Ryan Englin on Inside The Firm: Why Trade Contractors Keep Losing Good People and How to Fix It

I sat down with Alex Gore on Inside The Firm to talk about why small businesses struggle to hire and what they can do about it right now.

Alex asked me how I got here. The short version: I grew up watching my dad work 12-hour days and weekends in manufacturing. I was five or six years old running around his plant, thinking I was helping. I was free labor. He just could not find enough people. I told myself I'd never go into the family business. I went corporate, got my HR degree, spent years doing nothing but interviewing people. One day I walked into an office and 100 candidates were lined up outside waiting to be interviewed. That's all we did. Ten hours a day of conversations.

That experience taught me something most business owners miss. Interviews are about a conversation. Not a skills checklist. Not a pop quiz. A real conversation about who the person is, what they care about, and whether they belong on your team.

I started a digital marketing agency serving home service contractors. About four years in, my clients started telling me to turn off the leads. They didn't have enough people to service the work. One HVAC contractor in Phoenix, middle of July, booking AC repairs three weeks out because trucks sat empty in the yard. I applied my marketing background to their recruiting problem. Three weeks later they called me to turn the leads back on. All trucks filled. That moment changed my entire business.

Alex asked me about my interview process, and I walked him through all four stages. First is the screening step. Do you look good on paper? Can you follow instructions? Give that to an admin. Second is the culture fit conversation. This is where you find out if someone will create that positive energy on the team or drag everyone down. Third is position fit. Put them on a job site. Sit them in front of the software. Watch them work. And then the fourth step, which I believe is the most important, is what I call the pullback offer. You sit down and have a real conversation about expectations before anyone signs anything.

I compared it to moving in together. Which way does the toilet paper go? Do we squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom or the middle? Those sound silly. But unspoken expectations create death by a thousand paper cuts. The same thing happens at work. What does overtime look like? How do we communicate when someone is frustrated? If you never have those conversations, small friction turns into resentment. And resentment turns into turnover.

Alex asked me for the number one thing businesses do wrong when hiring. My answer was simple. They hire someone to fill a job instead of hiring someone to be part of their team.

We talked about the trades specifically. I told Alex the industry did this to itself. Construction, plumbing, HVAC. They ignored what was happening in the knowledge worker economy the same way newspapers ignored the internet in the 90s. Now a person can stand on their feet in an Amazon warehouse for the same hourly rate as dangerous physical labor. Or answer phones from their living room for nearly the same pay. The industry never asked itself how to compete beyond a paycheck.

Here is what makes it worse. The trades are actually cool. The people are cool. The work is cool. But the industry has spent decades marketing itself as gross. Plumbing companies bragging about being "the smell-good plumber" who doesn't stink like normal plumbers. What message does that send to kids and their parents? We did this. And now we wonder why nobody wants to be a plumber.

Alex also asked about employee referral programs. They are my favorite source for candidates. But most referral programs fail because they misunderstand the psychology. You offer someone a hundred bucks to refer a friend. That person thinks about the last time they told a buddy about a job opening and the buddy's wife got upset. Is a hundred dollars worth jeopardizing a friendship? No. It is not. Recruiting is a marketing activity, and referral programs need to be built around what actually motivates people, not just cash.

We wrapped up with a question I love answering. If I went back in time to when I first started, what advice would I give myself? One word. Niche. And then niche again. And keep going deeper until you have almost no competition. It took me almost ten years to get here. We teach a hiring process to businesses with under 500 employees in the trades. That is it. And it has made everything easier and more fun.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these topics on Titans of the Trades.