In the conversation
Ryan Englin on The Site Shed: Why Hiring for Skills is Killing Your Business
Key takeaways
- You can teach someone to turn a wrench. You cannot teach someone to set their alarm clock, get to the job site on time, or give a damn. Hire for behaviors and values first. Skills come last.
- Interview for cultural fit before skills fit. If someone is an amazing person and fits the team, find a position and teach them the craft. If you start with skills and skip culture, you fall in love with the wrench-turner and ignore every red flag.
- The real cost of a bad hire is never the check you wrote to Indeed. It includes lost customers, bad reviews, stolen employees, wasted training, and the owner pulled back into work only they can do. One client calculated $30,000 per bad hire who left within 90 days.
- Always be recruiting. That does not mean always be hiring. Build a bench of pre-qualified people so when a position opens, you call your bench instead of scrambling on job boards in desperation mode.
- Resumes cannot be trusted. They are written by people who don't know how to write them or by professionals paid to make anyone look great. Scrap the resume. Ask questions that give you the information you actually need.
- Break the cycle of hire fast, fire slow. The extra set of hands is not worth the toxicity, the cleanup, and the customers and employees they take with them when they leave.
I sat down with Matt Jones on The Site Shed for a three-part creative recruiting series, and in this final episode we went deep on why hiring for skills is killing trade businesses.
Here's the reality. If you own a plumbing company, you know plumbing. You can teach someone to sweat pipe. You can teach them to run a line. What you cannot teach is someone to set their alarm clock, show up on time, keep the job site clean, and care about the customer standing in their kitchen. You cannot teach give-a-damn. That is either there or it is not.
This is the trap I see over and over again. A business owner gets desperate. They need someone now. So they grab the person with the right skills and ignore everything else. The wrench-turner shows up, does decent work, but snaps at customers, creates toxic tension on the crew, and tanks your reviews. I had a client whose technician was impeccable at the craft but treated every customer question like a personal insult. They started losing customers and getting bad reviews left and right. The guy could do the work. He just didn't care about the people.
When you hire for skills first, you end up falling in love with what someone can do and ignoring who they are. Then the cultural fit conversation never happens because you don't want to get disappointed. You tell yourself you'll deal with it later. You won't. That bad hire will cost you customers, employees, and your sanity.
Our Core Fit Hiring System is built the opposite way. We interview for cultural fit first. Skills fit is the last thing we look at. Because if someone is an amazing person who fits your values, fits your team, and brings the right behaviors, you will find a position for them. You will teach them to turn the wrench. But if they can turn the wrench and they poison your culture, no amount of skill makes up for that damage.
Everything starts with values. Your hiring decisions need to be values-driven. That means your company's core values align with the personal values of the people you bring in. And here's the mistake I see all the time. The owner sits down in the interview, spends 20 minutes talking about how amazing the company is, and then asks the candidate questions. What does the candidate do? They repeat everything you just told them. You gave them all the answers to the test. Then they ace it and you're amazed. Three weeks later you're staring at them wondering who you hired.
Matt brought up something important in this conversation. The biggest hiccup in trade businesses is constantly hiring for skills instead of the right people. He told me he'd never once been through a proper interview process with a trade business. Not once. And that's not entirely the owner's fault. Nobody taught them this. They figured out their craft, they figured out how to run a company, but nobody ever showed them how to hire. The only time I hold it against someone is when they learn and choose not to act.
We also talked about the real cost of a bad hire. I walked through an exercise with a client who does short-term rental cleanings. She told me a bad hire costs $130 because that's what she spends on Indeed ads. I started asking questions. What about the customer satisfaction issues you have to deal with? What about the employees who stole or damaged property? What about the people they befriended and took with them when they left? What about the training, the onboarding, and the time you lost? By the time we finished, the real cost was around $30,000 per bad hire in the first 90 days. She just never wrote a check for more than $130, so she never saw it.
Across all industries, the average cost to hire and onboard one frontline employee is at least $4,100. That's the floor. And it doesn't account for the toxic residue a bad hire leaves behind. When toxic people leave, the environment they created doesn't just disappear. You have cleanup to do.
This is why I preach always be recruiting. Build your bench before you need it. One of the easiest things to do when you have a bench of pre-qualified candidates is send them a photo from your holiday party with a message that says "wish you were here." Their spouse is going to look at that and say, "Why don't you work there? They look like they have a lot of fun." That is how you attract people who are not ready to move today but will be ready in six or twelve months.
Break the cycle of hire fast, fire slow. The extra set of hands is not worth it if those hands come attached to someone who doesn't fit.
If you liked this, I go deeper on building a Core Fit Profile that identifies the right behaviors and traits before you ever post a job. Check out Titans of the Trades for more conversations like this.
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