, with 2026 data.
The baker position has been open for four months. The ad is on LinkedIn, on the careers page, on two job boards. Three applications, none of them workable. And in every meeting, the same line: "there is nobody left for this trade". Wrong. There are people. They live 20 minutes away by car, they have a job, they watch TikTok in the evening and Facebook in the morning, and they have never opened LinkedIn in their life. A hard-to-fill job is not an ad problem. It is an audience problem. And an audience problem is solved with media, not with one more form.
Hard-to-fill jobs: the 2026 diagnosis
France Travail's 2026 Besoins en main-d'œuvre survey (published April 21, 2026) counts 2.28 million recruitment projects, 43.8% of which employers judge difficult. The rate is down 6 points, the market is loosening a little. But look trade by trade: roofers, 79.7% of projects difficult; butchers, 73.8%; vehicle mechanics, 72.4%; welders, 71.3%. Bakers and pastry chefs come out at 53% in the same survey's open data. And two recruitments out of three will happen in small and medium businesses, meaning structures with no HR department, no employer brand, no dedicated budget.
The causes employers cite say it all: 84% mention an inadequate profile, 82% a shortage of candidates, 39% working conditions. And the adaptation is already happening: in 2025, 74% of recruiters facing tension accepted less experienced candidates than planned, 63% took profiles trained for something else. Translation: the employer is ready to widen the net. What is missing is not the will to hire. It is the ability to reach the people who could say yes.
LinkedIn is 23% of internet users. Facebook, 70%
The Digital 2026 France report (We Are Social and Meltwater, January 2026) draws the audience map. Facebook is used by 70.2% of French internet users, Instagram by 55.4%, TikTok by 38.3%, Snapchat by 37.8%. LinkedIn brings up the rear of the major platforms at 23%. And time spent settles the argument: 1 hour 33 minutes a day on TikTok for its users, 1 hour 14 on Instagram. Nobody spends an hour and a half a day on LinkedIn, and certainly not a roofer.
Now look at what recruiters do. According to the France Travail study run in early 2025 with 20,000 companies, 87% use job boards, 77% France Travail, 75% spontaneous applications, 53% professional social networks, 51% employee referrals. These are channels for active candidates, people who are searching. But a hard-to-fill job, by definition, is one where the people searching are not enough. The baker you need is employed. He does not type "baker job" into a search engine. You have to go and get him, the way you go and get a customer who has not yet decided to buy. We made exactly this argument about franchisee recruitment: when the target is not searching, it is acquisition, not job posting.
Recruitment media is drive-to-store in reverse
A hands-on trade is recruited within a radius. A baker does not relocate for a job in Reims, he comes from Reims or its outskirts. So the media plan should look like what we do to bring customers into a store, in the other direction: instead of bringing buyers to an outlet, we bring candidates to a job. Same tools. For Comptoirs de la Bio, isochrone targeting around each store halved the budget compared with leaflets, with 100% tracked delivery. Apply the same grid to a job: a 25-minute isochrone around the premises, and not one euro spent beyond it.
- Local social, the main channel. Meta and TikTok geotargeted on the zone, with creatives that show the trade. That is where the 70% and the 38% are. For Essity, a gamified social mechanic generated 14 million impressions at around 6 euros per lead: the cost of a contact is decided in the mechanism and the creative, not in the auction. A candidate lead obeys the same law.
- The street, for credibility and word of mouth. Bus shelters outside the vocational school, screens in the station, billboards on the zone's main roads. DOOH does not recruit on its own, but it does two things social cannot: it shows the whole town you are hiring, and it triggers conversations, the father telling his son "they're looking for people at X".
- Local search, as a safety net. "Baker job + town" queries, an up-to-date business listing, a jobs page that loads in two seconds on mobile. Low volume, but warm volume.
If you doubt that big recruiters think this way, look at the biggest of them. The French Army needs to recruit 16,000 people a year. Its autumn 2025 campaign (Dentsu Creative) ran on TV and connected TV, DOOH, outdoor, and on TikTok, Snapchat, Meta and BeReal. Not on LinkedIn. When you need 16,000 people aged 18 to 25, you go where they spend an hour and a half a day.
Recruit the way you sell
A defined audience (the employed baker less than 25 minutes away), a message that proves (salary, hours, the team, on video), a zone (not one euro outside the isochrone), a metric (cost per interview, not cost per click). If your recruitment plan does not tick those four boxes, it is not a plan, it is an ad.
The creative: show the trade, not the position
A candidate for a hard-to-fill trade does not need to be sold on the trade, he knows it. He needs to know why you rather than the shop across the street. A 20-second vertical video shot in the bakehouse at 5am, with the head baker talking, the salary on screen and the days off, is worth more than any twelve-bullet job ad. HelloWork measures that 43% of candidates check social networks during their search, and 90% of the offers on its platform now display a salary or an estimate: opacity on pay is no longer an option, it has simply become a signal of distrust.
This is what we are working on right now with Banette, a French network of artisan bakeries: baker recruitment campaigns run like acquisition campaigns, with a zone per bakery, creatives that show the workshop and the people, and measurement all the way to the interview. Not a "join us" page. A media system.
Measure cost per interview, reply the same day
Last point, the one that ruins most recruitment campaigns, even well-targeted ones: handling. An employed candidate who responds to a video on a Tuesday evening and gets a call the following Monday has already forgotten. We saw it with franchisees: callback speed is the cheapest lever in the funnel. A three-field form, no mandatory CV, a confirmation text within the minute, a call within 24 hours. These are flows we wire up as automation before launch, not after losing the first twenty candidates.
And you steer on the right metric. A CPM or a cost per click says nothing about a hire. Cost per interview held, and behind it cost per hire, are the only figures that align media and employer. A campaign at 12 euros per lead that produces no interviews is waste with a nice dashboard. A campaign at 40 euros per lead that produces one interview in four is a machine for filling positions.
What I tell business owners who "cannot find anyone"
You are not short of candidates. You are short of reach on the right ones. You posted where recruiters look, not where your candidates live. Get off LinkedIn, draw an isochrone, show the trade on video, put the salary in, call back the same day, and measure cost per interview. This is not employer branding. It is acquisition, with people instead of customers.
If you have positions open for more than two months, bring them to our free audit: together we look at where your candidates are, what you are spending to miss them, and which zone to start with.
