Ryan Englin on Up & to the Right Podcast: Recruiting the Right People for Trade Contractors

I went on the Up & to the Right Podcast with Joshua Farley to talk about why trade contractors struggle to find the right people and what they can do to fix it.

Joshua runs Red Line Electric and Solar, so he gets it. He's living the same reality as every contractor I work with. The talent pool in the trades is shrinking. Tech companies have slides between floors and go-kart tracks in the break room. That's the competition. And most contractors are still posting the same job ad they wrote ten years ago, wondering why nobody responds.

Here's the thing. You don't compete with GoDaddy on perks. You compete on culture. You compete on belonging. You compete on purpose. That's where we start with every client. We build marketing plans for applicants the same way you build marketing plans for customers. Instead of selling your company as a place people want to do business with, we market the culture so people want to work there.

Joshua asked me what one thing a contractor can do right now to start building a better team. My answer is always the same. Get clear on your values. Not the words on the wall. The behaviors you actually live inside the organization. People want to belong. They want to feel like the company matches what matters to them. If someone values family, they want to work for an organization that values family too. Get clear on that, put it out there, and you start attracting the right people. That's where every engagement begins.

We also talked about something I say every chance I get. Always be recruiting. I hear it all the time. "One of my top guys just moved back home to be closer to family." You can't predict that. And when it happens, most contractors scramble. They dust off an old job posting, throw it on Indeed, and start making desperate phone calls. That's not a system. That's panic.

When you're always recruiting, you have a bench of pre-qualified candidates ready to go. You've talked to most of them. You just start calling. No scramble. No desperation hire. And here's the other benefit. When you always have good people in the pipeline, it gets a lot easier to finally deal with those C and D players you've been afraid to let go. Your A players already know who the dead weight is. The question is whether you have the guts to do something about it.

Joshua and I spent a good chunk of the conversation on the four-stage interview process. This is where most contractors fall apart. They do one interview, fall in love with the candidate, hand them a tool bag, and say "go." Then three weeks later they're regretting the decision.

Here's how I break it down. Stage one is the phone screen. Ten minutes. Skills only. Do you have the certification? Are you comfortable working around high voltage? Quick disqualifiers. Stage two is the face-to-face culture interview. This is where you dig into values alignment and make sure this person fits who you are, not just what you do. Stage three is the disqualifying interview. This is the one most people skip, and it's the one that saves you the most pain. You put candidates into real-life situations and watch what happens. I gave Joshua a couple of examples. We had a client who kept losing CSRs. Amazing in face-to-face interviews. Put them on the phone and it was a different person. Two totally different skill sets. So now, during the disqualifying interview, the candidate goes into another office and we call them. We listen. We watch. For dispatchers, we ask them to come to the next interview with a prepared agenda. That tells you two things at once. Can they put together an agenda, and what do they think is important enough to talk about?

Faking a process is harder than faking an answer. Every single time.

Stage four is the offer meeting. Not a quick signature on a piece of paper. A real conversation about expectations, onboarding, and every little friction point that will come up in the first 90 days. This is where you set the tone for the relationship. Skip it and watch what happens.

Joshua nailed something during our conversation. He said in his experience, it's better to ask something of the applicant and make them responsible for some part of the process. That's exactly right. Skin in the game matters. And the candidates who are willing to do the work to earn the job are the ones worth hiring.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on every piece of this system on Titans of the Trades. Subscribe for more conversations like this.