In the conversation
Ryan Englin on Profit by Design: Take Your Interviews to the Next Level
Key takeaways
- Fifteen minutes is not an interview. It is rapport building. Anyone can fake 15 minutes. Spend a minimum of six hours getting to know a candidate before making an offer.
- The biggest interview mistake is talking about your company first. Spending 25 minutes selling how awesome you are gives candidates all the answers to the test before you ask the questions.
- Interview for the things you cannot or will not teach. If you can teach someone what a part does in three minutes, stop disqualifying candidates over that knowledge. Ask about punctuality, respect, and character instead.
- Most job seekers never hear back after applying. Employers trained candidates to disengage, then blame them for ghosting. Create a personal connection early and set clear expectations at every step.
- Your best future employees are terrible interviewers. They have not practiced because they have been at the same job for 12 years. The people who interview brilliantly are the ones who switch jobs constantly.
- Peers will ask questions leadership never thinks of and hear answers leadership never gets. Leave the candidate alone with a trusted team member. Watch what they say when the boss walks out of the room.
I went on Profit by Design with Dr. Sabrina Starling to talk about why most interviews fail and what trade contractors need to do differently to hire people they won't regret.
We started where I always start. My dad. He was in manufacturing, worked 12-hour shifts and weekends, and brought home one of those old brick cell phones thinking it was cool that work could reach him anywhere. I spent my childhood at the plant as free labor. It took me decades to realize the real problem wasn't that my dad loved to work. It was that he didn't have a team he could trust. He was there on weekends fixing the work that wasn't done right. That story is the reason I do what I do.
From there we got into the biggest mistake business owners make in interviews. They push people through too fast. I ask owners all the time: how many people get married after 15 minutes on the first date? Nobody. But we interview someone for 15 minutes and fall in love. Anyone can fake 15 minutes. I used to tell people if you spend less than six hours getting to know a candidate, you don't really know the person. People hear that and say, "It's a $12 an hour job, why would I spend six hours?" Because how many times do you want to do this? Some of these companies have 400 percent turnover and act like it's normal. It's not normal.
We talked about how most employers give away the answers to the test before they even ask the questions. One of my clients sent me an interview guide from a highly regarded industry coach. The first instruction was to spend 25 to 30 minutes talking about how awesome your company is. I told him: why don't we spend 25 to 30 minutes talking about how awesome the candidate is? That's a pattern interrupt. Most job seekers never experience that. And people are drawn to what's different.
Dr. Sabrina and I are completely aligned on this: interview for things you can't or won't teach. Everything else, don't even bring up. I had a client who was disqualifying candidates because they didn't know what some obscure piece of equipment did. I asked him how long it would take to teach someone that. Three minutes. You're killing your pipeline over three minutes of training. What I can't teach is showing up on time. I can't teach respect for customers. I can't teach someone to give a damn. Those are the things you interview for. That's the whole foundation of the Core Fit Profile.
We also dug into how to unmask the real person during the interview. One of the most effective tactics is to leave the candidate with a trusted team member while the boss steps away. People talk to peers differently than they talk to leadership. I've seen it happen dozens of times. The candidate is all smiles and gratitude with the owner. The owner walks away for five minutes and suddenly the candidate is bad-mouthing leadership and complaining about customers. Then the owner walks back in and they snap right back to the act. Faking a process is harder than faking an answer. That's why we build behavioral tests into every stage of the four-stage interview.
Dr. Sabrina brought up the question every owner has right now: how do I compete with Amazon? Here's the truth. Forbes reported that Amazon turns over their entire warehouse staff every nine months. They pay above market to bribe people into overlooking a brutal work environment. If you have a toxic culture, you will pay more to keep people. That's the trade-off. Our clients regularly hire people who take a pay cut to come work with them. Nobody switches jobs for money. Money is the excuse. They leave because of the environment. They leave because of the people. They leave because nobody ever said thank you.
The piece most small businesses miss is this: you might have an amazing culture, but if job seekers can't see it from the outside, they will keep scrolling. I ask audiences all the time. How many of you have customer testimonials on your website? Every hand goes up. How many have employee testimonials? Dead silence. Grab your phone. Ask two or three employees to talk for 30 seconds about what it's like to work for you. Put it on your careers page. Share it on social media. Build an email list of people in your industry who are open to working for you someday. When you throw the company Christmas party, send them photos with a subject line that says "wish you were here." Recruiting is a marketing activity. It always has been.
If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on the full interview process and employer branding on Titans of the Trades.
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