Ryan Englin on The Thought Leader Revolution Podcast: Recruiting Is a Marketing Activity

I went on The Thought Leader Revolution Podcast with Nicky Billou to talk about why recruiting is a marketing activity, not an HR activity, and why trade contractors don't have to settle for bottom-of-the-barrel hires.

Nicky asked me to share my backstory, and it always starts the same place. My dad was an owner-operator with a blue-collar business. I watched him work way too many hours. The business owned him. He didn't own the business. I swore I'd find a better way for people like him. I started a marketing company thinking his problem was not enough customers. More customers, more revenue, more people, more freedom. That's not how it works for most entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs struggle with building a team they trust. They struggle with finding people they can delegate to. That discovery changed everything for me.

About eight years ago I started building what became the Core Fit Hiring System. The foundation is simple. Recruiting belongs in your marketing department, not your HR department. Your marketing people already know how to compel someone to take action. They know how to communicate what makes you different. That's exactly what a job posting needs to do. Most companies compete on pay, and small to mid-size businesses can't win that game. You have to compete on something else. You have to tell people why they want to work for you. That's a marketing function.

Nicky and I got into the perception problem in the trades. I love Mike Rowe. I think what he's done is incredible. But the show is called Dirty Jobs. How many people are raising their kids to go get a dirty job? The industry doesn't help itself either. We've got plumbers marketing themselves as "the smell-good plumber," which implies that plumbers stink. Drains are a tiny percentage of what plumbers do, yet that's how we market the whole profession. I'm not out here talking about the gross work. I'm talking about the pride, the teams, the opportunity. Construction workers drive through a city pointing at buildings saying "I built that." Who wouldn't want that? They just don't know how to promote it.

I shared a client story that captures what happens when you change the approach. A construction contractor came to me after nine months of struggling to fill positions. He had landed one of those put-you-on-the-map jobs. A $5 million company that just closed a $7 million deal. He needed 50 people and he needed them yesterday. I told him to give me 90 days. His company grew by 50 new hires in that window by implementing a few of our processes. That's the power of treating recruiting as marketing instead of posting and hoping.

Nicky asked about my biggest challenge. These ideas are still new to the market. There are plenty of software companies and staffing agencies, but nobody else is taking a holistic approach and saying "I want to teach you to fish." I don't recruit for companies. I teach them how to attract, hire, and keep the right people through systems and processes they own. That's what the Core Fit Hiring System does. It's a different conversation, and sometimes it scares people because it's not what they've been doing for 20 years.

What keeps me up at night is the number of owners doing the same thing year after year hoping for different results. Their kids are growing up. Their hobbies are disappearing. Their physical ability is changing. Time is the one thing you can't get back, and every year spent grinding 70 or 80 hours a week is a year you don't get to live.

I left Nicky's audience with three action steps. First, if you want to attract better people, you must become attractive to better people. Second, if you want to attract the right person, you must get clear on who the right person is. That's the whole idea behind the Core Fit Profile. Third, if you want people to care about your business as much as you do, you must care about them as much as you care about your business.

I also mentioned my book, Hire Better People Faster. If you want a signed copy, head to Core Matters and grab one.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these ideas on Titans of the Trades.