Ryan Englin on The Home Service Expert Podcast: Hiring Employees You Won't Want to Fire through the Core Fit Hiring Process

I sat down with Tommy Mello on The Home Service Expert Podcast to talk about what it actually takes to attract, hire, and keep great people in the trades.

We got into it right away. Tommy asked about the origin of Core Matters, and I told him the story that changed everything for me. I was running a digital marketing agency for home service contractors. In 2015, a wave of clients told me to shut the leads off. An HVAC contractor in Phoenix called me in July and said they didn't need more leads. They had four trucks sitting empty in the yard and no techs to fill them. I told them recruiting is a marketing problem. Three weeks later, all four trucks were full and they had two more on order. That lit a fire. But then we discovered those techs were gone within weeks. That forced me to spend years building a full system to solve the entire attract, hire, retain cycle. That system became the Core Fit Hiring process.

Tommy and I spent a lot of time talking about the core. Your values, your purpose, your vision. That's where everything starts. People don't leave jobs. They leave people. They leave toxic cultures. They leave broken promises. If you want to attract good people, you have to become attractive to good people. And that means getting clear on who you are as an organization. Not copying someone else's values off a poster. Not surveying a team you probably didn't hire well in the first place. Digging in and doing the hard work of defining your Core Fit Profile and what you actually stand for.

We talked about how most job ads read like window stickers. Bulleted lists of requirements, drug tests, background checks, black and white text. No video. No story. No emotion. Meanwhile, the best people aren't even on Indeed. Only three to five percent of people looking for work are on job boards. The other seventy percent are passively looking, and they're making an emotional decision about whether your company feels like a place worth leaving their current job for. Recruiting is a marketing activity. Not an HR activity.

I told Tommy about working with a roofing company that kept hiring people who said they weren't afraid of heights. Then they'd freeze on a ladder. We told them to start doing the interview on the roof. Carry the ladder around back. Climb up. Do the interview up there. You don't even need to ask the question. Faking a process is harder than faking an answer. That's the principle behind our four-stage interview process. We design behavioral tests. Not trick questions. Real scenarios that reveal who someone actually is before you hand them the keys to a company truck.

Tommy brought up ghosting, which is everywhere right now. Candidates accept an offer and never show up. I walked through a simple tactic. When someone accepts and has to go give notice, role-play the conversation with them. Prepare them for the counteroffer. Then at 6:45 the next morning, send a text: "Good luck with the conversation. I'm rooting for you. Can't wait to have you on the team." These small things cost nothing and change everything. The alignment offer process is built around exactly this kind of expectation setting before day one.

We also dug into retention. I asked a business owner how many people they had on payroll December 31st. Ten. How many W-2s did they issue that year? Forty-three. That's not a hiring problem. That's a retention problem wearing a hiring costume. Tommy agreed. He talked about his own investment in onboarding, orientation, and pouring into people's personal goals. I reinforced that when you bring someone in and ask "what do you want out of life" and then build a three-year plan to help them buy a house or fix their credit, nobody else is doing that. They will not leave for a dollar more an hour.

We got into employee referral programs too. Most are broken. Companies offer $500 if the referral stays 60 days. That's insane. It's not your employee's job to retain their friend. That's your job. Their job was to get you the referral. Pay them for the referral. And stop making it about money. The best referral rewards are things like vacation packages, extra PTO, experiences with their family. Things that matter more than a check.

Tommy committed on the show to investing in our system. I appreciated that. The best way to learn more is at corematters.com or corефиthiring.com.

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