Ryan Englin on The Fortified Life: Why Hiring Is a Marketing Problem, Not an HR Problem

I sat down with Jason Davis on The Fortified Life podcast to talk about how I ended up helping trade contractors build teams they trust, the role faith played in that journey, and why most hiring problems have nothing to do with HR.

Jason opened by asking about my backstory, and I went back to where it all started. My dad was an owner-operator in manufacturing. Worked 12-hour days, six or seven days a week. I spent a lot of time with him as a kid, but it was always at the shop. He started the business thinking he'd have more money, more time, more freedom. Then reality kicked in. I watched that happen and told myself I'd never be an entrepreneur.

So I went corporate. Spent about 10 years in banking, growing processing teams, making offers to over a hundred people a month. That volume of reps taught me more about interviewing and hiring than anything else in my career. It also gave me a deep appreciation for process. In corporate, if you want somebody to do something a certain way, you have to show them, teach them, and guide them. Most entrepreneurs skip that entirely. They say "go do that" and wonder why it doesn't get done right.

The whole time, I thought my dad's problem was a revenue problem. Not enough customers. So when I started my own company, I built a marketing agency for home service contractors. Websites, emails, lead generation. Then something happened. It was the middle of summer in Phoenix. My HVAC clients called and said they didn't need more leads. The phone wouldn't stop ringing. They had trucks sitting in the yard with no techs to put in them. I told them I'd help them find techs. I had no idea if I could, but I always believed recruiting was a marketing problem. I was a marketer. So we did it. And it worked.

But then the next problem showed up. They didn't know how to interview. If they interviewed, they didn't know how to make the offer. If they made the offer, they didn't know how to onboard. If they onboarded, they didn't know how to keep people. Every fix exposed the next gap downstream. That pattern repeated for about six years before I had enough tested and refined to build the full Core Fit Hiring System and eventually expand it into what we now call the Core Fit Blueprint. Seven phases. Everything from stopping the bleeding to scaling with confidence.

Jason asked about the book, Hire Better People Faster. The reason I wrote it is simple. I kept thinking about my dad. He never grew past 10 or 12 people. There are thousands of business owners just like him who will never be able to hire me. Not enough budget, not enough time, not enough resources. If I put the system in a book, I can reach them anyway. Our vision at Core Matters is to impact half a million families through their employers running on our system. Everything we do is employee first. Yes, we help employers. But we do it by serving the employee.

One thing I made clear on the show: I am not an HR guy. HR is a compliance role. It's about protecting people and protecting the company. Dotting i's, crossing t's, managing benefits, running payroll. All necessary. But there's an entire dimension of the people equation that HR doesn't touch. I call it the employee experience.

Do your employees feel like they belong? Do they wake up Monday morning excited to see their friends at work? Or do they go to bed Sunday night with a knot in their stomach? Do they go home in a good mood and share it with their family? Or do they walk through the door and yell at their kids because the day was rough? That experience is what we help companies get intentional about. HR runs surveys and identifies problems. We fix them.

Most entrepreneurs have no idea how to interview. They ask a couple of questions about the job description, poke around the resume, maybe ask why somebody left their last job. None of that tells you whether a person is bought into your vision, your values, your belief system. And that alignment is what makes people excited on Monday morning and sends them home feeling good at the end of the day. That's the heart of the Core Fit Profile and our four-stage interview process.

Jason also asked about the revenue roller coaster, that pattern where entrepreneurs hire a few people, pause, then scramble to hire again. I see it everywhere. Owners get buried in delivery, stop recruiting, then panic when they lose someone or land a big contract. The root cause isn't poor planning. It's that deep down, they don't trust the people they have. That's why they stay stuck in the day-to-day. And that's what we fix.

We talked about faith too. I shared how God had to make my corporate life incredibly uncomfortable before I was willing to be obedient and leave. I didn't recognize it in the moment. It was brutal. But looking back, every piece of the journey prepared me for exactly what I'm doing now. The sanctification process is real, and I'm grateful for it even though it sucked while I was in it.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these topics on Titans of the Trades. We just wrapped a season and are moving into more solo episodes where I'll share stories from 15 years of doing this work. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or find the full episodes on YouTube.