Ryan Englin on The Rialto Marketing Podcast: How To Hire Better People Faster

I went on The Rialto Marketing Podcast with Tim Fitzpatrick to talk about why finding good employees feels impossible and what small business owners can do to fix it.

Tim and I share a marketing background, so we got into the parallels between attracting customers and attracting employees right away. The core message I drove home: recruiting is a marketing activity. If you understand how to get the right message in front of the right customer, you already have the skill set to get the right message in front of the right employee. You just haven't applied it yet.

Here's where most small business owners get tripped up. They think their competition for employees is the other HVAC company or the other plumber down the road. It's not. Their competition is Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Every company that makes it easy to apply, easy to find open positions, and easy to understand what it's like to work there. If you're invisible online, you lose before the race starts. About 90 percent of job seekers look for jobs online first, and roughly 70 percent of those people will Google you before they ever hit apply. Bad reviews, no reviews, a website that looks like it was built in 2004. All of that repels the exact people you want to attract.

We spent a good chunk of time on job ads. I walked Tim through my Corvette commercial analogy. A TV ad for a new car never talks about oil changes and maintenance schedules. It sells the experience. Your job ad needs to do the same thing. Stop listing requirements, responsibilities, and rewards like every other company. Start talking about the leadership, the culture, and what it actually feels like to work there. People don't leave jobs. They leave people. If that's the number one reason someone is looking, your job ad better address it.

I also shared one of my favorite filtering tactics. Easter eggs. Bury a question somewhere in the middle of your job description. Something unexpected. One of my favorites is asking candidates to name their favorite Disney princess and include it in their application. If they don't answer it, they didn't read the ad. That one filter alone saves you hours of sorting through people who mass-applied to 25 jobs and don't even remember your company name.

Tim asked me about the "hire slow, fire fast" idea, and I clarified what hire slow actually means. It's not calendar time. It's depth. You need to spend enough time with a person to understand their behaviors, not just their skills. I tell people all the time: you can teach someone to weld. You can teach someone to work safely. What you can't teach is showing up on time, caring about waste, or giving a damn. Hire for the things you can't teach, then invest in the skills.

We talked about process-based interviewing. Instead of asking someone if they value punctuality, tell them early is on time and on time is late, then schedule the interview for 7 AM and see what happens. Faking a process is harder than faking an answer. That's the entire philosophy behind our interview approach.

I also touched on pre-hire assessments, specifically integrity tests that measure likelihood of theft, dishonesty, substance use, and workplace violence. These are game changers for frontline hiring. About half of applicants won't even complete the assessment, which saves you even more time. The ones who pass give you real data to pair with your behavioral observations.

One thing I made sure to leave Tim's audience with: if someone leaves in the first 90 days, that's a hiring problem. You made a bad decision or set the wrong expectations. If they leave after 90 days, that's a leadership or culture problem. Two different diagnoses. Two different fixes. And both are fixable.

The last point I emphasized is that hiring and retention aren't separate problems. If you build a solid hiring system rooted in cultural fit, you fix about 60 percent of your retention issues at the same time. The other 40 percent comes from how you lead and engage people after they're on board.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on behavioral interviewing and building your candidate pipeline on Titans of the Trades.