Ryan Englin on High Volume Hiring: How Service Businesses Hire and Retain Frontline Workers

I sat down with Jeanette Leeds and Steven Rothberg on the High Volume Hiring podcast to talk about what service businesses get wrong when they hire and retain frontline workers.

This is a topic I never get tired of. I grew up watching my dad grind 12-hour days, six and seven days a week, because he "couldn't find good people." Forty-five years later, I still hear that same line from business owners everywhere. The truth? It's not that good people don't exist. It's that no one ever taught these owners how to attract people, get them to join the team, and then trust them enough to hand over the reins.

That's why I built the Core Fit Hiring System. The whole framework starts with your core. Your values, your vision, your purpose. We find people who fit who you are, and then we teach them the skills. I can teach someone to turn a wrench. I can teach someone to operate equipment. What I can't teach is showing up on time, treating people with respect, or giving a damn. That's what we hire for.

We also got into the generational conversation, which I love shutting down. Everybody in the trades loves to say "these kids today don't want to work." I found a study from the late 1960s when Boomers were entering the workforce. Average time on the job? About 12 months. Average number of jobs in their twenties? Seven. Sound familiar? It's not a generational problem. It's an age and maturity problem. Every generation of twenty-somethings looked the same. So stop making fun of the next generation. They know you're doing it. And stop expecting them to be just like you. They won't be.

The heart of the conversation landed on how companies treat frontline workers. Here's what I see in organization after organization. They invest in long interviews, strong onboarding, and real training programs for their executives and leaders. Then they look at the $18-an-hour frontline worker and say, "Why would I invest in them? They're not going to stay anyway." I always ask: is that cause or effect? Do they leave because you don't invest, or do you not invest because they leave? Every single time, it's the first one.

Steven brought up employer brand and asked what companies can do to give frontline workers a reason to get up in the morning beyond just paying rent. My answer is simple. When you hire a human being, you get the whole package. The home drama. The hopes. The goals. The dreams. The crazy family. You get all of it. Any leader who tells employees to "leave your drama at the door" is really saying: I don't value you as a whole person. I only want the piece of you that produces work.

The pandemic made this crystal clear. When companies separated workers into "essential" and "non-essential," the message employees heard was: you don't value me as a person, you only value me for what I produce. And employees decided they don't have to tolerate that anymore.

Here's the flip side. When you start valuing the person, productivity shoots through the roof. Retention shoots through the roof. Engagement shoots through the roof. And recruiting gets easier because you have raving fans going into the marketplace telling people it's an amazing place to work. That's recruiting as marketing in action.

We closed by talking about why recruiting can't live inside a two-person HR department. I ask this question in every workshop: how many people do you have recruiting? They say one or two. I ask how many people work for your company. They say 200. Wrong answer. You have 200 people recruiting for you. Every single person that works for you is a walking, talking billboard. And if you knew what most of them were saying about your company, you probably wouldn't be too excited.

When you build a real employer brand, equip your people with the right language, invest in purpose, and turn your whole company into a recruiting machine, that's when things transform. Not two people sitting behind an ATS all day. The whole company owns this.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on building frontline hiring systems that actually work on Titans of the Trades.