Ryan Englin on B2B Community Builder Show: A Marketing Approach to Hiring That Drives Word of Mouth Growth

I sat down with Pablo Gonzalez on the B2B Community Builder Show to talk about why hiring is a marketing problem, not an HR problem, and how that shift changes everything about the way you attract, interview, and keep great people.

Pablo opened with the story that got me into this work. I was running a marketing company helping trade contractors get more customers. Then one of my HVAC clients in Phoenix called and said stop sending leads. They had four empty trucks sitting in the yard and no technicians to put in them. I applied the same marketing principles we used for customer acquisition to their recruiting. Three weeks later all four trucks were filled and they had two more on order. That was the moment I realized recruiting is a marketing activity. Not an HR activity. Not a compliance exercise. Marketing.

We spent a lot of time on employer branding and the hidden cost of ignoring it. I walked through a simple audit anyone can do right now. Put your company name into Google followed by the word "jobs" and look at what comes up. If your open positions aren't the first thing on the page, you have work to do. If that one-star Glassdoor review is the first thing a job seeker sees, that is your employer brand whether you like it or not. And here is the thing most people miss. The search engines are not your friend in this equation. Their client is the job seeker, not you. That is why they charge you to advertise.

Pablo asked about defining who you actually want to hire before you start posting ads. This is where the Core Fit Profile comes in. You can't use demographics the way you do in customer marketing because most of those are protected classes. Age, gender, marital status. You will get yourself into legal trouble. Instead, focus on behaviors. What does a rockstar look like in this role? What do they do on weekends? Where do their kids play sports? You figure out the psychographics, and suddenly you know exactly where to advertise and what bait to use. It is the same discipline as building a customer persona, just applied to a different audience.

We talked about the difference between a job description and a job advertisement. This is one of my biggest frustrations. Companies take whatever HR or legal gave them, a bulleted maintenance schedule of requirements, and throw it up on Indeed. I use the Corvette analogy all the time. GM does not sell Corvettes by listing tire rotation schedules and oil change intervals. They show you the convertible on the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down. Your job ad needs to sell the emotional experience of working for you, not read like a compliance document.

Then we got into the four-stage interview process. Stage one is screening. Get rid of non-negotiables fast and figure out if this is someone you want to spend more time with. Stage two is culture fit. Do this first, not last. Stage three is position fit. Can they actually do the work? Stage four is what I call the pullback offer. Before anyone signs anything, you sit down and walk through every small expectation that will fester into resentment if left unspoken. I compared it to sitting in the driveway with someone before you move in together. Agree on the toothpaste, the toilet paper, the shoes in the hallway. None of it is a dealbreaker on its own. All of it together becomes death by a thousand paper cuts.

One thing I made sure to clarify. Four stages does not mean four separate meetings. You can collapse stages into a single visit. The key is that once you close a stage, you don't revisit it. And if your ideal candidates are employed, which they are, you need to make the process work for them. That might mean interviewing in the evening or on a weekend.

Pablo also asked about employee referrals and word of mouth. Most referral programs fail because they reward the wrong person. You give your employee $500 for referring a friend, but you give the friend nothing for quitting their job and taking a massive risk. Flip it. Offer the new hire a week of PTO in their first 90 days so they can take their spouse on that trip they have been wanting. That changes the entire conversation. Your employee is no longer asking their buddy to quit a job for nothing. They are offering something real.

I also shared the story of a construction client who had no public presence at all. Small subcontractor, couple hundred employees, zero marketing. We built out their employer brand and started creating content. Discovery Channel found them and put them on the premiere episode of the Dirty Jobs reboot with Mike Rowe. That is what happens when you invest in your reputation as an employer. People find you.

The bottom line is simple. Your employees are your number one customer. They deliver your customer experience. If you are not investing in their experience with the same energy you invest in your customer experience, everything else breaks down. And it is fixable.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these frameworks on Titans of the Trades.