John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the MarTech podcast, hosted by my friend, Ben Shapiro brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes, the MarTech podcast shares stories from world class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business this and career success. Recent episode, one of my favorite extending the lifetime value of your customer. You know, I love to talk about that. Listen to the MarTech podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:41): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ryan Englin. He is the CEO of Core Fit Hiring company that helps blue collar companies fill front lines with quality technicians and craft workers. So Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Englin (01:00): Thanks for having me today.

John Jantsch (01:02): So I think, I think one of the mysteries of the pandemic is for some people, is that a lot of companies have been really caught with this shortage of workers. I know that you’re probably responding to what feels like a crisis, but frankly, in the crafts, the skilled work community technician, community, it’s kind of been a long time thing. Hasn’t it it’s been, it’s been hard to get folks to fill a lot of positions gotten harder. You want to gimme your take on that?

Ryan Englin (01:27): Yeah. The, the labor shortage, the skills gap, the difficulty hiring, it goes back decades. People have been struggling with this. I found an article written in the sixties that talked about the skilled labor shortage. So this is nothing new. I think it’s just their is so much more information about it. And we consume information at such a greater rate. Now it feels like it’s bigger because we hear about it more often.

John Jantsch (01:51): I, I have some clients that are in the, uh, construction industry that I’ve worked with for years and, and it seems far more acute right now. Uh, they have, and I think it’s a combination of they’re busier than they’ve ever been as well. And because they can’t backfill, if they lose somebody, but’s made it a more acute situation. But is that, is it a combination of those things you think,

Ryan Englin (02:12): I think with the trades in particular. Yeah. And we work with all sorts of industries in the frontline, but in the trades, most of the, the people that they’ve had for a long time are aging out like that work is backbreaking work and you can only do it to a certain point. Yeah. And I think they’re predicting somewhere around 40% of that labor market to be gone in the next six to 10 years, because they’re all retiring

John Jantsch (02:36): And, and it’s more glamorous to be a YouTube influencer. Is that what you’re saying?

Ryan Englin (02:39): I didn’t say that, but that’s what we’re yes, because the kids aren’t coming into it. And I think a, a lot of that has to do with the fact that the parents aren’t excited to say, Hey, my son or daughter is going into. And so they’re pushing them towards the more glamorous jobs. I don’t know that YouTube is one of them, but definitely the Google jobs, the jobs, that kinda stuff. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:59): And is that, I mean, so is that, is that not a problem that’s gonna take care of itself with better marketing is, are, is the industry itself going to have to make some fundamental changes?

Ryan Englin (03:10): So there there’s, both of those are correct. Like they are gonna have to do some marketing, but they are gonna to make some fundamental changes. I think one of the, I hear a lot is, oh, the, the younger generations, they don’t know these opportunities exist. They don’t know how much money they can make and right. I think they do. They just don’t want it because they’ve heard the horror stories of the way people have been treated. One of our, one of the core things that we teach and, and that we coach on is how to stop thinking about people as a cog in a machine and start valuing them as a human being. When you hire somebody, it’s the whole package, you don’t just get the person that shows up eight to five, they’re gonna bring their life’s problems and their life’s goals and all the stuff they’re going through in life that comes to work with them. Yeah. And I think that the trades in particular has a bad reputation for dealing with that.

John Jantsch (03:59): That’s interesting because you read articles about Silicon valley and how competitive it’s gotten to get people there. And they’ve really treated it as culture is as big a deal as big a draw as incentives or pay. And I think that probably the trades industry is really pretty far behind that, that thinking aren’t they, they are

Ryan Englin (04:18): There, there is a culture. Every company has a culture, whether or not it’s written on a poster in the break room, or they actually live it and hold accountable, there is a culture there. And I think what the trades have missed in particular is missing the idea of being able to promote and market their culture. Because there’s this fundamental belief that people don’t care mm-hmm , and there’s a statistic out there came out of a gala report that says 86% of millennials will take a pay cut. Yeah. To go work for a company that aligns with their mission and their values.

John Jantsch (04:51): It’s really gotten hot in, I don’t know if it’s HR circles or there’s a, there’s even titles now like head of people in organizations, but this idea of employee branding, which is a little bit of what you’re alluding to, is this idea that the, the best sales people for getting more people in your organization are happy employees that are, you know, pumped about what they’re doing, but how do you bring that into, particularly into a culture where it hasn’t existed? Perhaps

Ryan Englin (05:18): I, I think for a lot of the clients that we work with, they have an amazing story to tell. Yep. They really do have an amazing culture. They’ve got an amazing story. They’ve got leaders that care, they just they’re rough and tough. Like they’re iron markers or construction workers or craft workers. They don’t think about marketing. They go to work in blue jeans every day and hopefully they’re clean, right? Like, it’s that kind of mentality. It’s rough and gruff. And if you just put a little bit of that marketing to it and say, let’s tell your story, which is one of the core pieces that we teach is how do you tell what we call the core story? Yeah. That’s what really draws people to your organization. Like you talk about the no, like, and trust. Yeah. Employees need that too. It’s customer,

John Jantsch (06:03): That’s just central fundamental marketing is that people connect with a story far better than they connect with. Here’s what, here’s the features of what we do here. And, and I think you’re right. I know in my work that industries like that. And, and even just more buttoned up industries say accounting and whatnot. They just have a trouble believing that anybody wants to hear their story. They want to hear what they’re gonna get . And I think that that’s part of the challenge is that people, even as much as people like you and I talk about it still have have in some industries feeling like that’s an important part. So how do you get people past that? Especially I can imagine the, the remodeling contractor says I don’t have a story. You know, I just show up, I, I do what I tell people I’m gonna do. And they seem to like, it. What’s that. How do you extract that story?

