Ryan Englin on Keep Hustling: Building Hustle in the Trades

I sat down with Aaron Gordon on Keep Hustling to talk about why the trades have a people problem disguised as a reputation problem, and what contractors need to do about it.

Aaron opened with a question I hear all the time: how do you reconcile being a hiring expert in blue collar industries when the world keeps saying this generation is unhirable? Here's the truth. It's not a laziness problem. It's a reputation problem. Five-year-olds play with Tonka excavators and bulldozers in the backyard and dream about building things. But their parents push them toward Google and Apple because that's what they get to brag about at dinner. No self-respecting parent wants to tell their friends their kid does a "dirty job." That narrative has to change.

I pointed out something that frustrates me every time I see it. A plumber shows up and charges $150 an hour to stop sewage from making your family sick, and the homeowner acts like they're being robbed. That same homeowner pays $500 an hour to an attorney without blinking. Until we start valuing the people who keep our homes safe and our modern world running, the image problem won't go away. Google just announced a $10 million grant to get more electricians in the UK. Not because they love the trades. Because they can't pull fiber optic cable without electricians, and that threatens their business. The very foundation of every tech company is built on the backs of skilled tradespeople.

But here's the part nobody in the trades wants to talk about. The real crisis isn't getting people in the door. It's keeping them. Blue collar industries have not fundamentally changed how they treat people in 50 years. The average age in construction is 51 right now, and somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of tradespeople are retiring in the next decade. The older generation keeps saying "these kids are lazy and entitled," but when I dig into it with them, they were the same way at 20. Every generation says this about the next one. It's been happening for thousands of years.

What's different now is that we took kids who spent 18 years in front of screens, handed them a shovel on day one, told them to dig ditches for eight hours, and then said "see, they can't hack it." That's not a workforce problem. That's a leadership problem. We need to change how we bring people in and develop them.

The modern workforce has blended work and life in a way the trades haven't caught up with. This isn't Severance. People don't walk onto a job site and forget they have a family. When someone is going through a divorce or their kid is sick, they need to know their employer sees them as a whole human being. I told Aaron straight up: very few people wake up excited to erect a building. They come to work because it funds the life they actually care about. When employers embrace that reality instead of fighting it, everything changes. Our clients who get on board with this dominate their markets. They have more people lining up to work for them than they have positions to fill.

Aaron asked me how to build that kind of team from scratch. It starts with communication, and we are losing that skill fast. I've watched my 27-year-old nephew sit on the couch next to his friend and text each other instead of talking face to face. In the workplace, nobody has ever sat these young people down and asked, "What do you want to accomplish in five years?" Parents were too busy working. The school system was too busy being underfunded. No one invested in them as people.

That's where the fuzzy file comes in. When you onboard someone, you ask personal questions. Where did you meet your spouse? What's your anniversary? Favorite restaurant? Favorite sports team? This is stuff that normally takes years of casual conversation. We learn it all in 30 minutes on day one. Then we use it. If two people on the team are both Chiefs fans, put them on the same crew. You just manufactured a friendship at work. Gallup's Q12 research found that people who have a best friend at work are six times more likely to be engaged. Six times. In a world where we're the most connected but loneliest we've ever been, and where the construction suicide rate is four to five times the national average, creating genuine connection at work isn't a nice-to-have. It's everything.

I also talked about how we dismiss great candidates because they interview poorly. Unless interviewing is their job, a bad interview tells you nothing. The person who has been at the same company for eight years and never needed to interview is going to be nervous and awkward. That's exactly who you want to hire. We train hiring managers to coach candidates through the process instead of judging them for being human. And when you do that, those candidates walk out wanting to work for you more than ever.

The number one thing millennials and Gen Z want isn't pay or benefits. It's this: am I working for someone who invests in me? Are they training me and giving me opportunities to grow personally and professionally? And what do most companies in the trades do? They train the craft and nothing else. Then they wonder why people leave.

We covered a lot of ground in this conversation. Expectation setting, onboarding done right instead of "go follow Jimmy around," and why no news is not good news. If you liked this, I go deeper on all of these topics on Titans of the Trades.