Ryan Englin on Shally's Alley: Why Post and Pray Is Dead and Your Employee Experience Is the Real Recruiting Strategy

I went on Shally's Alley with Shally Steckerl to talk about why post-and-pray hiring is dead, why recruiting belongs in marketing and not HR, and what blue-collar employers keep getting wrong about the people who build their businesses.

We started with the job boards. Indeed's tagline is "helping people find jobs." Not "helping employers find great people." Think about that. The employers fund the platform, but the platform does not exist to serve them. The job boards care about volume, not quality. Every time a rep calls, the pitch is the same: want more candidates? Pay more. They never ask if you want better candidates.

That distinction matters because most companies hand recruiting to HR. And every HR person I've ever met hates sourcing. They want to focus on compliance, benefits, training. The people stuff. Recruiting is not people stuff. Recruiting is a marketing activity. The same skills your marketing team uses to attract customers work for attracting employees. The problem is nobody connects those two activities.

I gave Shally an example I share all the time. Go look at a service contractor's website. It says "available 24/7, weekends, on-call, the customer is always right." Customers love that. Know who doesn't? The technician reading that site while deciding whether to apply. That tech sees "I will never see my family again." You just repelled the exact person you want to attract. Now flip the script. Put on your website why your people are the best. Background-checked. Trained daily. Given scripts and tools to succeed. A-player technicians read that and think, "My boss isn't doing any of this. I want on that team." And customers see it too. That is marketing doing double duty.

We spent a big chunk of the conversation on ghosting and engagement. Here is the math. Gallup says 27% of employees are engaged. Somewhere around 20% are actively disengaged. That leaves 53% in the middle who do not care whether they work for you or someone else. Hand those people a QR code and tell them to recruit their friends, and you know what happens? Nothing. They are not equipped, they are not motivated, and they are not going to sell your company for you.

Your 27% who are engaged will recruit naturally because they want to work with friends. But 73% of your team needs training, tools, and scripts before they will have a meaningful conversation with a passive candidate. We would never hand a sales team a new commission structure and say "good luck." We bring them in. We huddle. We practice. We role play. Employee referrals deserve the same investment.

Shally told a story about his daughter that landed perfectly. She got fired from her first job because nobody trained her. Nobody even knew she was starting. Her second job's manager vanished and nobody could tell her when to come back. Two experiences, same message: we do not care about you. That is exactly what I tell every client. We have taught an entire generation of workers that employers do not care about them. And then we wonder why they ghost us.

Here is what fixes it. We had a client with a 90% interview no-show rate. We pulled their recorded phone screens and listened. Monotone. Robotic. Checking boxes. One candidate kept bringing up his band and the screener just moved on to the next question. We coached them to turn those calls into connection conversations. Within weeks the no-show rate flipped. 90% of candidates started showing up. The only change was treating candidates like human beings instead of line items.

Our rule is simple. Every applicant gets a human response within 15 minutes. Not a "thanks for applying, we'll be in touch" auto-reply. A real person. If the application comes in after hours, the automation says "we return calls between 8 and 3, reply with the best time to reach you tomorrow." That one move separates you from every other employer in the market.

I also talked about job ad length. Indeed tells our clients to shorten their ads. A 300-word ad gets volume. A 1,200-word ad gets quality. We write long ads that describe the company, the boss, and the culture because people don't leave jobs, they leave people. 80 to 85% of applicants who read the full ad and still apply are people worth talking to. That is the trade-off. Fewer applications, dramatically better candidates.

Shally's daughter eventually found an employer who called her the same day she applied, had a casual meet-and-greet conversation first, then invited her back for a two-hour working interview. We call that a test drive. The candidate test-drives the company and the company test-drives the candidate. She loved it. No surprise. They treated her like a person, not a cog.

The question I left the audience with is the same one I ask every owner I work with. Is the problem really the job market? Or is the problem you? If you are treating candidates as replaceable parts, you will keep getting replaceable results. And it is fixable.

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