Hiring and Keeping Field Technicians When Talent Is Scarce

Ask almost any electrician, plumber or builder running a Swedish trade business what limits their growth, and the answer is rarely a shortage of customers. It's a shortage of people. Trade bodies such as Installatörsföretagen and Byggföretagen have for years pointed to a large recruitment need across the installation and construction sectors, and Arbetsförmedlingen's occupational forecasts regularly list several trades among the hardest roles to fill. The exact numbers shift year to year, so verify the current forecasts with Arbetsförmedlingen and your own trade association before making long-term plans.

Here's the encouraging part: when everyone is fighting over the same experienced technicians, the winner isn't whoever pays the most. It's whoever is best at finding, training and keeping people. Those are things you can actually control. Here's a concrete plan.

Stop chasing the finished technician — build a pipeline

Most small firms recruit reactively: someone quits, panic sets in, an ad goes up, and you hope for the best. The problem is that the most experienced technicians are rarely unemployed. They already have a job and only move if something is clearly better.

Flip the model and build a continuous pipeline instead:

• Apprentices and route-to-qualification. In the electrical trade there's a structured system where a graduate of the upper-secondary energy programme logs installation hours as an apprentice on the way to certification. Plumbing and construction have equivalent trade certificates earned through agreed training. Taking on apprentices is the surest way to grow your own technicians — and they tend to stay loyal to the firm that trained them.
• Work placements (APL). Host students from vocational upper-secondary programmes. Plenty of hires start as a placement student who did well. It costs you supervisor time but gives you first pick.
• Career changers. People switching careers in their thirties are often motivated and stable. Adult education and vocational colleges (YH) produce exactly these candidates.

The rules for certification, apprenticeship hours and authorisation do change — confirm the current requirements with Elsäkerhetsverket (for electrical work) or your trade association before promising an apprentice a specific path forward.

Write a job ad that actually stands out

Most trade ads are interchangeable: "We're looking for a driven electrician with a driving licence." That says nothing. A technician thinking about switching jobs wants to know three things: what the day-to-day looks like, how they'll be treated, and what they can earn and grow into.

• Be specific about the actual work: service calls or contract jobs? Mostly housing or industrial? Their own service vehicle?
• Be honest about terms: collective agreement, unsocial-hours and overtime pay, wellness allowance, occupational pension. Spell it out.
• Describe the culture with examples, not clichés. "We have lunch together on Thursdays" says more than "family atmosphere".

And reply fast. A candidate who hasn't heard back in a week has already moved on to the next firm.

Pay matters — but rarely as much as you think

Pay has to be competitive and follow the applicable collective agreement; that's a baseline, not a differentiator. Once your pay is at market level it stops being the deciding factor. Surveys on why tradespeople change jobs keep pointing to the same culprits: poor planning, the feeling of never having enough time, a boss who doesn't listen, and stress over clunky systems. That's where you win or lose people.

It's also worth doing the maths on what turnover actually costs. When an experienced technician leaves, you don't just lose a salary — you lose customer relationships, the time spent training a replacement, and productivity during the gap. Keeping people is almost always cheaper than recruiting new ones.

What actually makes technicians stay

Ask any technician to describe a bad week, and the story is rarely about pay. It's about chaos: the wrong materials delivered, a schedule that changed three times, a self-inspection protocol to fill in on paper in the van, and two hours of admin in the evening that nobody pays for.

Removing that friction is one of the most underrated retention strategies there is. In practice that means:

• Schedule as if the technician's time were the most expensive thing in the company — because it is. Cut dead time between jobs and pointless driving.
• Kill the paperwork. Checklists, self-inspection protocols, photos and time-and-material logging should be doable right there in the phone on site — not written up again in the evening.
• Put the right information in their pocket: the customer's address, what the job involves, prior history and a way to make contact.

This is exactly where one joined-up system changes daily life. FieldApp is built for Swedish field-service businesses and brings together booking, scheduling, an offline-first field app for photos, checklists and self-inspection, a geofenced time clock with payroll data as CSV, and invoicing that syncs to Fortnox. The point isn't the technology for its own sake — it's that a technician who escapes admin and stops chasing information actually wants to stay.

Onboarding decides the first 90 days

Many new hires decide whether to stay or go within the first few weeks. A sloppy start — nobody to show them around, no clarity on who to ask, thrown in at the deep end on the wrong job — is one of the most common reasons for early exits.

• Pair the newcomer with an experienced mentor for the first few weeks.
• Keep a simple checklist of what to cover: safety, routines, systems, who does what.
• Book short check-ins after week 1, 4 and 12. Ask them straight out how it's going.

The takeaway: become the employer people speak well of

In a trade where everyone is short of people, your reputation as an employer is one of your strongest assets. Technicians talk to each other. The firm that trains its own apprentices, schedules smartly, removes the paperwork and treats people fairly soon finds candidates reaching out on their own — and that's exactly where you want to be.

Start with one thing this week: remove a single admin task that steals your technicians' evenings. If you want to see how one joined-up system can do that, try FieldApp free for 14 days. No card, no commitment — just a calmer day for your technicians.