In this proficient episode, Ryan Englin, CEO of Core Matters, shares how he uses his expertise in automated processes to help business owners achieve their goals by hiring the right people.
You will discover:
– Why the source of your hiring problem isn’t a lazy workforce, it is you
– Why high-performers leave jobs and how you can leverage that to boost retention AND attract them
– Why recruiting isn’t an HR function and where it actually belongs
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Ryan, hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast, and I am here with yet another high demand coach. It is the one and only Ryan Englin. Ryan is passionate about supporting growing businesses. Growing up, he saw his father working 12 hour shifts and weekends as an owner operator, witnessing company struggles in hiring quality frontline workers, Ryan was determined to help them find a better way. His company, core matters, provides coaching and training on attracting hiring and retaining Rockstar employees using his proven process, the core fit hiring system, small and mid sized businesses can learn how to hire better people faster. Ryan’s worked with over 100 clients for almost a decade, and he is here with us today. Ryan, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here. Loved the opportunity to take even just a brief look through your book and just, I have to say, absolutely love what I saw, I love the simplicity of it. I love the structure of it. And I’m wondering if we could kind of start there. What, what have you found are, are some of the core steps that folks need to take if their desire really is to hire Rockstar employees, not just the average Joe looking for a job.
Ryan Englin
I love that. You called it a core step, because that is so much of what we talk about at core matters, is that foundation, that part that’s central, or core to your organization. And what it comes down to is company culture. I mean, that’s kind of the broad term for it. People don’t leave jobs. They leave people we’ve all heard that. We all agree. We all know so if people leave a company looking for a better person to work for, we as entrepreneurs have to become those better people we do, better leaders, better communicators, better at presenting ourselves as a better place to work, not just a higher paying job, or one that has more hours available, which is what so many of us fall into, because it’s easier.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s so good. That’s so good. And I love the attention here, because I think this is something that, if folks have been hiring for a long time, they may have some bad habits of, you know, just kind of, I was working with a client, and we were talking about their hiring strategy, and they said our hiring strategy is post and hope we posted out there, and we hope that folks will come and and they’re kind of, you know, to an extent, they had success with that over the years, especially when jobs were harder to come by, especially good jobs. But it’s not really that way anymore, and it’s changing, but it’s changed a lot since covid. The job seekers mindset, I found, has changed a lot since covid. How do we need to be building better hiring processes in today’s economy?
Ryan Englin
I’m going to go back to the first thing we talked about, which is core and I think it’s less about the actual process, and it’s more about being genuine and being the type of person that attracts Rockstar employees. You see, if you’re not attracting rock stars to join your team, to apply for your jobs, you’re probably not attractive to rock star employees. And it’s a tough pill to swallow sometimes, because nobody wants to admit well, maybe I’m not the best maybe I’m not the best company or the best boss, but rock stars want to play on high performing teams. It’s that simple. And if you aren’t representing yourself in the marketplace or in your job description when you post it as a high performing company, rock stars are going to look elsewhere, because the last thing they want to do is come and be the person that has to carry everybody, which is what happens so often these rock stars, which is why they don’t stick around. And so we have to really look at ourselves first and say, who do we want to attract? And what would someone that we want to attract want, you know, an employer? What would they want in us, and that we need to become, that, that, a if we can do that, almost, the rest of the stuff will solve itself, because we know that they’re going to want to be communicated with. Well, we know that they’re they’re going to want to know how to put points up on the scoreboard, like, how are we tracking their performance? We know that good, high producing employees are going to want those things, and then we can go and create those systems and processes almost take care of themselves. But I will tell you one thing that I think has happened since covid. Because you brought up covid, the job seekers realized they aren’t at the mercy of the employer as much as they thought they were. It’s kind of pulled back this veil and they said, oh, there’s this thing called the gig economy. There’s this idea that the employer is really not going to take care of me, and so I need to take care of myself. And so the loyalty is shifted away from the employer and to the individual, which I don’t have anything wrong with that, but we have to make sure we meet people where they’re at. We can’t sit here and play the victim card. Oh, nobody wants to work. Everybody’s lazy. Everybody’s entitled. Yeah, the reality is, no one wants to work for you because they don’t know who you are, they don’t know what you stand for, they don’t know what you believe. They don’t know how great of a company you are, because we put so little emphasis in promoting our employer brand. We’re so focused on chasing customers, we forget that we have to chase employees as well.
