Ryan Englin on Service Business Mastery: Interviewing, Hiring, and Retaining Top Talent for Your Home Service Business

I went on Service Business Mastery with Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch to talk about interviewing, hiring, and retaining top talent in the trades. We covered a lot of ground, from why people leave mid-season to how applicant tracking systems save you time and money to the conversations most owners never have with their people.

Here's what I want you to walk away with from this one.

The Best People Leave in the Summer. That's Not a Red Flag.

Tersh brought up something I hear all the time. He said he always assumed anyone looking for a job in the middle of summer must not be very good. I get why people think that. But here's the reality. The best employers in the trades burn their people out every summer. Everyone's short-staffed. The hours are insane. The wife is at home saying she's tired of never seeing her husband. And eventually, someone hits the breaking point.

The problem is they don't have time to look for a new job. Looking for work sucks. It's stressful and time-consuming. But if you've been building a relationship with that person for a couple of months through your recruiting as a marketing activity, they don't have to go looking. They already know where they're going. That's why you always be recruiting. You never know when someone is going to hit that moment and say they're done.

There are two types of job hoppers. The first type stays in the same trade, same role, and bounces from company to company. That person knows what they want to do. They just haven't found the right people to do it with. That's the person you want. The second type jumps from cashier to construction to manufacturing to something else entirely. That person doesn't know what they want to be when they grow up. Steer clear.

The Pullback Offer Prevents the Blindside

Tersh told a story about a tech he trained all winter long who put in a two-day notice right at the start of the hottest part of the year. He knew the guy's personal situation was changing. He asked about it. The guy kept saying everything was fine. And then he was gone.

I told him the piece he missed was the pullback offer conversation. During that process, you sit down and walk through all the what-if scenarios. What if you decide to move? What if something changes at home? What if this isn't what you expected? You don't ask these questions to interrogate people. You ask them so neither side gets blindsided.

If that tech had felt safe enough to come to Tersh three months earlier and say he was probably moving back home, Tersh would have made completely different decisions. He would have started training someone else. He would have had a different reaction entirely. The blindside is what hurts, not the departure.

Money Is Never the Real Reason

Josh asked me about inflation and whether the old rules about pay still apply. Here's the stat I shared. If you have a solid culture and the employee is engaged, it takes a minimum 20% pay increase for them to even be open to looking elsewhere. If they're not engaged, people actually take a pay cut to leave you.

That's not a typo. People leave money on the table to get away from a bad culture.

Does that mean you ignore inflation? No. You have to keep up. You have to raise prices so you can afford to keep good people. But stop thinking money is the fix. Money is the excuse people give you because they know you won't argue with it. The real reasons are always deeper.

Your People Give Up Friends, Family, and Fun to Come Work for You

This is something I brought up that I want every owner to sit with. Your employees are giving up time with their kids, their hobbies, their friends, and the things they love to come do work for you. And most employers think writing a check covers that. It doesn't. You can't put a dollar value on time with your family.

This is where values, purpose, and vision come in. Values are how you make decisions. Purpose is what gets people out of bed on the days they don't want to get out of bed. Vision is what keeps them on the bus. If your vision is how to make payroll this week, that's fine, but realize you will attract people whose vision is just as short-term. If your vision is bigger than that, you attract a completely different kind of person.

I told the story about an electrical contractor client who tells incoming techs with entrepreneurial ambitions to come work for him for three years and he'll teach them everything. At the end of three years, those guys consistently stick around. They never leave. Because nobody else invested in them like that.

The Single Mom Who Became the Number One Performer

I shared a story from my corporate days. I inherited a woman another manager couldn't deal with. She was labeled a low performer because she couldn't make it to work by 8 AM. Her kid's school didn't open until 8. Her boss made an example of her every morning, reaming her in front of the team. It wrecked her headspace until lunch every single day.

I sat down with her and said your day starts at 8:30. She told me I couldn't do that. I said who told you that? She said her old boss. That was it. Her day started at 8:30. She became the number one performer in the entire operation.

Remove the tiny barriers. Work with the person. You get the whole package when you hire somebody.

The ATS Is a Hammer. It Depends on Who Swings It.

We spent time on applicant tracking systems. I give the same answer every time someone asks which one is best. The best ATS is the one your company actually uses. I just got access to a client's system that's missing features I love. But they use it every day, they know it cold, and it works. That makes it the best one.

An ATS does two things that change the game. First, you post your jobs in one place and the system distributes them to all the job boards for you. No more logging into Indeed, then Craigslist, then ZipRecruiter one at a time. Second, it brings every application back into one place so your whole team can see them, schedule interviews, and communicate with candidates through automated emails and text messages.

One client told me they're getting the same number of applicants they used to get, but they're not spending $600 a week on Indeed anymore and they're saving 20 hours a week processing applications. Same results. Less money. Less time. That's what automation does.

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