Ryan Englin on The Morning Huddle Construction Show: Hire Better People Faster

I went on The Morning Huddle Construction Show with Stacy Holsinger (filling in for Chad Prinkey) to talk about why contractors keep losing the war for people and what to do about it.

Stacy opened the conversation with a stat that hit me right in the chest. She was at a Worlds of Work event in Montgomery County, Maryland. About 160 employers showed up. Only 1% were contractors. That is a massive problem. We are not showing up. And when we do not show up, an entire generation of kids never learns that careers in the trades even exist. She asked a couple hundred eighth graders who installs the lights in their building. Nobody knew. That tells you everything about the gap we need to close.

Here is where I came in. I grew up in a blue-collar family. My dad was an owner-operator who thought going out on his own meant more time and more money. Five years later the business owned him. I thought his biggest problem was marketing and sales. It wasn't. It was finding people he could trust. That realization eventually led me to build the Core Fit Hiring System at Core Matters, where we help contractors attract, hire, and retain the right people.

I told Stacy something I tell every audience. People don't leave jobs. They leave people. Every hand goes up when I say that. Then I flip it. If people are leaving your company, they are leaving you. Look in the mirror.

We dug into the marketing side of recruiting because that is what this really is. It is not an HR problem. It is a marketing problem. I told the audience to go to Google right now and search for a job at their company. Two things will happen. Either bad Yelp and Glassdoor reviews dominate the results, or there is nothing at all. Crickets. Your competition's website shows up instead of yours. If you are not controlling that narrative, someone else is writing it for you.

We spent a good chunk of time on building a bench. A bench is a list of prequalified candidates who raised their hand and said they want to join your team but aren't ready to move yet. You nurture them with emails, text messages, culture content, and career path information. One of our clients has about 6,000 people on their bench from a simple banner at the bottom of their website that says "join our careers newsletter." When a position opens, they email the list instead of throwing money at Indeed.

I shared a few ways to get people onto your bench. Put a career path one-pager behind an email opt-in. Show the progression from entry level to apprentice to journeyman to foreman, complete with salary ranges and timelines. It takes half a minute to build because you already know the information. Now people are raising their hand saying "I want to know more."

Stacy and I also talked about job ads. Most of them look like a window sticker on a Corvette Z06. Bulleted list of requirements, must-haves, certifications, and a salary at the bottom. That is not how Chevy sells a $200,000 sports car. They run a 60-second commercial of people ripping around a racetrack, wind in their hair, grins on their faces. No price. Pure emotion. Your job ad needs to do the same thing. Sell the people. Sell the culture. Sell the experience of working at your company. The requirements can live further down the page.

We also talked about becoming an employer of choice. I broke it into three pieces. First, get clear on your core. Your values, your vision, your purpose. If your bus is running in circles with no destination, people will get off and find another bus. Second, build trust. If you are not a high-trust leadership team, you cannot expect your people to trust you. Third, commit to growth. A stagnant company means a dead career path for your people. No growth means no reason to stay.

I brought up a story about one of our clients, a commercial landscape contractor in the Southwest with about 500 field workers. Around 450 of them were Spanish-speaking. I asked the team why their website, job ads, and interview guides weren't in Spanish. Their answer: "We never thought of it." And instead of forcing Spanish-speaking employees to learn English, what if you invested in teaching your English-speaking superintendents basic Spanish? That single move tells your people you care about them as human beings.

The bottom line from this conversation is simple. Nobody wants to work for a company they have never heard of. Nobody wants to work for a company with a terrible reputation they can see on Google. And nobody stays at a company that does not invest in them as a person. Fix those three things, and hiring gets a whole lot easier.

I mentioned my book Hire Better People Faster at the end of the conversation. If you want the step-by-step technical deep dive on everything we talked about, grab a free copy at corematters.com. And if you liked this, I go deeper on recruiting as marketing, employer branding, and building a bench on Titans of the Trades.