Ryan Englin on Good Morning, HR: Recruiting and Retaining Blue Collar Skilled Workers

I went on the Morning Huddle Construction Show with Stacy Holinger to talk about why contractors are invisible to the next generation of workers and what it takes to fix that.

Stacy opened the episode with a stat that hit hard. She attended a workforce event in Montgomery County, Maryland. 160 employers showed up. Only 1% were contractors. She asked a couple hundred eighth graders who installs the lights in their school building. Nobody knew. That is not a problem with the kids. That is a problem with us. We are not showing up.

And when we do show up, what do people find? I told the audience to do something simple. Go to Google right now and search for a job at your company. See what comes up. One of two things will happen. Either your Yelp reviews and Glassdoor reviews are telling a story you don't want told, or there is nothing. Crickets. Your competition's website shows up instead of yours. If you are not controlling the narrative about your employer brand, someone else is controlling it for you.

This is a marketing problem. Not an HR problem. I say this all the time and people still confuse it. Recruiting is a marketing activity. HR is compliance and rules. Recruiting is communication and attraction. The reason people can't find good workers is the same reason a business with no marketing can't find good customers. You haven't given anyone a reason to choose you.

We talked about building a bench. A bench is a list of prequalified candidates who raised their hand and said they'd love to join your team but aren't ready to move right now. One of our clients has 6,000 people on their bench from a simple banner on their website that says "join our careers newsletter." When a position opens, they email their list instead of scrambling on Indeed. That is how you stop the cycle of panic hiring.

I walked through a few ways to build that bench. Career path one-pagers work incredibly well. Put together a simple document that shows someone how they go from entry level to journeyman to foreman, complete with salary ranges and timelines. Put it behind an email opt-in. People give you their contact information because they want to see what's possible. That takes half a minute to put together. You already know the information.

Stacy and I spent a good amount of time on job ads. I used my Corvette example. Chevy sells a $200,000 sports car with a 60-second commercial showing people living their best lives. The roar of the engine. Wind. Smiles. No price tag. Then there is the window sticker. A bulleted list of features, options, and the price. Which one do your job ads look like? The window sticker. Every single time.

People don't leave jobs. They leave people. So the next time you write a job ad, speak to what people are actually looking for. They are not looking for a place to swing a wrench. They are looking for a different place. Make the ad about your team, your culture, how you invest in people. Stop listing "must be able to lift 50 pounds" for a welder. Welders know what welders do. Promote the experience of working with your people.

I shared the story of our client whose goal is for every employee to retire a millionaire. They put that right in their ads and back it up with Smart Dollar, Financial Peace University, 401k planning, and financial advisors. That is what people want. Nobody wants to work somewhere for 30 years and have nothing to show for it.

We also got into something I feel strongly about. Most contractors with Spanish-speaking crews invest in teaching their field workers English. Flip that around. Buy Rosetta Stone for your superintendents and foremen and teach them Spanish. Imagine what that says to a crew member who has worked at five companies where nobody bothered. Your superintendent asks about his kids in Spanish. That person is never leaving. We had a commercial landscape contractor with 500 field workers, 450 Spanish-speaking, and their website, job ads, and interview guides were all in English. When I asked why, they said "we never thought of it."

I hit on the employer of choice framework. Getting clear on your core values, your vision, and your purpose is the foundation. If your bus is running around in circles, people get sick and want off. If your bus is going somewhere they don't want to go, same result. Get clear on the destination and attract people who want to go there.

Trust came up too. If you are not a high-trust leadership team, you cannot expect your people to trust you. When what you say and what you do don't align, people see through it. Every time.

The construction industry has a reputation problem. The word on the street is that contractors don't care about their people. A lot of that is not true. There are contractors out there who will bleed for their team. They just don't know how to communicate it. That is the marketing problem we need to fix.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these topics on Titans of the Trades. And if you want the step-by-step playbook, grab a free copy of Hire Better People Faster at corematters.com/freebook.