Ryan Englin on A Leadership Beyond: Hire and Retain Better People Faster

I sat down with Tom Rosenak and Adrienne Guerrero on A Leadership Beyond to talk about why recruiting is a marketing activity, not an HR function, and how small and midsize businesses in the trades can start hiring and keeping the right people.

We started with the question I hear all the time: why does treating recruiting like an HR function lead companies astray? Here's the reality. HR reports up to finance in most organizations because people are the biggest expense on the P&L. But human resources is a compliance function. It's about regulation and protection. It's not about connecting with people and building relationships. And yet we hand them all the "people stuff" because, well, they have the word "human" in the title.

Marketing teams already know how to identify a target, craft a compelling message, and get in front of the right audience. They do it every day for customers. Recruiting is a marketing activity. The same principles apply when you want to attract employees. But most companies skip this entirely, hand HR a list of bullet points, and wonder why every job ad on the planet looks exactly the same.

People don't leave jobs. They leave people. So if everyone on a job board is posting the same window sticker of requirements and responsibilities, you're not standing out to the people who matter. You're repelling them.

We also talked about the so-called labor shortage in the trades. I don't buy it. Every company I walk into, I ask them: how many employees did you have on December 31st, and how many W2s are you issuing? Nobody tells me the numbers are close. One company had 130 employees and issued 400 W2s. That's not a shortage. That's a retention crisis. People want these jobs. They just don't want to work for you.

Tom brought up a great point about vision and values. When you get clear on who you are as an employer and you communicate that authentically, you attract people who want to contribute to what you're building. Skip that step, and you end up hiring anyone who can fog a mirror just to fill a seat. Then you repeat the cycle every few months.

I walked them through the Core Fit Profile, which is the first step in our process. It's a brainstorming activity where the leadership team looks at seven different factors to identify the right person for the role. Not demographics. Behaviors and traits. Once the team votes on what they want and don't want, everything downstream flows from that agreement: the job ad, the screening questions, the interview process, onboarding. Everybody is working from the same compass.

We talked about interview structure too. It blows my mind that people think a 15 or 30 minute conversation is enough to make a hiring decision. You're asking this person to move in with you. You're trusting them with your baby. Our process puts subject matter experts at each stage. One person handles screening. One person evaluates culture fit. The hiring manager handles the position interview. You don't need one person doing all of it. You need the right person at each stage. That's the four-stage interview process in action.

Adrianne raised onboarding, and I didn't hold back. If someone leaves in the first 90 days, they never stopped looking. Your onboarding needs a serious checkup. The "who are you" onboarding experience, where a new hire shows up and nobody knows their name, the computer isn't ready, HR didn't finish paperwork, that tells your A-players everything they need to know about the team they just joined. And they will keep looking.

When you hire a human being, you get the whole person. The good, the bad, everything in between. "Leave your drama at the door" is not a management strategy. If you expect people to leave their life at home, they'll leave your company instead.

I also shared what's next for Core Matters in 2025. We're making a big shift toward being a hands-on partner inside the business rather than coaching from the outside and saying "good luck." We over-engineered our own program and people told us they didn't know where they stood. So we're simplifying everything. And we're leaning hard into retention and performance, not just recruiting. As the job market shifts, the companies that invest in keeping their people and helping them grow will win.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on building a Core Fit Hiring System and everything we discussed here on Titans of the Trades.