Ryan Englin on Profit Tool Belt: How to Hire Better People Faster

I went on Profit Tool Belt with Dominic Rubino to talk about how trade contractors can stop bleeding people and start building teams that actually stick.

Dominic opened the conversation with a great observation about Starbucks covering 100% of college tuition for employees at ASU. He asked the right question: what would it take for a contractor to become the employer of choice in their market? That question is the foundation of everything I teach. If you want to attract good people, you have to become attractive to good people.

I shared how I got into this work. I grew up in the trades. My dad was an owner-operator who put me to work as free labor after school and on weekends. I told him I'd never join the family business, went corporate for 11 years, spent 10 wanting out, then started a marketing company to help people like my dad. A few years in, an HVAC contractor in Phoenix called me in July and said they didn't need leads. They were booking AC repairs three weeks out because four trucks sat empty in the yard with no techs. I applied marketing principles to their recruiting. Three weeks later they had four techs and two more trucks on order. That changed everything for me. But then two of those four techs left within weeks. That's when I realized the problem wasn't just attraction. It was retention. I spent the next four years building what became the Core Fit Hiring System.

We dug into a story that still sticks with me. A client lost his financial controller after two or three years. I did the exit interview. She said two words explained everything: he never said thank you. She told him no fewer than 50 times that acknowledgment mattered to her. His mindset was "why would I thank you for doing your job?" Her leaving set his business back six months. I hear entrepreneurs say all the time, "I wish they would care about the business as much as me." My response is always the same. When is the last time you cared about your employee as much as your business?

Dominic and I landed on something we've both arrived at independently after years of doing this work. Core values have to be verbs. Integrity, teamwork, excellence. Those are not values. Those are words on a wall. Show me integrity. You can't. It's not observable. But "put employees first" or "people over profits"? Those are behaviors you can see and measure. And once you define values as behaviors, turn them into stories. Dominic told one about a new hire whose truck broke down on a rural road. The kid got out and started running to the shop because he didn't want to be late. That story does more for culture than any plaque ever will. We call it the core story. If you can't tell at least two stories from the last month of each value showing up, it's not a real value.

We spent real time on employee referral programs because most of them are broken. Here's the stat that stops people in their tracks: only 6% of employees will refer for money or recognition. Six percent. If you've got 20 people, that's maybe one person who might refer once. And most referral programs make it worse by requiring the new hire to stay 60 or 90 days before the bonus pays out. That turns your employee into an unpaid retention manager. That's not their job.

Flip it around. Equip your people with tools to make referrals. Give them employee testimonial videos they can send to a buddy's spouse. And stop handing out cash. Align the incentive to the values you say matter. If you say you value family, pay for a night at Great Wolf Lodge instead of writing a thousand-dollar check. That check gets forgotten next week. The memory of 24 hours with their kids lasts for years. The perceived value is higher. The cost is often lower. And it proves you actually mean what you say.

I also challenged the idea that the problem is external. The problem is not the labor market. The problem is not Indeed. Only 3 to 5 percent of the people you want to hire are actively looking on job boards. Recruiting is a marketing activity, not an HR activity. If you're just posting and hoping, you're fishing in the wrong pond.

Dominic asked something that matters: if people don't leave jobs, they leave people, then what is every job seeker actually looking for? Another leader. Not more money. Not better benefits. Another leader. Yet none of our job ads talk about leadership. None of our websites talk about leadership. None of our onboarding programs talk about leadership. That's the gap. That's what we fix.

I offered listeners a free copy of my book, Hire Better People Faster. It walks through the seven components of our system with tools, templates, and worksheets for every stage.

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