Ryan Englin on That Will Nevr Work Podcast: Mastering Growth and Hiring with Core Matters

I went on That Will Nevr Work Podcast with Maurice D. Chism, Sr. to talk about what makes someone a rockstar employee and what makes a company worth working for.

Maurice asked me a question I don't get very often. He flipped the script and asked how a job seeker becomes more attractive to an employer. Here's the truth. Most people write resumes that capture every job they've ever had. They throw everything at the wall. And then they wonder why they never hear back.

A recruiter makes a decision about your resume in six seconds. Six. So if your resume doesn't scream "I'm the one you're looking for" in six seconds, you're done. The fix is simple. Pick the role you want. Read the job description. Craft your resume to match that description. Delete everything that doesn't serve that purpose. Become the employee on paper that they want to hire.

I shared a story about a client right now looking for a video editor. We spelled it out in the ad. We said provide a portfolio of educational entertainment content for a financial services company. Someone submitted a horror flick they made in college. That person did not read the ad. And this is the problem. Job seekers have convinced themselves no one reads applications, so they stop putting in effort. That thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Maurice and I talked about the difference between a job description and a job ad. This is something I'm passionate about. A job description is a compliance document. It's the list of activities someone does to keep their paycheck. A job ad is an advertisement. I use this example in every workshop. I play a Corvette commercial. You see people enjoying life. The roar of the engine. No price. No specs. No list of features. Then I show a window sticker. Bulleted list. Maintenance schedule. Sticker price. I ask the audience which one their job ads look like. Every single time. The window sticker. Chevy figured out you don't sell Corvettes with a window sticker. You sell them by making people feel something.

We also got into the idea of core responsibilities versus activities. Nobody pays a video editor to edit video. They pay for publish-ready content that has a chance of going viral. That's the outcome. How they get there matters less than that they get there. When you define the three to five outcomes you're paying for, you make it easier to find the right person and easier for that person to know if they're winning.

I told Maurice about the bowling analogy. Imagine you're bowling and a curtain drops the moment your ball crosses the lane. You hear pins shatter but you never see how many fell. The screen doesn't show your score. You just keep bowling. That's what companies do to their people every day. They never let them know how they're winning. Human nature demands a scoreboard. If your winning aligns with the outcome I need from you, we both win. But if you don't know what a good job looks like, I promise your people don't know either.

Maurice brought up a real pain point. People don't want to be corrected. Bosses don't want to have hard conversations. So nobody communicates until the boss has been losing sleep for weeks and finally fires someone. I told him what I tell every client. If you fire someone and they're surprised, you have a massive communication problem to fix before you fire anyone else. No one is ever surprised they got terminated. That's the standard.

We talked about something I see all the time. An employer is ready to get rid of a low performer. I say fine, but before we replace them, let's document what a rockstar looks like in this role. We write it out. Clear outcomes. Clear measurables. Then I tell the employer to take that document and share it with the underperforming employee. Ask them if they're willing to do it. More often than not, that low performer becomes a rockstar almost overnight. Because now they know what winning looks like. Building a Core Fit Profile is where this all starts.

The conversation turned to culture. One culture, a person shows up and they're a rockstar. Another culture, same person, you wish you never hired them. Culture impacts their ability to perform more than anything. I used the sports analogy. Take a famous athlete and put them on the lowest performing team. It's a culture issue. They won't play well. We do this all the time in business and then wonder what happened.

I ended with the mirror test. Write down everything you want in a rockstar employee. Everything. Then hold that list up and look in the mirror. Would that rockstar want to play on your team? If the answer is no, you have two choices. Lower your standards or become the company that rockstars want to work for. Same thing in a relationship. If your ideal partner wants someone who's in shape, out of debt, and has goals, you go do those things first. Then finding that partner gets a whole lot easier.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on building culture and hiring systems on Titans of the Trades.