Ryan Englin (06:52): It all starts with their why. I’m a huge fan of Simon Sinek. Start with why they all all have a reason. They all have a purpose that they started this business. They took it over. There’s a joke in the trades. The only, the two ways people get into the trades is they either didn’t want to go to college or mom and dad told ’em to do it. That’s how you get into the trades. But I think a lot of them, they wanted more. And so they left being a craft worker and they went and started a business. And it’s, let’s get back to why you do what you do. Why do you, you get outta every day. Why do you lodge through all these fires deal with a team of 40, 6200? Like, why do you take on all of this risk and do it day in and day out? Like your reason for doing that is so critical to being able to market and promote your story.

John Jantsch (07:35): So we’ve been talking a little bit about the groundwork, you know, that has to be done if you’re gonna effectively draw employees, but because that’s obviously that’s the long term part. Uh, but in the short term, if people are coming to you now and saying, how do we attract people? How do we retain people? What are some of the advice that you’re giving people in this particular, um, environment?

Ryan Englin (07:54): So I’m gonna answer the second question first. How do you retain people? And here’s what we find is that retention goes up significantly when you start making better hiring decisions. So if you’re hiring for culture fit, if you’re hiring to build a successful team, if you’re hiring with teaching people, how to better communicate, and you’re having those conversations up front, you’re really getting to know people, your, your retention problems will really fix themselves. But it’s the attracting people. If you wanna attract good people, you have to become attractive to good people. Mm-hmm, , it’s that simple. So if you aren’t getting good people applying for your company, or you’re not getting, you’re not hiring good employees, I really want you to take a step back and say, Hey, are the good people actually attracted to us? Remember people don’t leave jobs and leave. Yeah. And if there’s something about your company, your culture, your team, that’s not attractive. You need to take a real intrinsic look, deep dive and say, let’s fix this first.

John Jantsch (08:50): Okay. So I’m sure that everybody listening that makes complete sense to, but then I guess the follow up is, well, how do you make yourself more attractive?

Ryan Englin (08:59): That that’s the thing that we run into a lot in the trades is remember, they’re craft workers, or like you said, accountants, their, their accountants are software engineers. Like whatever it is, they’re not storytellers mm-hmm . So it’s really, you gotta work with your marketing team. One of the first things we do when we work with a new client is we take away from HR. Yeah. Recruiting is not an HR function. Recruiting is a marketing function. You are selling your company, you are selling an opportunity. You’ve gotta get your message out there in front of the right people so that they apply. And then you can sell them in the interview process. Yeah. And so it’s really getting your marketing team involved. Like how do we make ourselves more attractive to perspective job seekers, not just our customers,

John Jantsch (09:38): Where are they listening? Where are they tuning in? If I’m listening to this show and I’m, I’m particularly trying to hire, or at least get my name in front of potential candidates for that, is it the job sites? Is it radio? Is it, what are you finding? Are you finding a channel that, that seems to be most effective for getting at least on people’s radars?

Ryan Englin (09:56): So when we look at job seekers, they’re broken into two categories, the active job seekers and the passive job seekers. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:02): And you really want the passive ones. You want the passive

Ryan Englin (10:03): Ones. And here’s the thing about the passive ones. They’re 70% of the job market. 70% of the job market wants to switch jobs. They just wanna switch under their own terms. They don’t wanna have to, they don’t wanna have to go through the process of looking for work. Well, one of the things we teach real early on is that the process of looking for a job is one of life’s most stressful events. People do not like to switch jobs. Yeah. So if we can make that process easier for them, if we can make ourselves more attractive, we can put our opportunities in front of those passive job seekers. That’s where we’re gonna find the real good ones. But the active job seekers are on the job boards. So if you have a need today, which most people need to fill something today, you may not have six months to wait for that passive job seeker to take action, right?

Ryan Englin (10:42): So you go to the job boards, but how do you stand out? There are brands out there spending millions of dollars a month in advertising. How do you compete with that? And it really is being disruptive in the way that you approach the job boards. Truth is that those job postings are ads mm-hmm . And instead of putting the must have reliable transportation must be able to lift 50 pounds, must be able to use some software that we’re gonna teach you how to use anyways. why don’t you put what you’re really looking for? How do you define a good person? What is the type of person you want to join your team? Yeah. And when you get really clear on that, you’re posting are gonna stand out like a sort thumb,

John Jantsch (11:19): Right? And now a word from our sponsor. Yes.

