Ryan Englin on Marketing Guides for Small Businesses: How to Develop a Hiring Process That Works

I went on Marketing Guides for Small Businesses with Jen Kelly to talk about why hiring is broken for most small businesses and what owners need to do to fix it.

The conversation started where I start with almost every client. Recruiting is a marketing activity. It is not an HR activity. HR is built for compliance. Following the rules. Dotting the i's. Marketing is built to break the rules, challenge assumptions, and stand out. When you hand recruiting to your HR team, you get job ads that look like maintenance schedules. Bullet lists of requirements, duties, and pay rates. Nobody gets excited about a maintenance schedule.

I brought up the Corvette commercial comparison. Chevy does not run Super Bowl ads showing the maintenance schedule. They show the lifestyle. The roar of the engine. The open road. The feeling. Then we look at our job postings and wonder why nobody applies. Your job ad is a window sticker. Make it a commercial.

I shared a story about an HVAC contractor here in Phoenix who ran a radio spot talking about how much they invested in their people. How clean their techs were. How they trained them to respect the homeowner. It was a customer acquisition ad. But it worked for recruiting too, because people heard it and thought "I want to work for a company that treats their people like that." That is the power of flipping your message. You do not need two separate budgets. You need one message that speaks to both audiences.

We spent time on a topic I'm passionate about. The employer-employee relationship. Too many companies treat it like a transaction. You give me time, I give you money. That is not a relationship. That is a vending machine. When you hire someone, you take on the whole person. Their goals, their stress, their family, their drama. If you are not willing to invest in the human being, do not expect loyalty. People don't leave jobs. They leave people. Every single time.

Jen asked how small businesses compete against bigger companies with better benefits. The internet leveled the playing field. You do not need a Super Bowl budget. You need a website that tells a compelling story. You need social media that shows what it is like to work for you. That company party you threw last month with great photos of people having fun? Post it. Let people see this is a place they want to be. And stop believing you have nothing to offer. Small businesses give people flexibility, relationships, real career growth, and the chance to matter. Big companies give you a badge number and a pecking order.

I hit on employee referrals hard. The number one place to invest if you want off the job boards. Employee referrals produce better retention, faster ramp-up, and a built-in friend at work, which Gallup identifies as one of the top engagement indicators. One client was spending almost $600 per hire for entry-level positions on Indeed. That is real money. Give it to your people instead. Equip them with video, social media posts, and what we call the core story. Teach them who you are, what you stand for, and what you believe. That attracts people far more than "now hiring at $15 an hour."

We talked about ghosting, and I asked the question I always ask. Who ghosted who first? The average contractor takes almost seven days to respond to an application. In cleaning, it is thirteen and a half days. No marketer on the planet would let a hot lead sit for seven days and then blame the lead for not picking up the phone. Speed matters. Automate that first contact. Get an applicant tracking system. It works just like a CRM except it connects to job boards and manages a recruiting pipeline instead of a sales pipeline.

I also addressed why the trades specifically struggle. The trades had a newspaper mentality in the 90s. Knowledge work got cool. Parents started steering kids toward tech and college. Schools cut shop class and auto class. The trades put their heads down and ignored the shift. Now we have a perception problem that is decades in the making. The math still favors the trades. A four-year apprenticeship, zero debt, $80,000 to $100,000 a year. Compare that to a teacher making $30,000 with $80,000 in student loans. But almost nobody is pushing that message.

I closed with something I feel strongly about. The interview is where most companies lose. Getting applications is not the hard part. Connecting with people during the interview process is the hard part. The interview is your sales process. If you do it right, the candidate sells you on why they belong. If you do it wrong, you are begging a stranger to take the job. That never works.

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