Ryan Englin on Profit Tool Belt: Hiring Mistake Horror Stories

I sat down with Dominic Rubino on the Profit Tool Belt podcast to talk about hiring mistake horror stories and what contractors keep getting wrong when they bring people onto their teams.

We opened with something almost every contractor has lived through. That first hire. It's usually a buddy, a former coworker, or a brother-in-law. You hired them out of convenience, not because they fit the way you behave or the way you treat your customers. And then you spend every waking hour cleaning up their messes. You were working 60 or 70 hours before. Now you're at 90. That's not a people problem. It's a culture misalignment problem. And it is fixable. But only if you do it on purpose.

I shared a story about a small mechanical contractor who hired someone to be their COO-level replacement. The resume looked perfect. Day one, the guy walks in with a list of ideas to change everything. He hadn't even learned where the bathroom was yet. He lasted maybe 45 days. The owner hired entirely off the resume and skipped the most important part. How this person behaves. How they think. How they communicate. That's the culture fit interview that changes everything. When you stop screening paper and start screening people, you make better hires every day.

Dominic and I talked about resumes, and I broke down the three types that exist now. One written by a professional resume writer full of embellishments. One written by someone who has no idea how to write a resume. And a third type that didn't exist a few years ago. Written by AI. I recorded a video where I had ChatGPT write a resume for an Amazon job in 12 minutes. It pulled keywords from the job description, fabricated metrics, and all I had to do was enter the company name and dates. Every other detail was made up. That's what you're screening when you rely on resumes. For frontline trade roles, I say skip the resume entirely and focus on what you can observe.

The second horror story was an electrical contractor with about 40 employees. They needed an operations manager. A referral came in. The owner loved the way she presented herself. She was competent. She interviewed well. But there were red flags. Four operations manager jobs in two years. The owner ignored those because he was attracted to her and had already made up his mind. A few months in, the service manager was raising alarms. Customers were complaining. Then the owner found an empty Grey Goose bottle in his office liquor cabinet. A couple weeks later, they found a Yeti cup on her desk full of straight vodka and a flask underneath. She'd been drinking on the job the entire time. After they terminated her, she sued for wrongful termination.

When we did the postmortem, every red flag was visible in the interview. The addictive behaviors. The controlling tendencies. The job-hopping pattern. All missed because of one bias. This is exactly why I coach owners to let other people on their team interview first. If you get emotionally attached, and most owners do, have someone who doesn't get attached run the early stages of your four-stage interview process. You come in at the end.

We also dug into something I feel strongly about. I asked the audience to stop blaming the labor market and start looking in the mirror. If you want rockstar employees, you have to become the kind of employer a rockstar wants to work for. I used the dating analogy. You can write down every quality you want in the perfect partner. But then you have to turn around and ask yourself, is that person interested in me? Am I what they're looking for? Most contractors are a three trying to attract a ten. Become a ten first.

That means treating recruiting as a marketing activity. Define your ideal employee the same way you'd define your ideal customer. What do they care about? Where do they spend time? What message will move them? Then build an employer brand that attracts that person. One of our clients hasn't posted a job in weeks and still gets qualified people reaching out every week asking to join. That's what happens when you do this work.

I also shared a simple tactic anyone can use today. If punctuality matters to you, put it in the job description. Say "early is on time and on time is late." Then when you schedule the interview, tell the candidate to arrive ten minutes early. If they show up late, that's the first and highest-weighted question on your scorecard. No conversation needed. You told them the standard and watched whether they met it. Faking a process is harder than faking an answer.

And one more thing people overlook. Employee testimonial videos. Stop collecting only customer reviews. Go ask one of your people to record 60 seconds about what it's like to work for you. Put it on social media. It doesn't need to be polished. In fact, raw and real works better. That's what the next generation of workers wants to see. Real people telling the truth. If you go to your team and they have nothing good to say, well, that's a different problem. Fix that first.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of this, from building a Core Fit Profile to the pullback offer to onboarding that actually works, on Titans of the Trades. Subscribe for more conversations like this.