Hiring Faster Without Lowering the Bar: 3 Shifts the Best Skilled-Trades Staffing Desks Are Making

Most of the assumptions that built modern recruiting break down in skilled trades. The best candidates aren't on job boards. They aren't answering their phones during business hours. The clients hiring them often don't know who their real competitors for that talent are. Staffing agencies that win in this part of the market have rebuilt their desks around those realities.

Episode 2 of The State of Industrial Hiring: Live brought Mark Herbst and Cameron Hidalgo of Express Employment Professionals Baton Rouge into conversation with FactoryFix's Chris Nesbitt. Mark co-owns the office, where about half the book is skilled trades. Cameron runs the skilled-trades desk. Together they fill machinist, welder, CNC operator, and maintenance technician roles and carry 28 skilled-trades clients a week with a five-person inside team.

Here are the three takeaways worth sitting with.

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‍1. Go to candidates. Don't wait for them.

Most staffing teams know skilled-trades roles are hard to fill. Fewer have restructured their desks around the reason. The qualified candidates for machinist, welder, and maintenance technician roles are overwhelmingly already employed, and they aren't browsing job boards in the middle of a shift. Roles in this category get filled by recruiters who go looking, by sourcing tools running in the background, and by the deliberate work of staying in touch with people who weren't ready the first time around.

Mark named that reality directly during the session.

"The candidates that our clients need are already working 90% of the time," he said. "They're not taking out their phone during business hours."

The Express Pros desk is built around that fact. FactoryFix's AI engages candidates on the network around the clock and surfaces the ones worth a phone call, and most of the office's actual fills come from that sourced group rather than from active applicants.

The timing on sourced candidates is slower than a recruiter wants. Mark said it takes three to five touchpoints to land a true combo welder, and almost never on the first call. A candidate may go quiet for two weeks before resurfacing, because the current job had to go sideways first. Most teams give up on sourced candidates after one touch and never see the second-week callback.

What you can do with this: What you can do with this: Audit how your team treats sourced candidates today. If a candidate gets one outreach and then falls off the follow-up list, that's the gap to close. Build a process that touches a sourced candidate three to five times across multiple weeks. AI sourcing tools can automate the outreach and follow-up so the cadence actually holds, which is what most teams don't have the bandwidth to do manually. The fills are on the other side of that effort.

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2. Layer tools deliberately. Don't blow up your existing processes.

The pressure to put AI everywhere in recruiting is loud right now. The teams getting real value from it are picking their spots carefully and drawing clear lines about where AI lives and where it doesn't. A staffing agency that competes on relationships has a different AI strategy than one that competes on volume, and the difference matters for what gets automated and what stays with people.

Mark drew that line for his office. When you call Express Pros Baton Rouge, a person picks up.

"We are not the office that is gonna have a switchboard that you have to go through," he said. "You're gonna get a live person."

Front-loading AI into the call experience would gut the relationship work the business runs on. A live recruiter answering at 7 AM is most of the reason a candidate picks up the callback at 7 PM. So Express puts AI in the places humans can't physically be: passive candidate engagement overnight and on weekends, an inbound phone backup so hot leads don't bounce to voicemail when every recruiter is on a call, and AI-assisted translation between dense industry job descriptions and the plainer language candidates use on their resumes.

"You have to know what your workflow is and where you can implement [AI]," Mark said. "We needed help on passive recruiting. Period."

The 2026 FactoryFix Industrial Hiring Benchmark Report found that 48% of industrial hiring leaders rank improving candidate quality as their top priority for 2026. The teams putting AI to work well aim it at the parts of the workflow where the bottleneck is volume or coverage and keep humans on the parts where someone needs to read a face or build a relationship.

What you can do with this: List the parts of your workflow that actually break today. Where do candidates fall off because nobody could get to them? Where does volume overwhelm the team? Those are the spots for AI. The relationship-heavy parts stay with people.

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3. Bring labor market data to client conversations.

The strongest staffing desks right now operate as market advisors to their clients. They walk into prospect meetings already knowing who else in the market is hiring the same roles, what those competitors are paying across experience levels, and how fast applicants are moving in that local market. Labor market reports are the asset that makes that work possible, and most staffing teams underuse them.

Mark uses labor market reports in four places on his desk: on prospect calls, in pay conversations with clients, in annual planning meetings with existing accounts, and in his own recruiter prioritization decisions.

The prospect call is where most operators start. The dynamic flips when a staffing rep walks in with a report showing the prospect their actual competitors for talent. Mark described pulling a report on a maintenance tech role and noticing Scitec, a local company that installs technology on construction equipment, listed as a competing employer. The prospect had no idea Scitec was hiring for the same skillset. That conversation won Express the account.

The pay conversation is where the reports come in next. When a client's offer sits below market, Mark puts the data in front of them and lets it argue.

"We don't want to tell them, we want to show them," he said. "We're just looking to step in and be that valued advisor."

He walks them through how pay spreads across experience levels in their area. Then he asks which experience level they want. They read the gap themselves and adjust the offer. Nobody has to be told they're underpaying.

The same approach scales to existing clients. Mark will ask a client to send a list of every role they might hire for in the coming year, pull a report on each, and walk through them as a set. The client leaves with a clear view of where they sit across their entire hiring book.

The fourth use is the quietest. Labor market data tells the desk where to spend recruiter time. When the local talent pool is deep, a role can fill in two weeks. When it's thin, the same role can drag on for two months and burn through recruiter hours. Knowing the difference before assigning the work saves entire weeks across the desk.

What you can do with this: Pull a report on your hardest open role this week. If the data shows you've been wrong about the local market or wrong about your pay range, change something. The conversations with your clients change once the report is on the table.

If you want a labor market report for one of your open roles, email us at marketing@factoryfix.com and we’ll send you a complimentary report. 

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Watch the full conversation

The full 30-minute recording is available here: Watch Episode 2

This conversation is part of a 3-part webinar series built on the findings from the 2026 FactoryFix Industrial Hiring Benchmark Report, which analyzed 1.2 million applications, 15,500 roles, and survey responses from 83 hiring leaders across 18 industrial role categories.