Scott Ritzheimer
What would you say to someone? Because there are folks who kind of hear that and they’ll kind of smile and nod at it, but it doesn’t really transform the way that they approach it, right? There’s still a frustration that’s just kind of baked in. How do you help them get past that frustration and really start building a strategy that works with with that type of person, that type of secret
Ryan Englin
Well, believe it or not, no one ever comes to me and says, Hey, I need to hire next year. Nobody ever does that. Everybody comes to me going, I got four Oh, I got four empty trucks. I can’t find anybody good. I need help today, or I don’t know what I’m gonna do. And so we have to stop the bleeding by showing them some quick wins. And I can tell you, quick wins usually come in one of two areas, either one, we’re helping them present themselves as a more attractive place to work. And the easy way to do that is to just write a different job ad right? See, everybody takes the exact same thing that they get from HR, or that they copy from Google, and they all post it to indeed, and they’re like, why can’t I find anyone Good? Well, because you’re doing the same thing everybody else is doing, and marketing 101, tells you got to be you got to be different. You got to stand out. Yeah, so that’s one way. But then I think the thing that most people don’t even think about is we have to stop the attrition. How many of those trucks are empty? How many of those seats are vacant because there was someone sitting there and they left? And see, we usually only put our efforts on hiring because we’re like, oh, good riddance. They’re gone. We didn’t need them anyways. They weren’t working out well anyways. But then we bring in another person that we think’s a rock star, and six weeks later they leave us too. Yeah, us too. And then we blame the job market, and we say, well, nobody wants to work. Well, maybe they get in and they find out that what you promised them on the front end isn’t reality. Yeah. And we need to start connecting those two things. And once you do that, these people will be more excited to stick around.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. It’s so true. And one of the places I’ve seen this happen a lot, particularly with folks who go out and have help in hiring, right? A lot of firms will focus on, hey, we recruit, we hire, we market your job for you, and then it’s kind of up to you, right? From post hire onward, and they just totally fumble at that point, right? We’ve all heard the stories, but, like, new employee starts and the boss is on vacation for a week, you know? Or, like, it just so, why is it, why is it that we’re so bad at onboarding? And what are one or two things that listening today could start to do to make that better?
Ryan Englin
Yeah, I think the reason we’re so bad at onboarding is we’re so busy on creating a great customer experience, we’re so focused on revenue that we only want to do the things that directly impact revenue, and that’s more customers. So I rarely when I talk to companies that struggle with onboarding employees, and I ask them the question, well, how do you feel that you do in onboarding customers? Oh, we are top of the market. We are the best. They’ve put so much emphasis on the customer that they forgot that, especially if you’re a service business, which is who we work with, primarily, you forgot that your people are your product, and so if you’re not doing a good job creating an employee experience and bringing employees in that are happy and productive and want to be there and want to take care of the customer, all the great customer experience stuff in the world isn’t going to matter. And so we need to shift the way we think. And instead of putting all this emphasis into marketing and bringing on new customers, retaining our customers, what if we put that emphasis on marketing to potential employees and bringing on happy, productive employees and keeping them happy and productive. If we did that, they’re going to take care of the customer for you, because that’s what they live for. Yeah, and we could make that shift, but it’s a difficult shift to make because most people don’t know how to do it, and that’s what we talk about in the book. That’s what we do in our program, is how do you make that shift and become more focused on the employee than you are on the customer? We do. We do a lot of work in the trades, and it’s funny because you go to a website or you’ll see an ad on social media and say, We’re available 24/7, rain or shine, we’ll be there for you no matter what you need. Emergency Service. Emergency Service. You know what the job seeker sees when they see that ad? I’m going to be torn away from my family. I’m going to take the phone home on call. I’m going to have to work middle of the night. And we’ve, we’ve created this, this idea that employees are expendable. They don’t matter to us. What matters is the customer will do whatever it takes. Well, covid. Allowed people to wake up and they said, I don’t have to put up with that anymore.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, it’s so true. Here’s the the kind of thread running on in this I work with a lot of founders. A lot of folks listening to this are founders, entrepreneurs. And you might be sitting there thinking like, but that’s how I built this business, like, by being customer centric, by by being there 24/7 and all of that’s true, but there was a time when you weren’t that either those are skills that you learned, right? You were able to learn how to market to how to onboard clients, and you got good at it. You can apply that same thing with with what Ryan’s talking about here. If you really commit yourself to doing the same thing in the hiring space, it translates really, really well. But the shift that you’re talking about, Ryan is so, so powerful. I hope people hear it. You have to shift your attention to not just marketing, to selling to and catering to your customers, but building a team by cut by catering to them so that they can do it for your customers. Is that right?
