Ryan Englin on Owner's Profit Playbook: Recruiting Is a Marketing Activity

I went on Owner's Profit Playbook with Pat Mancuso to talk about why bad hiring quietly drains profit, and why recruiting is a marketing activity instead of an HR chore.

Pat framed the whole show around a line I love: what you don't know is costing you commas and zeros. That is exactly what happens with hiring. Owners believe a bad hire cost them the $300 they spent on Indeed plus a few weeks of wages. Wrong. One commercial HVAC contractor I worked with estimated a single wrong hire cost them over $60,000 in 90 days. That number felt low to me. Nobody writes a check for the drop in supervisor productivity, the upset customer, the bad review, the decent employee who quit because they were tired of picking up the slack. Those are the costs that never show up on a P&L line item, and they add up fast.

We started with my dad. He ran a manufacturing business, worked 16 hour days, carried one of those brick phones in the 80s and was thrilled about it because now people reached him anytime. I spent my childhood at his shop and decided I wanted no part of it. So I went corporate for a decade, then started a marketing company to help people like him. I believed his problem was revenue. It wasn't. A client called and said they solved the customer problem and had nobody to do the work. My corporate background told me that's a marketing problem. Three weeks later that client called back and said they filled four trucks and to turn the leads back on. That moment changed my business. My dad never had a team he trusted, which is why he always had to be on the phone.

Pat asked why owners can't let go. Three reasons. They don't want anyone else making decisions. They don't have a system. And nobody ever taught them a better way. That third one is the big one. When you have a system you trust, letting go gets easy. One client told us recently they left on Friday night and didn't check email until Monday morning. It took them a year and a half. They got there.

Then we got to why owners make bad hires. Desperation. Every single time. A truck goes empty, that truck represents $50,000 a month, and the first guy who shows up on time passes the test. The candidate doesn't even know there was a test. Owners get desperate because they're reactive. They fill the trucks and pause recruiting. Then a guy calls Monday and says he isn't coming back. That's the revenue roller coaster applied to people. Always be recruiting. You are never fully staffed. Someone gets hurt, someone's spouse wants to move across the country. Something always happens.

I told Pat the fishing story because it lands with owners. If you go fishing, the first decision is not location. It's what fish you want to catch. Once you know the fish, you know where they live, what time they bite, what gear you need, what bait attracts them. Everything else follows. That's why we build a Core Fit Profile before anything else. There are two questions in hiring. Can they do the work, and do they belong here? We've all hired the great technician nobody wants to work with, and the person everybody loves who can't figure out the job. Get clear on motivators, behaviors, values, and non-negotiables, and that clarity drives your job ads, your job descriptions, and your interview guide.

Here's a shortcut I gave the audience. Write down every reason you have ever fired someone. Those are your disqualifiers. Ten reasons gives you ten interview questions. Interview for those.

We also covered the alignment offer. Most people hand over a number, hours, and a letter. When someone doesn't work out in the first 90 days, it's because expectations went unmet. So instead, I give you my list of expectations, you give me yours, and we compare notes before anything gets signed. I compare it to sitting in the driveway before you move in together. Which way does the toilet paper go. How do you fold a towel. How do you load the dishwasher. All the stupid little things couples fight about, handled up front.

On resumes, I don't hedge. Three types exist. Written by people who don't know how to write one, written by professional resume writers who embellish, and written by AI. All garbage. We post plenty of jobs without requiring one. Make them show me they can do the work instead of telling me. Send the integrity assessment. Send a one-way video interview. Three hundred applicants becomes fifty who record a video, thirty who take the assessment, twenty who pass. You did that with automation and a system.

And the silver bullet? Care about the things they care about. We had a client with a 90% interview no-show rate. We pulled the call recordings and found a screener blowing past a candidate who kept mentioning his band. We coached her on active listening. Within a couple months it flipped. Nine out of ten showed up, because somebody finally took an interest in what they cared about.

If you liked this, I go deeper on recruiting as a marketing activity and building a bench on Titans of the Trades.