In the conversation
Ryan Englin on Better Than Rich: How to Hire Better People Faster
Key takeaways
- If you're attracting people who aren't trustworthy, there's a real good chance you're not a trustworthy employer. The people you pull in are a mirror of the company you've built.
- The fastest way to hire when you're desperate is to take your top performer to lunch and brainstorm for 90 minutes on every person they know in the industry. Top performers hang out with top performers. Low performers socialize with low performers.
- Stop asking interview questions people can rehearse. Tell candidates early is on time and on time is late, then schedule the interview for 7:00 AM. If they walk in at 7:07, that's the first and highest-weighted question on the scorecard. No conversation needed.
- Compare the number of W2s you issued last year to the number of people on payroll at year end. You issued way more W2s than you had people. That's not a hiring problem. That's a retention problem.
- When you make the offer, roleplay the quitting conversation. The candidate's current boss will throw money at them. If you don't know why more money matters to the candidate beyond the dollar amount, you lose them to a counteroffer every time.
- Pay a new hire for a full week without putting them on jobs. Build the relationship first. They'll stay two years instead of two weeks. Throwing someone into a truck on day one with no onboarding is why you keep doing it over.
I went on the Better Than Rich Show with Mike Abramowitz to talk about how trade contractors attract, hire, and keep the right people. We covered a lot of ground. Core values. Interview tactics. A full live roleplay of poaching a tech from a competitor. And the hard truth about why most contractors stay short-staffed.
We started where I always start. The core. Your purpose, your vision, your values. If you haven't defined who you are as an organization and who the right people are for your team, everything else is an exercise in futility. I told Mike that most contractors I talk to haven't done this work. They keep saying "nobody wants to work" but when I ask them what makes a good employee, they struggle to answer. If you don't know what you really want, you won't attract who you really want. That's the foundation of the Core Fit Profile. Define the behaviors and traits of your best people first. Everything else follows.
Mike asked if AI can shortcut the values work. My answer: be careful. AI has been trained on what large organizations published, and most of them never did it right. Values like honesty and integrity are permission to play. Table stakes. They're not differentiators. Core values need to be verbs. You need to see them in action. If you can't tell stories about a value showing up in the last month, it's not a real value.
Then we got into the thing most contractors want to hear. "I need someone yesterday." I don't sugarcoat this. Your business didn't start to struggle overnight. It's not getting fixed overnight. But if you need someone right now, here's the fastest path: go to your top performer, take them to lunch, and brainstorm for 90 minutes about every person they know in the industry. Top performers hang out with top performers. That's where your next hire lives.
Mike and I actually roleplayed the entire conversation. The lunch with the top performer. The phone call to his buddy Joe. The pitch. The compensation discussion. The interview scheduling. It's the most tactical segment I've done on a podcast in a while. One thing I made sure to hit: before your employee picks up the phone, ask them why they stay. What do they brag about to their friends and family? That becomes the opening of the pitch to the candidate. If they say "nothing," you have a different conversation to have first.
We talked about behavioral interviewing and why most interviews are broken. Mike listed what every owner wants in an employee. Reliable. Shows up on time. Honest. Does quality work. Follows the process. Except for quality work, every single one of those is a behavior. So why are we spending interviews asking technical questions? We need to test behaviors. Schedule the interview for 7:00 PM. Tell the candidate early is on time and on time is late. Question one on the scorecard: did they walk in at 6:50? I'm not asking if they're punctual. I'm watching.
I also walked through the red flag and yellow flag system. Red flags end the conversation. The guy shows up in board shorts and flip flops. His phone is blowing up and he keeps checking it. Those are dealbreakers. Yellow flags aren't dealbreakers on their own, but stack enough of them up and you have a problem. The guy rushes through the task you gave him. He won't make eye contact with your team. He's on his phone during the ride along. Address every yellow flag before you make an offer.
We closed with onboarding. Just because your business is on fire does not mean you throw the new hire into the flames. I told Mike about exit interviews where people quit six months later because they never got an office tour. That set the tone on day one. The owner who says "I'm paying this person, I need them turning wrenches" is the same owner who's doing it over again six weeks later. We always find time to do it over. We never find time to do it right.
I hit the W2 test hard. Call your CPA. Ask how many W2s you issued last year. Compare that to how many people were on payroll December 31st. That gap is your retention problem. And the reason that gap exists is because we don't slow down, build relationships, and assimilate people into the organization. Take a week. Pay them. Don't put them on jobs. They'll be with you for two years instead of two weeks.
If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these concepts on Titans of the Trades. And if you want a free copy of Hire Better People Faster, head to corematters.com/freebook. Just cover shipping and I'll autograph one and send it your way.
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