Ryan Englin
Absolutely, that is exactly right. In fact, I found out about a decade ago, this was the big shift for me. And most people forget. They think recruiting is an HR activity, and it couldn’t be further from the truth, recruiting is a marketing activity, and we need to treat this like we treat marketing and sales. You need to treat it the same way. And to your point, yes, you make that shift, and it’s not a huge shift. We were talking a few degrees, and all of a sudden you change one word, you change customer to employee, and all of a sudden it’s the same tool, and it gets you the same effect, but with a different group of people, the people that are actually going to help you get to that next level.
Scott Ritzheimer
So true. So true. Ryan, there’s a question I like to ask all my guests. I’m going to ask it to you, and it is this, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing that you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Ryan Englin
People genuinely, intrinsically like they are motivated by working hard for good employers. They want to work hard. This idea that people are lazy or entitled, it’s, it’s the media, it’s social media. It’s a couple of people that have a big megaphone. People really do want to work hard. They want to put in a good day’s work. They want to put points up on the scoreboard for you. They want to, yeah, you just have to give them a reason to want to do it for you.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s so true. That’s so true. So Ryan, there’s folks listening to this. They realize they’ve got to make that shift, right? They’re They’re tired of hiring lackluster employees that they want to build a team of rock stars, but they know that they need someone’s help to do it. How can they find more out about you and the work that you do?
Ryan Englin
Yeah, we’re corematters.com they can learn all about our process. They can learn more about my book. We have a bunch of free educational materials as well for people that just want to do it themselves for a little while, all available in our hiring tips. There is a lot of information there. But what I’d love to do for your listeners, if they want to go to corematters.com/freebook, if they just pay a little bit of shipping and handling. I’d love to ship them a signed copy of my book so they can read it. They can go through it, not just have to skim it on Amazon or pick up their own copy, but I’d love to give them a copy of it, because this information is so valuable. I wish my dad had it 40 years ago. Yeah, yeah, I really do, and I really want a lot of people to have this information, because it is transformative, and it’s not that difficult. It’s not some complex academic thing that you have to do. You just have to shift your thinking a little bit and apply that thinking to some different processes, and you’ll be able to get everything you want from your team.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s so true, so true. Ryan, there’s one more question that I have for you, because we have lots of other coaches and consultants who listen to this, and what advice would you give another coach or consultant who’s who’s working with founders, is working with owners and is struggling to to find the right team?
Ryan Englin
Get really clear on what you want. The reason most people can’t find good people is because they’ve never sat down to define a good person. They’ve never thought about it. When I ask companies, I ask I ask supervisors, I say, what makes a good person? We all want good people, what makes that and we sit down, we brainstorm it, and it never has anything to do with their ability to do the work? Well, it has to do with their behaviors and their traits and their mindset and who they are as a human being. And that’s not fun, right? It’s not it’s not tangible, it’s not logical. It’s that touchy feely stuff that a lot of entrepreneurs don’t have time for. But I promise you, your people want you to make time for it. When you do they will make time for you. So get really clear incred I mean crystal clear name them. We do it in marketing all the time. We create personas all the time. Let’s create a persona for your ideal employee. Let’s get really clear on who they are, how they behave, how they show up, how they work, and that will make it so much easier. For you to go out and start attracting these people.
Scott Ritzheimer
So true. Ryan, fantastic, fantastic stuff. Love the work that you guys do. Thank you so much for being on the show. Really was a privilege and honor. Having you here today, for those of you watching listening, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time take care.
Contact Ryan Englin
Ryan Englin is passionate about supporting growing businesses. Growing up, he saw his father working 12-hour shifts and weekends as an owner/operator, witnessing companies’ struggles in hiring quality frontline workers. Ryan was determined to help them find a better way. His company, Core Matters, provides coaching and training on attracting, hiring, and retaining rock-star employees. Using his proven process, the Core Fit Hiring System, small and midsize businesses learn how to hire better people faster. Ryan has worked with over a hundred clients for almost a decade.
Want to learn more about Ryan Englin ‘s work at Core Matters? Check out his website at https://corematters.com/
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