Ryan Englin on Green Profit Academy Pros Podcast: The Power of Great Interviews in Today's Teams

I sat down with Christeen Era and Steve Bousquet on the Green Profit Academy Pros podcast to talk about why the interview process is broken in the trades and what it actually takes to hire and keep the right people.

Christeen opened up about her own experience with what she called "employee PTSD." She had been so burned by bad hires that she walked away from her business and rebuilt it from scratch. That story hits close to home. I hear versions of it every single week from contractors and service company owners who are worn out, short-staffed, and convinced the problem is the labor market. It's not a labor market problem. It's a process problem. And it is fixable.

We spent a big chunk of the conversation on the four-stage interview process that we use inside the Core Fit Hiring System. Stage one is pre-qualification. Just making sure you and this person need to spend more time together. Stage two is the culture fit interview. This is where you find out if the person aligns to how your company actually operates. Not the words on the wall. The behaviors that walk down the hall. And here is why culture fit comes before position fit: you might have the right person applying for the wrong job. If someone came in for a crew lead role but you can tell they belong in estimating, you want to know that before you lose them.

Stage three is position fit. Can they actually do the work? And I don't mean can they answer questions about the work. I mean can they demonstrate it. Put them in real scenarios. If you are a roofing company, take them up on the roof. If you are hiring a CSR, put them in a room and call them. Faking a process is way harder than faking an answer.

But the stage everyone misses is stage four. The offer meeting. I told Christeen that before you hand over the offer letter, you sit down belly to belly for 60 to 90 minutes and set expectations. I compared it to moving in with someone. Imagine sitting in the driveway before you walk through the door and going through a list of 60 stupid things you know you will fight about. Which way the toilet paper goes. How you squeeze the toothpaste. Can you drink from the milk carton. None of those are dealbreakers on their own, but unspoken expectations cause death by a thousand paper cuts. The same thing happens at work. Accounts aren't set up on day one. The background check is delayed. Nobody told the new hire. They show up thinking "I thought they said they were excited to have me here." One conversation before the first day prevents all of that.

We also talked about why recruiting is a marketing activity, not an HR activity. The same principles apply. You identify your ideal customer before you market to them. You figure out what matters to them and put the right message in front of them at the right time. Yet almost nobody does this for recruiting. They wait until someone quits, dust off an old job ad, and throw it on Indeed. That is reactive. It is expensive. And it attracts the wrong people.

I challenged the audience to build a Core Fit Profile for their ideal employee. Not demographics. Behaviors. Traits. What drives them. What they do for fun. Where they spend their time. When you have that, everything else gets easier. You know what to say, where to say it, and who you are looking for.

One of my favorite moments was when Christeen asked what questions spark real conversation in an interview. My answer is simple: ask about personal goals. People work to live. They don't live to work. When you find out that someone wants to buy a house, take their kids to Disneyland, or put new tires on the family car, you learn more about that person in five minutes than you will in an hour of technical questions. And if they say they don't have personal goals, take ten minutes to help them think about it. If they have no personal goals, there is no way on planet Earth you will get them to care about professional goals.

I also told a story about a client whose entire leadership team was passive aggressive. They all went to high school together and ran their company like a fraternity. Once they owned it and rewrote their job ads to reflect who they actually were, they started hiring people who thrived in that environment. Sales went up. Turnover disappeared. Authenticity in the interview process is not optional. It is the foundation.

The bottom line: if someone leaves in the first 90 days, that is a hiring mistake. Not theirs. Yours. Looking for work is one of life's most stressful events. It sits right next to death of a spouse and terminal illness on the psychological stressor list. These people are putting their family's livelihood on the line when they accept your offer. The least you can do is invest the time to get it right.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on every piece of this process on Titans of the Trades.