Know Who You Are Hiring Before the Seat Opens

You have a seat you've filled three times this year. Same ad, same interview, same result. Nothing changed about how you hired, so nothing changed about who showed up.

That's not a labor market problem. That's a definition problem. And it is fixable.

Panic hiring kills culture fit every single time

Here's the cycle I watch owners run. Somebody quits. Six weeks in, no call, no show, keys left on the desk. You panic. You go back to Indeed and hit reactivate on an old ad. You interview whoever answers. Then you hire the least bad applicant.

I know you're not excited about that person. Nobody ever tells me "where has this guy been my whole life." They tell me "he'll do."

Then the offer goes out and the candidate accepts a little too fast. Yeah, yeah, I can start tomorrow. And you get that flash of seller's remorse. Wait a minute. I thought you were employed.

Speed feels like the solution when a truck sits empty. Speed is the thing destroying your results. When you move too fast, when you have no system and no process you can point to and say this is how we do it, you make bad choices. And you make them more than once.

If you can't find good people, you never defined them

I stand in front of rooms of leaders and ask one question. Define a rock star for me. What does an A player look like in your company?

Let me tell you what they never say. They never mention turning a wrench. They never mention troubleshooting a unit or reading a print or running a route. Not once.

Here's what they say every single time. I want someone who shows up on time. I want someone with reliable transportation. I want someone who communicates and works with the crew.

Now look at your last hire. When you were panic hiring, did you have time to look for any of that? Did you make time? Of course not.

I wrote this in my book and I'll say it again here. Everybody uses the word find. I can't find good people. If you can't find someone, you probably haven't spent the time to define what that person looks like.

Let that sit for a second. You're walking down the street peeking around corners looking for a great tech, a great customer service rep, a great leader. But you never wrote down what they look like. So every time one walks past you, you go, nope, not him. Not her. Not him.

The client who kept his rejection letters

A client came to me burned out. He said he didn't know how much longer he wanted to do this. He wanted the business packaged and ready to sell. Maybe he'd keep it once it was healthy, but right then it was eating him alive. Hiring constantly. Keeping almost nobody. Culture problems. Behavior problems. Nobody liked each other.

I told him we sit down and build a process. We turn that process into a system. Then we teach his people to run it without him.

Months later he called me with a letter of intent to sell. He was thrilled. Then he said something that stopped me cold, because I'd never heard it framed that way.

Ryan, you taught us to hire people our old system would have thrown out. He had a stack of rejection letters from candidates who would sail through the new process. His culture got stronger. His business got better. Buyers lined up.

He got exactly what he wanted. Not because he found better people. Because he defined them first.

Write the profile before you write the ad

Before the seat opens, before the ad goes live, define the person. Not the skills. How they work. What they value. What the crew around them needs to survive a bad Tuesday.

All that stuff leaders rattle off when I ask them to define a rock star? Write it down. That's the profile. The non-negotiables, the behaviors, the mindset, the motivators. The things that make you glad somebody walked onto the job site.

I built the Core Fit Profile for exactly this reason. Behaviors and traits, never demographics, because most of what people put in a persona is a protected class. That profile then drives every downstream decision you make: where you recruit, what the ad says, what you ask in the interview, what onboarding looks like.

I feel the eye rolls. Yes, it's a big task. Do it anyway. Your team will thank you for it. You'll make better hiring decisions, better performance decisions, better team building decisions. You'll communicate better because you finally got it out of your head and onto paper.

One warning. Don't open AI and ask it to build the profile for you. It doesn't know your business. It doesn't know your crew.

And if you want the other half of this, the part about why great people pass you by even when you know who you want, start here: if you're not attracting good people, you're probably not attractive to good people. That's a bigger lift and a separate conversation.

The Monday move

Pick your most refilled seat. Not the idealized chief operating officer you daydream about filling. The seat you keep putting bodies into, whether from growth or turnover. Almost always it's an hourly frontline role. A tech. A customer service rep. Sometimes accounting, sometimes sales, sometimes a service leader.

Write one page on who the right person is. Not the duties. Not the tasks. The person.

If that page is hard to write, congratulations. You found your leak. There are leaks all over your business, and this one costs you more than most. I dig into that idea further in why every business in your industry leaks money.

Send me the page when you finish it. Direct message or email, your call. I'll read it and give you honest feedback. No strings.

And if you're not certain hiring is even your real leak, take the Bottleneck Test at corematters.com. Three minutes and you'll know.

New episodes every Wednesday.