Creator Sourcing and Contracting for Technical Trades

Building a working roster in a trade where perhaps two hundred people post publicly takes six to ten weeks, and what arrives at the end is twelve to twenty contracted people with verified credentials, agreed rates and signed usage terms. Not a list of handles. A scraped list of four hundred logistics accounts costs nothing and is worth about that; the work here is verification, contracts and payment rails that survive contact with a Ukrainian bank holiday. Where these people are: Not on creator marketplaces. Tanker drivers, wind technicians, customs brokers and dispatchers do not sign up to influencer platforms, so sourcing runs through trade association member directories, technical college alumni groups, union locals, conference speaker lists, and the places these trades actually talk to each other: r/CDL, the electrician subreddits, forklift and heavy-equipment TikTok, Polish and Ukrainian driver Telegram groups. Every candidate is then found again by hand and approached individually, in their own language, by someone who can answer a technical question in the first message. Verification, which is the real product: We check the credential document rather than the bio claim. CDL or CE class, counterbalance or reach truck ticket, high-voltage switching authorisation, customs brokerage licence, GWO certification for turbine work. We check employment status, and whether their employer has a social media policy forbidding precisely what you are about to pay them for. We obtain an employer permission letter wherever filming or naming touches the workplace. In gaming we verify rank and hours through the platform's own API rather than a screenshot someone sent us. Contracts and money: Everyone signs the same base agreement: usage grant and term, ninety-day category exclusivity, a credential representation, indemnity, a termination clause that works in both directions, and a rate written down before the first brief. Payment runs through Wise or Deel into whatever country they are in, with W-8BEN or W-9 collected up front and EU reverse-charge VAT handled correctly. Late payment kills a roster faster than a bad brief ever will, so payment terms are part of what we negotiate on your behalf, not an afterthought for your finance team to discover. Everyone is paid for a test brief before joining the roster. Unpaid tests are how agencies burn the reputation of an entire category in trades where people talk to each other constantly, at depots, on shift, in the same Telegram group we found them in. The handover: A roster document carrying, for each person, what they hold, what they will and will not film, their rate, their notice period, the signed contract, the test asset they produced, and a plain note on how they are to work with. Plus the rejection list and the reason for each, which is usually the more useful half. It stops your next agency spending six weeks on someone we already found a problem with. What we refuse: Scraped databases and creator-platform exports sold by the thousand. Unpaid test content. Payment in product where the product is not the point. Roster resale: the people we contract for you are yours to work with directly, and we hand over the relationship rather than sitting in the middle taking a margin on their invoices. And we do not source for gambling, prediction markets or token products. Who this is not for: Anyone who needs volume next month. Anyone who wants people to say things they do not believe, because in a trade this small the person you buy will meet their own audience at a depot on Tuesday and prices that risk correctly. And teams with no briefing plan, since a roster with nothing in front of it goes cold in about a quarter.