Ryan Englin on The TradeMarke Podcast: Attracting, Retaining, and Investing in Trade Workers

I went on The TradeMarke Podcast with Sarah Ghirardo and Eric Thomas to talk about what it actually takes to attract, hire, and keep great people in the trades.

We started with the mindset shift that changes everything. Most contractors are still out there hunting for people. Posting a job, crossing their fingers, and hoping someone decent shows up. That is not a strategy. That is desperation. The real move is to flip from finding to attracting. If you want to attract good people, you have to become attractive to good people.

Here is where it gets interesting. Service contractors spend real money marketing to homeowners. Their websites, their social profiles, their trucks. Everything screams "we are available 24/7, we will be there in three hours, we work nights and weekends." That is great marketing for the consumer. But when a job seeker reads that same messaging, all they hear is "you will never see your family." Nobody talks about what it is actually like to work there. Nobody puts the culture on display. Nobody features their people. Your employees are your number one customer. When job seekers go to your website and find nothing about the employee experience, they connect the dots on their own. And the story they tell themselves is never the one you want.

I told Sarah and Eric about one of my favorite strategies. Building a bench of passive candidates. About 3% of people are actively looking on job boards at any given time. That means 97% are not there. But a big chunk of those people are passively open. They go to a barbecue, ask a buddy how things are going at his company, keep their options open. If you can get those people onto an email list and nurture them with culture content, employee stories, and what life looks like inside your company, you have a pipeline ready to go the moment you need someone. One of my clients built a bench so deep they stopped posting jobs entirely. Qualified candidates now reach out to them every week.

We talked about where to source people. I told them something counterintuitive. LinkedIn. I know. Techs are not on LinkedIn, right? Wrong. The techs who care about their career are on LinkedIn. One construction client hired about 140 people in a year. Three came from LinkedIn. All three were still there a year later. Most of the other 140 were gone. Volume is not the goal. Quality is.

I also brought up something that makes contractors uncomfortable. Put your open positions in your customer newsletter. One HVAC contractor had 55,000 people on their email list and refused to do it because they did not want customers to know they were hiring. That is scarcity thinking. Your customers have sons graduating high school. They have neighbors looking for work. You are not advertising weakness. You are inviting your community in.

Retention came up fast. I said what I always say. We do not have a labor shortage in the trades. We have a retention problem. Call your bookkeeper and ask how many W2s you issued last year compared to your headcount. The gap tells the real story. You know how to hire people. You do not know how to keep them.

People stay when three things are true. Someone cares about them personally. Someone invests in their career. And they have a real friend at work. I walked through our fuzzy file process, which is a simple onboarding tool where you collect personal details like kids' names, favorite restaurant, anniversary date, and favorite sports team. Then you use that information intentionally. Send a gift card from 1-800-Flowers a week before his anniversary. Match two fans of the same team on the same crew. These things cost almost nothing and create emotional loyalty that a $2 raise never will. But here is the catch. If you do it for one person and forget another, it backfires. It has to be a system, not a random act of kindness.

We also got into training and the mindset around hiring for attitude over experience. I see this shift happening. More owners are willing to bring in someone with zero experience and a great attitude instead of chasing a 10-year tech who comes loaded with bad habits and a bad mindset. Hire for the things you cannot teach. Teach everything else. That is the core fit approach in action.

I shared the story of a plumbing contractor with about 15 people who hired their first CSR without following our process. They loved her. Three weeks later we were triaging the fallout. They called back ready to slow down and do it right. That is the pattern I see over and over. When you slow down the process of interviewing, qualifying, and onboarding, it actually speeds things up.

My closing advice was simple. Start a conversation with your team. Not a survey. Not an anonymous form. A real conversation. Ask what is working. Ask what is not. And when someone finally trusts you enough to tell you the truth, do something with it. Most people in the trades do not know how to articulate what they are feeling. Your job as a leader is to draw it out of them. Coach them through it. That is where the gold is.

I mentioned my book Hire Better People Faster and the free tools at corematters.com. If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these topics on Titans of the Trades.