Ryan Englin on Building Scale: Hiring Isn't the Problem, Retention Is

I went on Building Scale with Will Foret and Justin Nagel to talk about why the hiring crisis in the trades is actually a retention crisis, and what owners need to do about it.

This conversation hit the fundamentals hard. I started where I always start. I asked a simple question: how many people are on your payroll at year end, and how many W2s did you issue? One client told me 41 employees and 77 W2s. That's not a hiring problem. That company hired 30-plus extra people that year. People showed up. They just didn't stay. That math changes the entire conversation.

People don't leave jobs. They leave people. That stat about money? Only 9% of employees leave for more pay. Nine percent. The rest leave because of who they work for, how they're treated, whether anyone invests in them. And here's the part that stings: if people are leaving your company, they're leaving you. Not the industry. Not the economy. You.

We spent time on the disconnect between office and field. It's everywhere. Office people have zero appreciation for what it feels like to do physical work all day. Field workers have no idea what it's like to sit behind a screen for 50 hours a week getting pulled into meetings. Cross-functional training fixes this. Put your office team in boots for a day. Put your craft worker at a desk. By noon, everyone has a different perspective. One of my clients hired a director of talent acquisition who had no field experience. I told them to get her out on job sites weekly. It lasted a couple weeks before the office pulled her back in. That's a leadership failure.

Will and Justin asked about telling the employer brand story to both audiences. The answer is not two stories. It's one story told through different tools. A company I work with doesn't give field workers below foreman level access to iPads or computers. So they built software that works through a text message on a smartphone. No password needed. The communication is the same. The mechanism is different. That distinction matters.

We talked about being authentic as an employer. I had a client years ago who dropped F-bombs during interviews on purpose because that was the culture. I told him to put it in the job ads. His face went white. But that's the point. Stop putting out a pristine false front and then surprising people with who you really are. There's somebody for everybody. I watched a documentary about life thriving at volcanic vents two miles under the ocean in 600-degree acidic water. If life can find a way there, someone will thrive in your culture too. Just be honest about what that culture actually looks like.

I brought up the difference between rock stars and superstars. Your rock stars are amazing but they bomb interviews because they haven't done one in 12 years. They're fidgety, nervous, rusty. Meanwhile, the person who switches jobs every six months interviews like a pro. They say everything you want to hear. And you hire them over the rock star. Every single time. Then you wonder why they leave in eight months.

The conversation turned to process. I'd rather take a B player and give them an A-plus process than take an A-plus player and throw them into a B process. When you have no process, you have no scoreboard. People make up their own rules for how to keep score. And those rules rarely match yours.

We covered job titles and how indeed works as a search engine. Stop getting creative with titles in job postings. "Captain and Commander of the Unicorn Army" is not what anyone types into a search bar. I don't care what you put on the business card. Put the real job title in the ad. Sixty percent of Indeed searches are just a city and state with no job title at all. People are searching "who's hiring near me." That tells you something about how the workforce thinks about work right now.

Employee referrals came up. They work because people are six times more likely to be engaged when they have a best friend at work. But most referral programs fail because they offer $250 and expect an employee to call a friend and say "tell your wife I want you to quit your job." Nobody risks a friendship for $250. Align the reward with your values. If you value family time, pay for an experience. If you value technology, give tech. Stop defaulting to cash.

For technology, an applicant tracking system is the one non-negotiable tool. It will revolutionize how you recruit, communicate, and automate. Text automation matters too, especially for field workers who aren't sitting at computers. And pre-hire assessments are a gold mine, but not for the decision to hire. Use them after you hire. They tell you how to onboard, communicate, and engage that person for years.

The bottom line from this conversation: be intentional. Every retention problem and every hiring problem traces back to a decision someone made or didn't make. It's fixable. All of it. But you have to commit to doing the work.

If you liked this, I go deeper on retention, onboarding, and building a recruiting system that actually works on Titans of the Trades.