Ryan Englin on The Rialto Marketing Podcast: Disruptive Ideas To Find The Best People When You Need To Hire

I sat down with Tim Fitzpatrick on The Rialto Marketing Podcast to talk about why recruiting belongs in your marketing department and not your HR department.

Tim and I see the world through a similar lens. He's a marketing guy. I'm a marketing guy who happens to apply it to hiring. And the overlap is massive. That's why this conversation clicked so fast.

Here's the core problem. HR is a compliance function. It's about checking boxes, following rules, protecting the company. That's important work. But compliance people think in compliance terms. When they write a job ad, it comes out looking like every other job ad in the country. A bulleted list of requirements, duties, and compensation. That's not marketing. That's a window sticker.

Marketing is about getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Recruiting is a marketing activity. The same principles that attract customers attract employees. Define your target. Craft a compelling message. Choose the right channels. Build a pipeline. Nurture the relationship.

We dug into the Core Fit Hiring System and why the word "core" sits right in the middle of everything. Your vision, your values, your purpose, the way you behave, how you make decisions, the story you tell. That's your employer brand. That's the hub. Without it, every tactic downstream falls apart.

Tim asked about ideal candidate profiles, and I walked through the Core Fit Profile. It works like a buyer persona on the marketing side, but with one critical difference. Half the elements in a traditional customer avatar are protected classes. Age, gender, religion, family status. You can't use those to define your ideal employee. So we focus on behaviors, psychographics, values, how someone shows up, what they care about, where they spend their time. Know the fish you want to catch and everything else follows.

We talked about resumes and why I tell people to dump them entirely for frontline roles. There are now three types of resumes out there. Professionally written ones that embellish the truth. Self-written ones that miss the mark because nobody taught that person how to write a resume. And now AI-generated ones where a candidate pastes in your job posting and gets back a perfect-looking document in seconds. None of them can be trusted. Reference checks are the same story for most roles. The candidate gives you three people who will say nice things. That's not a screening tool. That's theater.

The interview itself needs to become a sales conversation. Not you selling the candidate on the company. The candidate selling you on why they belong on your team. When employers flip into pitch mode and start listing every benefit and perk, they miss the chance to listen. They miss the chance to find out if this person actually fits. The four-stage interview process is designed around listening, observing behavior, and testing alignment with your culture before you ever make an offer.

I shared the story of the controller who quit because her boss never said thank you. Two words. That's all she wanted. She told him at least 50 times. He never changed. Her leaving set the business back six months. People don't leave jobs. They leave people.

Tim and I also got into something I didn't expect to go so deep on. Your customer-facing marketing directly impacts your ability to recruit. We ran recruiting ads on social media for home service contractors and customers started clicking on them too. They saw a company being authentic about who they are and thought, "That's the company I want in my home." Some clients redirected all their marketing toward employee acquisition and ended up getting both employees and customers from the same content. Your online reputation matters just as much. If a job seeker Googles your company and finds a 2.7-star Yelp profile with hostile owner responses, they're gone.

I left Tim's audience with one action item. Take your best employee to lunch. The one you wish you could clone. Ask them what changes they'd make to your recruiting. Ask them how you can better support them in referring their friends and family. Then shut up and listen. Don't justify why things are the way they are. Just listen. Then implement what they said and let them know they were heard.

Most companies are only two good hires away from a completely different business. That's not a massive problem. That's a fixable one.

All seven components of the system are laid out in Hire Better People Faster. If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on employer branding and the full hiring process on Titans of the Trades.