How to Hire Electricians

Your pay decides who applies

Start with one number from your market. In the Dallas–Fort Worth area, nine in ten electricians earned more than $18.63 an hour in May 2025.2 A post offering $17 sits below almost everyone already doing the work there. It doesn’t attract the wrong electricians. It attracts almost none.

Read the chart as a map, not a price list. License, experience, specialty and overtime all move a person up or down it. The good example later in this guide pays $35, just above the 75th percentile in Dallas–Fort Worth.

Pay also keeps moving. Average weekly pay at electrical contracting firms rose 6.2 percent in a year, to $1,703, and it is up about 40 percent since early 2019, against about 30 percent inflation.1 That average covers every employee at those firms, not only electricians, but the direction is plain: a rate that was competitive a few years ago may not be now.

An electrician weighs your job against the one they already have. Beat it on at least one of three things:

Pay

The hourly rate, overtime, and per diem when there’s travel.

Path

Raises they can see coming, license renewal and continuing education paid, and a real shot at foreman.

Place

Short drives, home every night, a take-home truck, day shift.

If you can’t pay more, sell what you do have, and put it in the post. Day shift and home by 4 has real value to someone with kids. Nobody knows you offer it unless you write it down.

The same job, posted two ways

Here is one opening at a made-up contractor, Example Electric Co. in Fort Worth, Texas, posted two ways. Same company, same city, same work. Only the pay and the words change.

A two-word post at $17 an hour

1. Title: “Electrician.” Journeyman or apprentice? Service or commercial? The title matches every search and fits none of them.
2. Pay: $17 an hour. Below the 10th percentile for electricians in the area.
3. Description: “Electrician needed.” It answers none of the questions an employed electrician asks before leaving a job.
4. No license or experience listed. A journeyman can’t tell whether the job is meant for them, and neither can an apprentice.

A real job post at $35 an hour

1. Title: “Commercial Journeyman Electrician.” It names the level and the kind of work, the way electricians search.
2. Pay: $35 an hour. One clear number, just above the 75th percentile for the area.
3. The first line sells the schedule. Day shift and home every night are things many current employers can’t match.
4. What you get comes before what we require. Give them a reason to keep reading before you ask for anything.
5. Only real deal breakers are required. A license and four years of commercial work. Training the company can provide is offered, not demanded.
6. How hiring works has times in it. One business day, 15 minutes, 45 minutes, two business days. They know what happens after they apply.
7. Three application questions. Each one checks a deal breaker. None asks them to write an essay.

The good post isn’t better because it’s longer. It’s better because it answers what every working electrician wants to know before they leave a job: what it pays, what the schedule is, what the work is, how far the drive is and what happens after they apply.

Use the title people actually search for, like “Commercial Journeyman Electrician” or “Fire Alarm Technician.” An internal grade like “Electrician II” or a slogan in the title only makes the job harder to find. Then read your post the way your best electrician would. If they’d say “that sounds alright,” post it. Need a starting point? Edit one of the job description templates.

Posting is step one

The electricians you most want already have jobs, so they aren’t checking job boards every day. The post has to go to them.

Copy this into local Facebook groups and fill in the brackets:

Anyone know a commercial journeyman electrician looking for work? We’re [company], $35 an hour, day shift, home every night. Details and apply here: [your job link]. Tag someone who’d be good.

Refresh your post every week. On a paid plan, Refresh in your Best Electrician Jobs dashboard resets the posted date to today and moves the job back up the list, once every 7 days. Then share the link again. A post nobody has seen in three weeks is a post nobody will see.

Your best hires will come from your best electricians. They’ve worked next to dozens of others. They know who shows up, who’s careful, who’s fast and who’s ready to move.

So ask them. Go to the three people you’d clone if you could and ask, “Who’s the best electrician you’ve ever worked with? Who’s available, or close to it?” Then call those people yourself, today.

Two things make referrals keep coming:

• Make it worth a phone call. Pay a referral bonus once the new hire has stayed 90 days.
• Take the risk off the person who refers. Tell your crew plainly: “If someone you send me doesn’t work out, that’s on me, not you.” People won’t put a friend forward if they think a bad hire will be held against them.

Recruit the references too. When you call a candidate’s reference, finish with: “We’re always looking for good electricians. Would you want to hear what we pay?”

Speed decides who you hire

Electricians who are looking rarely apply to just one job. They apply to several in one sitting, and the first contractor who calls back gets the first real conversation. Every day you wait gives that conversation to someone else.

You’re the one being interviewed. Act like it.

• Reply within one business day to every application.
• Text like a person: “Saw your application come through. I’m on a job until 3. Can I call you after?”
• Call after 3:30. They’re working during the day. Don’t make them hide from their foreman to talk to you.
• Never reschedule. When you move their interview, you’ve shown them how you’ll treat them once they work for you.
• Close the loop. If it’s a no, tell them. They know other electricians too.

Keep application questions to the real deal breakers: a license number, whether the schedule or travel works, and a driver’s license if they’ll drive a company truck. Two or three questions is plenty. Every question past that loses someone good.

The first call

Ten to fifteen minutes. You can make it, or your office manager can. Ask the same questions in the same order every time, and write the answers down.

If the pay doesn’t work, find out now, not after three meetings.

The interview

Meet at your shop, or walk a jobsite with the foreman they’d work for.

Sell first. Tell them who you are, what they get and why your people stay. Ask why they’re thinking about leaving where they are. If it’s pay, talk pay. If it’s their boss, tell them how you run your crews.

Then tell the truth. Show them the hard parts: the August attic, the rooftop, the travel weeks, the on-call rotation. Better they walk away now than in week three with your truck.

Ask questions only someone who has done the work can answer. For example: “A breaker keeps tripping on a circuit you didn’t install. Walk me through your first ten minutes.” Listen for the details that only come from doing the job. The free interview scorecards have questions for 21 electrical and low voltage roles, from apprentices and journeymen to fire alarm and data center technicians.

Write everything down. If they apply again next year, you’ll know what happened the first time.

Verify before you offer

A good interview tells you someone can talk about the work. Verification tells you they can do it and are allowed to.

• License. Licensing systems usually separate apprentices, who work under a licensed electrician’s supervision, from journeymen and masters. The titles and rules vary by state and sometimes by city, so look the license up with the board that issued it. Our electrician licensing guide lists each state’s board.
• Certifications. If the job needs a NICET level or another certification, check the number with the issuer.
• Background and driving record. If you run them, tell candidates early and follow federal, state and local rules. The EEOC’s guidance on background checks is a good place to start.
• Hands-on test. Give them an hour on something real: bend an offset, read a print, find a fault. Or bring them on for a paid working day at full rate. Either way, pay them for their time.
• Your foreman’s opinion. The people who’d work next to them are your best judges.

Make the offer before someone else does

Call with every detail: pay, schedule, start date and what day one looks like. Then listen. If they hesitate when you say the rate, ask about it right there. A question now costs you nothing. A surprise counteroffer next week costs you the hire.

Send the written offer the same day or the next. Every day between a verbal yes and a signed offer is a day another contractor can call.

Keep a bench

You’ll meet good electricians you can’t hire today. Keep their names, numbers and notes. Tell them, “I don’t have a spot right now. When I do, you’re my first call.” Then actually call.

When someone quits on a Thursday, you’re calling people you already know instead of starting from zero.