Ryan Englin on The Money Advantage Podcast: Hire Better People Faster

I sat down with Bruce Wehner and Rachel Marshall on The Money Advantage Podcast to talk about why hiring is the single biggest bottleneck in most businesses and what owners can do to fix it.

The conversation started with something personal. My dad was in manufacturing, worked nights and weekends, and I spent my childhood at the plant as free labor. I didn't realize it at the time, but my dad always struggled to find good people. He had bodies. He didn't have the right people. That pattern followed me into my own career and eventually led me to build Core Matters.

Here's the shift that changed everything for me and for my clients. One rockstar employee replaces two or three mediocre ones. Every single time. One person who doesn't make mistakes, doesn't create drama, and doesn't keep you awake at night is worth more than three warm bodies. Most owners resist that math because they think in terms of hands. I think in terms of outcomes.

Bruce and Rachel asked why hiring specifically. Why not better marketing or better processes? My answer is simple. You can only cut expenses so far. You will never get below zero. But on the revenue side, the ceiling is infinite. And the way you push revenue is through people. A good employee with a great process produces great results. A great employee with a mediocre process still produces mediocre results. The process matters, and the person matters. Both. Not one or the other.

We spent time talking about the bus analogy. Jim Collins says get the right people on the bus. But he stops short. The bus has a lot of empty seats beyond the leadership team. Those seats need to be filled with people who are excited about where the bus is headed. When you tell someone "we're going to the mountains" and they love skiing, they will get off and push when the bus breaks down. When the bus drives in circles with no destination, people get nauseous and leave. That's not a people problem. That's a leadership problem.

I walked through where we start with every client. First, figure out who you are as an organization. Your values, vision, and purpose. That is the hardest part. Owners look at their business like a tool. They don't get emotional about a hammer. But if that hammer makes you $150,000 a year and provides for your family, you are emotionally attached whether you admit it or not. You can't read the label of the jar you're inside of. Get someone outside the business to help you see what's real.

Then we talked about getting more quality applications. Here's the reality. People don't leave jobs. They leave people. If we know that, why are we so afraid to tell job seekers who they will actually be working for? More than two-thirds of job seekers say the number one thing missing from a job ad is information about the people they will work with. Not the company history. Not the stock bios on the website. Tell them the truth about your culture. If your leadership team is hands-off, say that. If nobody babysits anyone, put that out there. It will repel the wrong people and attract the right ones. And it will be different from every other ad on Indeed, which is exactly what the market needs.

I also challenged the room on speed. Most companies let applications sit until the weekend. By then, the good people are gone. Someone else recognized them and hired them on Wednesday while you were still "getting to it." Treat incoming applications like customer leads. No company lets a customer inquiry sit from Tuesday to Saturday. Set a metric. Fifteen minutes. Respond fast. Make the candidate feel wanted.

On interviewing, I gave a principle that changes everything. Interview people based on the behaviors the job actually requires. If someone is going to be on the phone all day as a CSR, the entire interview needs to happen on the phone. Stop dragging phone people into a face-to-face meeting and then judging them on something irrelevant to the job. If someone is going to be face-to-face with customers, put them in front of a customer during the interview. See how they perform in reality, not in a conference room answering rehearsed questions.

And dump the resume. There are only two types. Those written by professional resume writers that you can't trust, and those written by people who don't know how to write a resume, which make them look worse than they are. Neither tells you what you need to know.

I also shared one of my favorite automation techniques. When applications flood in, put the next step back on the job seeker. Set up a voicemail number. Send an automated reply telling them to call and leave a message selling themselves. You just eliminated 75% of people who won't pick up the phone. And those are exactly the people you don't want anyway. You automated the screening process and tested behavior at the same time. Faking a process is harder than faking an answer.

We closed with something Bruce said that I agree with completely. Your employees are your number one customer. When you invest in them, they invest in your customers. When your customers are taken care of, your business grows. That's the order. Not the other way around.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on the full hiring system and the interview process on Titans of the Trades.