Ryan Englin on GrowCFO Show: How to Recruit and Retain Better People Faster

I went on the GrowCFO Show with Kevin Appleby to talk about how finance leaders and business owners can recruit and retain better people faster.

Kevin's audience is primarily CFOs and finance professionals. People who understand process, systems, and data. That made this conversation click fast because the Core Fit Hiring System is built on those exact principles. Good people working a great process will outperform great people stumbling through an okay process. Every single time.

We started where I always start. The fishing framework. Kevin and I walked through the most important decision you make before you recruit anyone: what kind of fish are you after? That one decision dictates everything. Where you post. What bait you use. What gear you need. Time of day, time of year, seasonality. Most companies skip this step entirely. They dust off an old job description, throw it on a job board, and wonder why they're not catching anything.

The answer to that first question is what we call the Core Fit Profile. It's not a list of tasks and responsibilities. It's a picture of who the person is. How they behave. How they think. I can teach someone to reconcile an account or run a report. What I can't teach is picking up the phone and having a tough conversation with a customer who's 60 days past due. If that phone feels like it weighs 500 pounds every time, no amount of training fixes that. Hire for the things you can't teach.

We spent a good chunk of time on a concept Kevin's audience doesn't hear enough: recruiting is a marketing activity. It does not belong to HR. It belongs to marketing. You're putting the right message in front of the right people at the right time. Most companies already do this on the customer side. They have funnels, automation, nurture sequences, ad budgets. All you need to do is change the messaging and put it in front of a different audience.

I walked Kevin through how the bench works. Seventy percent of job seekers are passive. They're not on job boards. They're not updating resumes. They're quietly putting feelers out, and it takes them 9 to 18 months to make a move. If you wait until you have a vacancy to start recruiting, you miss all of those people. The bench is a pipeline of pre-qualified candidates you nurture over time with culture content, employee testimonials, and letters from leadership. One of our clients built a bench so deep they stopped posting jobs entirely. Qualified candidates now call them every week asking to join.

I compared it to the plumber who emails me every month. I don't always need a plumber. But when my pipe bursts, I know exactly who to call. Same principle.

Kevin asked me about retention, and I told him what I tell everyone. Onboarding starts the second a job seeker learns about your company. I think about my wife and me. We've been together more than 25 years and we both still remember our first date. That first date set the tone for everything that followed. The same thing happens with employees. The first impression, the first interaction, the first day. It all compounds.

Onboarding is not an event. It's an experience. And it never ends. We put clients on a 90-day cycle because relationships get stale. You need to reignite and remind each other why you decided to do this together.

I brought up Gallup's Q12 research. Out of twelve engagement questions, one stands above the rest: do I have a best friend at work? If the answer is yes, there's a six times greater likelihood that person is engaged than if they say yes to any other question on the list. People give up three things to come work for you. Friends, family, and fun. Your job as a leader is to replace those things inside the organization. When you do, people stay. When you don't, they go find a company that will.

We closed by talking about remote work. My take is simple. If the work gets done, I don't care when or where you do it. That's how we run Core Matters. I have people on my team I've never met face to face. We see each other on Zoom constantly. The relationship is strong because we built a culture that values results over presence.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on building these systems on Titans of the Trades. Subscribe for more conversations like this.