Ryan Englin on Freedom Blueprint for Home Services: Building a Bench for Proactive Recruiting

I sat down with Justin Deese on Freedom Blueprint for Home Services to talk about why reactive hiring is killing trade contractors and what proactive recruiting actually looks like.

I started with a story I tell often. My dad was an owner-operator in manufacturing. Twelve to fourteen hour days, six or seven days a week, brick phone on him at all times. I grew up thinking his problem was not enough business. Turns out, it was not enough people. Cash doesn't fix that. All the leads in the world don't fix that. I learned this the hard way when an HVAC client in Phoenix called me in July and told me to turn the leads off. It was 120 degrees outside. They were booking service calls three weeks out because four trucks sat empty in the lot with no techs to drive them. I applied what I knew about marketing to their recruiting, and three weeks later all four trucks were filled with two more on order. That moment changed everything for me. Recruiting is a marketing activity. It always has been.

Justin and I dug into the biggest mistake I see contractors make. They treat hiring as a reactive exercise. Somebody quits on Friday, they dust off an old job ad on Monday, throw money at Indeed, and pray. That is not a strategy. That is panic.

The best recruiting organizations in the world are professional sports teams. People line up to play. Most don't make the cut. And every single one of those teams has a bench. When someone gets injured or sick or traded, they call up from the bench and that person is ready to go. We do the same thing with our clients. We call it building a bench. It is a curated pipeline of passive job seekers. People who looked at your company and thought, "That place looks cool, but I'm not ready to apply yet." We nurture those people. We market to them. We communicate with them. By the time they raise their hand and say "Coach, I'm ready to play," they already know your culture, your leadership, and your values. They hit the ground running.

We talked about employer branding and authenticity. I told Justin about an electrical contractor who dropped f-bombs in the middle of an interview to test whether the candidate could handle the culture. I loved the instinct. But I told him to put that energy in the job ad instead of blindsiding someone. Back before Indeed changed their policies, we put profanity right in the ad. The people who applied said, "These are my people." That is what real employer branding looks like. Not a highlight reel. Not false promises on social media. Authenticity. If you're a micromanager, own it. People will figure it out anyway. The question is whether they figure it out before or after you've wasted everyone's time.

Justin asked about the Gallup Q12 and the best friend at work concept. I walked through the research. Gallup found that employees who say yes to "Do I have a best friend at work?" are six times more likely to be engaged. Six times. So how do you create that? You start by treating people like human beings with hopes and goals, not just a set of hands. I shared our fuzzy file process. During onboarding, we ask new hires questions about their family, hobbies, bucket list items, and interests. Then we use that information to intentionally pair people who have something in common. If two guys both have the same bucket list item, put them together. Manufacture the opportunity for friendship. Nobody wants to quit a job where they'd lose their best friend.

Justin also asked how Core Matters actually works with companies. I used a fishing analogy. When someone calls us and they're starving, trucks sitting empty, we don't start with a 12-week curriculum. We stop the bleeding first. Fill the immediate gaps. Write the ads. Screen the applications. Get fish in your stomach. Then once you can breathe, we build the Core Fit Hiring System around you. We put processes and systems in place, train your team to run them, and get you out of the bottleneck so you're not the one doing everything.

I closed with something simple. The best people are already around you. Ask your team who they know. Ask for referrals. Sit down, have a real conversation, and say, "I need help solving this." Your people want to help. Stop burning them out and start inviting them in.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on building a bench, employer branding, and the full hiring system on Titans of the Trades.