Ryan Englin on Service Business Mastery: Hiring for the HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Trades

I sat down with Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch on Service Business Mastery to talk about why hiring in the trades feels so hard and what contractors get wrong about the entire process.

We kicked off with a truth I repeat everywhere I go: recruiting is a marketing activity. Before I built Core Matters, I ran a marketing agency. I had an HVAC contractor in Phoenix, middle of July, 120-degree heat, booking AC repairs three weeks out. Four trucks sitting in the yard with no techs. I applied the same marketing principles we used to generate customer leads to their recruiting. Three weeks later they had every truck filled and two more on order. That moment changed the trajectory of my entire business.

Tersh made the connection right away. He asked if we build an avatar for the ideal employee the same way marketers build one for the ideal customer. He finished my sentence before I got there. Yes. We call it the Core Fit Profile. But here's the catch. Do not hand this to your marketing team and say "build me a candidate avatar." Everything they give you will be a protected class. Age, gender, family status. You can't target any of that in recruiting. So we build the profile around behaviors instead.

I surveyed hundreds of contractors. I asked them to define "good" when they say they can't find good people. Nobody says "they can read gauges" or "they can recharge a system." They say: shows up on time, looks the customer in the eye, cleans up the job site, collects payment, doesn't wreck the truck. None of that is technical skill. All of it is behavioral. Once you understand the behaviors you want, you know where people with those behaviors hang out. That changes your entire sourcing strategy.

We talked about the trap of filtering candidates purely on technical knowledge. I shared a story about a commercial refrigeration company that ended every interview if the candidate couldn't identify a single component. I asked the owner how long it would take to teach the answers to those three questions. Seven minutes. He was bypassing great people because he didn't want to invest seven minutes of training.

Past performance is not an indicator of future success. That's a strong opinion I hold. A tech's last boss might have been terrible. The culture might have been toxic. The same person can be a rockstar in one environment and a disaster in another. Stop letting a resume tell the whole story.

Brent Ridley asked a live question about candidate ghosting. Six interviews scheduled, two showed up. I hear this constantly. Here's the bottom line. Switching jobs is one of the most stressful events in a person's life. Once they decide to make a move, they want out of that stress fast. The average response time to an applicant in home services is almost eight days. Eight days. Meanwhile a competitor responds in 15 minutes and has that candidate sitting across from them before you even open the email.

The fix is automation. An applicant tracking system does for recruiting what a CRM does for sales. It posts your ad to every job board at once. It pre-screens candidates with knockout questions. No driver's license? Automatic rejection email. Qualified candidate? Automatic email with a calendar link to book a phone screen. No human touches anything until someone is actually worth talking to. One client saved 20 hours a week and $600 a week in Indeed spend within a week of launching their system.

If you don't want to invest in an ATS yet, use an easter egg. Put a specific instruction two-thirds into the job ad. Something like "when you apply, tell us your favorite Disney princess." If the answer isn't there, that person didn't read the ad. They go to the bottom of the pile. You just filtered for the people who actually care enough to read.

Josh asked about over-filtering. My answer: you can never filter too much as long as qualified people are still making it through. If it goes silent, you went too far. But if someone misses a step, ping them once. Looking for work is stressful. Give people the same grace you'd give a tech on the job site. Have a process. Be flexible within it.

I closed with the statement I make everywhere: if you want to attract good people, you have to become attractive to good people. That means having an employer brand and an employer presence that speaks to the people you want on your team. Not a job ad that reads like a legal document. Not a careers page with a fax number. A real, compelling message about who you are and why someone's life gets better when they work for you.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these systems on Titans of the Trades.