Ryan Englin on Cherokee Business Radio: Recruiting Is a Marketing Function, Not HR

I went on Cherokee Business Radio's High Velocity Radio to talk with Stone Payton about why recruiting is broken for most trade contractors. And why the fix starts with treating it like marketing, not HR.

I shared the origin of Core Matters. I grew up in a blue-collar entrepreneurial family. My dad worked 12-hour days, six or seven days a week, telling us he was building a better life for his kids. Twenty years flew by and he missed a lot of it. I went corporate, hated it, became an entrepreneur, and started a marketing company helping home service contractors. HVAC companies, plumbers, the people who keep everything running. A couple years in, every single one of them had the same problem. They didn't have enough people. I could generate all the leads in the world and it didn't matter when trucks sat empty in the yard.

So I made the leap. I applied marketing principles to recruiting. It worked. And it was more fun than anything I'd ever done in business.

The core message I drove home on this show is simple. Recruiting is a marketing activity, not an HR activity. When you recognize that and start treating it like marketing, the whole game changes. Think about what most companies do. They slap a boring job description on Indeed, wait for people to apply, and then complain that nobody wants to work. That job description is an advertisement. And it looks like every other ad out there. One of the biggest rules in advertising is you have to stand out. You have to get noticed. Most job ads read like legal documents. They repel the exact people you want to attract.

Stone asked me about retention, and I hit on something I talk about all the time. Looking for work is one of life's most stressful events. It sits on the same list as death of a loved one and divorce. When someone leaves you, they are telling you the stress of working for you is worse than the stress of job hunting. That is a gut check for any business owner.

The pattern I see over and over is owners reaching for money as the fix. It's easier to write a check and pay a three-dollar premium per hour than to look in the mirror and ask hard questions about company culture, leadership, training, and development. But when you buy people with money, they leave you for money. Every single time.

I walked through what actually keeps people. It comes down to relationships. Your employees give up time with friends, family, and the things they do for fun to come work for you. Mirror what they are giving up. Create connection. Build a mentoring program so new hires have someone in their corner from day one. Gallup's Q12 research shows that if someone has a best friend at work, there is more than an 80 percent chance they are fully engaged. That one data point changes how you think about onboarding.

I also talked about the biggest mistake I see in interviewing. Employers spend the first 25 minutes bragging about how awesome they are. Then they start asking questions. By that point, you just gave the candidate all the answers to the test. They tell you what you want to hear. You get excited. You hire them. And they don't work out. Flip it. The candidate sells you. Your job is to guide them through the conversation with great questions, the same way a good interviewer runs a podcast. The best employees don't interview well because they haven't done it in five, six, seven years. The people who interview like pros do it every three months because they can't hold a job. That distinction matters.

Stone asked for tactical advice people can act on right now. I gave two things.

First, build your Core Fit Profile. Get crystal clear on who your best employee is. How do they behave. What do they believe. What do they do for fun. The same clarity you brought to defining your ideal customer applies here.

Second, write a better job ad. Take what HR wrote and hand it to your marketing team. Tell them to make it sound like a commercial, not a compliance document. Make it compelling. Make it fun. Make someone read it and say "I want to be a part of that team." You don't need to list every task and requirement. If someone is an electrician, they know what electricians do. Tell them why they want to do it for you.

I also talked about a client who started collecting employee stories. People they helped buy a house. People who got out of debt. People who retired a millionaire. When the owner saw all those stories gathered in one place, something clicked. He said, "That is what I want. I want every person who interacts with us to have a story to share." That became the vision driving the whole company forward.

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