Ryan Englin on Biz Gone Social Podcast: Why Hiring Feels So Hard and How to Fix It

I went on the Biz Gone Social Podcast with Lorraine Duncan to talk about why hiring is broken for most small businesses and what it takes to fix it.

We started with the core problem. Most business owners never learned how to hire. Nobody taught them. They picked up bits and pieces from friends, peers, and painful experience, then mashed it all together into a fragmented process that repels the exact people they want to attract. Every single time.

Here's the thing that makes it worse. Both sides fake it. The employer cleans up the office, hides the drama, puts on a show. The candidate buys new clothes, combs their hair, rehearses perfect answers. Then three or four weeks in, everyone relaxes and becomes themselves. And both sides feel deceived. It's not a hiring problem at that point. It's an authenticity problem.

I told Lorraine the first mistake I see everywhere is treating hiring as an HR compliance activity instead of a recruiting and marketing activity. Your job post reads like a legal document. Must be able to lift 50 pounds. Must have reliable transportation. Nobody cares about that list. People don't leave jobs. They leave people. So if someone is looking for a new job, they're looking for a new boss. Yet 99 out of 100 job ads say nothing about who you'll work for, how the company communicates, how leadership invests in people. You're selling the window sticker when you need to sell the Corvette commercial.

Lorraine asked how small businesses compete against bigger companies for great people. The answer is simple. Small businesses have an advantage most of them never use. When you know who you are as an organization, when your culture is clear and your leadership walks the talk, you can actually follow through on the promises you make. Big companies preach the same things, but most people know it's lip service. A small business can actually pour into a person. That's the edge.

We got into one of my favorite stories. I had an electrical contractor who specifically looked for people in interviews who wanted to start their own business someday. Most owners hear that and panic. "I'm not hiring my future competitor." This guy's strategy was the opposite. He knew those people would be completely invested. They'd want to learn every part of the business. They'd bring the same internal drive that makes entrepreneurs grind through the hard days. And what happened? They became his future leaders. Once they saw everything involved in running a company, the insurance, the payroll, the compliance, they said "No thanks, I just want to do this part." Lorraine jumped in and said her husband's plumbing business experienced the exact same thing over 30 or 40 years. The hires who eventually went out on their own were always the best workers. Ambitious, driven, learned fast, did more than what was asked.

I also hit on something that frustrates me deeply. The trades industry has spent 20 or 30 years bashing itself. Plumbers market themselves by saying "We don't smell like those other plumbers." Construction companies make jokes about the industry. What they think is attacking the competition is actually convincing an entire generation of parents that the trades are gross, that it's Plan C or D, that no self-respecting kid of theirs is going to be a plumber. The kids want to work with their hands. The parents won't let them because they don't want to tell their friends at the country club. We created that problem. And it's fixable, but only if we stop tearing the industry down from the inside.

For owners drowning in daily tasks with nobody to delegate to, I gave some practical advice. Stop putting new hires into tiny boxes. Your first hire doesn't need to be "just a bookkeeper." Especially early on, you need someone who thinks like you do, who aligns with your culture, who can handle a little bit of everything. Build your Core Fit Profile around behaviors and traits, not a narrow job description. And when you do hire that person, actually delegate. Don't hand them work and then demand they bring it back so you can check it. That's not delegation. That's micromanagement with extra steps.

We wrapped up talking about the power of niching deeper. I tell every business owner the same thing. You're probably never niched deep enough. Niche early and niche often. You can serve a smaller group so exceptionally well that nobody can touch you. The riches are in the niches.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on building a hiring system that actually works on Titans of the Trades. Subscribe for more conversations like this.