Ryan Englin on People Strategy Forum: Creating a Magnetic Culture

I went on People Strategy Forum with Sam Reeve and Simmit to talk about what it actually takes to build a culture that attracts people instead of repelling them.

We started where I always start. If you want to attract the best people, you have to become attractive to the best people. That means sitting down and writing out what your best employee looks like. Not their resume. Not their certifications. Their behaviors, their mindset, their communication style. Then ask yourself an honest question: would my company be attractive to that person? Most owners discover they have amazing things about their workplace that they never brag about. The best people don't even know it's an option.

This is exactly why I keep saying recruiting is a marketing activity, not an HR activity. Your marketing team already knows how to build customer personas, craft compelling messages, and run campaigns. Give them recruiting. They will be ten times more effective than the controller you hired for finance who inherited hiring because labor is on the P&L. Your job posting is an advertisement, not a compliance document. People don't leave jobs. They leave people. Yet 99 out of 100 job ads describe the job and say nothing about the leadership team, the culture, or the reasons people actually stay.

I told the story of the five passive-aggressive fraternity brothers who ran a nine-figure company. They came to me struggling with sales turnover and I told them one of their values needed to be passive aggressiveness, because that is who they are. They fought it at first. Thought it was toxic. So I wrote a job ad that read like a fraternity recruiting pitch. Their own procurement director read it without knowing it was his company and said, "I want to work here." Within six months, sales were through the roof. The difference was honesty. They stopped hiding who they were and started attracting people who thrived in that environment.

Here is a quick test. If any part of your interview process involves hiding the crazy cousin in the back room, cleaning up the shop, or moving busted trucks out of the parking lot, you have not fully documented who you are. You are making a promise you know you cannot deliver on.

We spent a good chunk of the conversation on onboarding, which I broke into the three phases of our 2412 Launch. Phase one is think like we think. Spend two weeks integrating new hires into your culture, building relationships, teaching them how your organization approaches customer service, communication, and problem solving. Phase two is do like we do. Follow our processes, our safety protocols, our checklists. Phase three is win like we win. Show them what success looks like, what a career path looks like, what performance management looks like. Do all of that in the first 90 days and retention gets so much easier. But for some reason, most leaders would rather do it over and over again than pause and do it right once.

Simmit asked a great question about probation policies. I don't like them. Think about it. You put someone through multiple rounds of interviews, psychometric tests, and evaluations. You certify they are ready. Then on day one you say, "For the next 90 days, either one of us can walk away for any reason." What does that say about your commitment? We complain that nobody is committed anymore, then we build policies that communicate the exact same thing back to them.

On retention, I told them what I tell every client. Money is a means to an end. When someone asks for a raise, I want to know what the raise affords them. A house? Getting out of debt? Starting a family? Once you understand what they want to accomplish in their personal world, you can support them in that. One of our clients built a first-time home ownership program. After a year of employment, people could apply for a grant toward their down payment. They brought in mortgage experts, credit repair specialists, real estate agents for lunch and learns. The company understood that when people own a home, they put down roots. Retention went up because the employer was investing in the whole human being, not just the widget.

That is what our Growth Accelerator Program does. It closes the gap between where the employee is and where they want to be personally. When you help someone get what they want, they fight to stay.

We also talked about the next generation in the trades. I told Sam and Simmit that getting into high schools is the wrong play. The real move is getting in front of mom and dad. Kids are not taking a job that their parents don't think is cool. Nobody is targeting the parents. I used the example of T-ball jerseys. Every time mom washed that jersey, she saw the car dealership logo. That is the long-term thinking we need to bring to workforce development.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these concepts on Titans of the Trades. Subscribe for more conversations like this.