Ryan Englin on The Business Builder Way: How to Stop Hiring the Wrong People

I went on The Business Builder Way with Wayne Herring to talk about why most trade contractors don't have a hiring problem. They have a retention problem disguised as a hiring problem. And it starts with leadership, not job boards.

Wayne asked me to walk through my story, and I kept it honest. I grew up in a blue collar household. My dad was an owner operator in manufacturing. He worked 12-hour days, six or seven days a week. He carried one of those brick cell phones in the 80s because he was the only one who could fix things when they broke. I watched him struggle to build a team my entire childhood. I told my high school guidance counselor I didn't care what I did as long as I had control of my time. They laughed and told me to go to college.

So I did. Then I went into corporate banking for a decade. Built teams. Watched them get restructured. Watched my best people get moved to other managers because I trained them too well. I got so frustrated I left and started a marketing company to help contractors like my dad. I believed his problem was revenue. Turns out it was people.

In 2015, I nearly lost the business. Over a 60-day stretch, 85% of my revenue disappeared because every client said the same thing. "I don't need more leads. I need more people." One HVAC contractor in Phoenix was booking AC repairs three weeks out in July because they had empty trucks and no techs. I told them I could fix it. The whole time I was thinking, "What am I doing?" Three weeks later they hired four technicians.

That moment changed everything. But filling trucks was only part of the equation. Clients didn't know how to interview. They stumbled over offers. They threw new hires into a truck on day one with zero onboarding. Ninety days later the person quit because they never felt a connection with their supervisor or the company. So I built the entire system. Attract. Hire. Retain. That became the Core Fit Hiring System.

Wayne asked me what fills the top of the funnel in 2025. Here is the reality. Gallup's 2025 report says only 31% of U.S. employees are engaged. That means 69% of the workforce is open to something better if the right opportunity shows up. Those people are not on Indeed. Indeed is for the unemployed. And in a market with 4.1% unemployment, the unemployed are often unemployable. Stop fishing in Lake Indeed and start becoming attractive to the 69% who are open but not looking.

This is where recruiting as marketing changes everything. Most contractors spend heavily on customer-facing marketing and put zero effort into their reputation as an employer. Worse, the things that attract customers actively repel candidates. Your website says "available 24/7, emergency services, affordable pricing." The candidate reads that as "you won't pay me well, you'll take me away from my family, and I'll never watch a game on Sunday." In an effort to appeal to customers, you're alienating the best people.

I walked Wayne through the Core Fit Profile, which is how we define the right person before we ever post a job. It is built on behaviors and motivations, not demographics. We study your best current employees and catalog what makes them great. That profile drives everything downstream. Where to recruit. What bait to use. What questions to ask in the interview.

We talked about the investment of time in the interview process. I tell people to spend eight hours with every candidate before they hire them. The objection is always "I don't have the time." And I ask the same question I always ask. Why is it that we always have time to do it over, but we never have time to do it right?

The interview is a collaboration. It is not an interrogation. The candidate needs to get to know you just as much as you need to get to know them. When you walk them through the candidate journey and show hiring managers what it feels like to be on the other side of their process, blinders come off. Every single time.

We also dug into vision. Most owners cast their own goals as the company vision. Revenue targets. Growth percentages. Nobody on the front line cares about that. They care about what's in it for them. I use the skiing analogy all the time. If you say "we're going skiing" without specifying snow or water, half the team shows up in swimsuits and half in snow bibs. Someone is about to be extremely disappointed. When those misaligned people leave, we say "dodged a bullet" instead of owning the fact that we weren't clear.

The real diagnostic is simple. Call your CPA. Ask how many W2s you issued last year versus how many people you had on payroll December 31st. That gap is your retention problem staring you in the face. You don't have a hiring problem. You have a keeping-people problem.

I go deeper on all of this in Hire Better People Faster. If you liked this conversation, I dig into these frameworks and stories every week on Titans of the Trades. Subscribe for more conversations like this.