John Jantsch (11:22): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by HubSpot. HubSpot is the world’s leading CRM platform and has rolled out over 50 plus integrations over the past year to help businesses connect with customers like never before the latest suite of customer-centric tools to help your business, show your customers a whole lot of love, including seamless payment tools, CRM powered, CMS, customer portals, and feedback surveys, secure customer portals, keep ticket conversations going between customers and reps offer access to your knowledge base and can be customized to fit your brand without having to code a thing and customer feedback surveys, where you can capture unique feedback to your business, share insights with your team and grow your understanding of your customers. Learn more about how a HubSpot CRM platform can help build, maintain, and grow your customer relationships @ Hubspot.com in the skilled labor market. Do employers need to start lowering their expectation about skill and experience?

Ryan Englin (12:31): I think some of them, they

John Jantsch (12:32): All want that person, which 20 years, and they could work their way out of any problem possible, but maybe that’s unrealistic.

Ryan Englin (12:38): So we don’t get into this a whole lot, but there is this element that if, if employers don’t figure it out real quick, they’re gonna lose a lot of their tribal knowledge that are 20, 30 years. They can solve any problem without help or support. And there really needs to be an emphasis us to take that information and get it documented so that you can start training that to new people. The companies that we see the best at growing or, or farming is, is what we call it when you’re farming for new employees and you’re growing them up, yourselves are the ones that have really invested in an apprenticeship program and have said, Hey, you know what? We’re gonna take people that have the behaviors and the traits that we want and we teach ’em the skills.

John Jantsch (13:17): Would you actually translate that out to a broader market? In other words, having, not just the people you have in internally. I think that is absolutely true. But would you be going to university situations or to vocational schools and trying to get involved at, at that early point?

Ryan Englin (13:33): You can . I think the, again, it’s not that they don’t know these jobs exist it’s that they don’t want them. Yeah. So what can you do to get people more excited about these jobs? A lot of the, what we hear in the trades, particularly the vocational schools, they’re really not doing much of a service like they’re teaching the bookwork, but they’re not teaching how to troubleshoot. They’re not teaching how to solve problems. They’re not teaching the stuff that’s really important to lawyers. So there is an opportunity to get involved there, but that’s not really where it should be coming from. It goes back to the old days. I remember when I was a kid, I was in T-ball and there was this local business owner that sponsored all the jerseys and we had their company name on the back. Like they got involved in the community at an early age and they said, Hey, this is who we are. And it wasn’t because they were hoping to get brand new employees or brand new customers for it. But over time, people would start to notice and that brand would become synonymous with the local community. And I think we really need to get back to

John Jantsch (14:27): That. I’m seeing you slide into third with consolidated plumbing on your, on your journey. Yeah. Yeah. So are you seeing no, I’ve, I’m gonna back up before I ask that question and you may not have an opinion on this, and this is certainly not meant to be a political, um, comment at all. What role are unions playing in this industry? Uh, today? Is there a usefulness for, are they part of the problem? Because at one point unions were very instrumental in the teaching and training of trades and skilled workers, not maybe so much for the small business employee, but I wonder, do you have an opinion on where that stands today?

Ryan Englin (15:04): So I think the reasons that unions were created in the first place, they served a purpose. It was really to protect the employees and give them a way to, to bargain with the employer collectively. And that there are still some elements of that where it’s important. There are some industries that have just not opened itself up to the private sector, but I think for the most part, so we don’t, we typically stay out of union states. We typically don’t work there. And if we do, we work with the smaller employers, mm-hmm I, the one thing that the employer, the unions did really is they put together the apprenticeship programs, the training programs, they taught these guys the skills. Yep. But I think where we run into problems is that the pay between unions and the private sector, they’ve just, they’ve never lined up. Yeah.

Ryan Englin (15:44): And so that’s been a real challenge. The other thing too, that the unions do differently than what we teach is, like I said before, when you hire somebody, it’s a package deal. This isn’t come work this job for two months and then go sit down at the union hall and wait for the next job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don’t do that. We work a lot with especially seasonal contractors. A lot of them out here in Arizona summer is insane for H V a C and then in the winter, a lot of these companies lay people off,

John Jantsch (16:11): Wait, Arizona has winter.

Ryan Englin (16:13): We, we call it winter. We put the jackets on when it’s under nineties, but they’ll lay a lot of their guys off and that’s just not the right mindset for how you hire and retain people. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:21): Yeah. So, yeah. That’s certainly gonna attract a certain kind of worker perhaps. Yeah. So supply and demand being what it is. Is there pressure on wages right now that is really gonna create some, some costing problems for contractors.

Ryan Englin (16:35): Yeah. We typically just say, let’s pay what the market can support, but right now I don’t know that anybody really knows what the market can support. But I do think that there is gonna be pressure on pay because especially if you’re in those entry level jobs or those unskilled labor jobs, and you are paying 12 to $15 an hour, it, Amazon is your biggest competitor right now. Mm-hmm, , it’s not the contractor down the street. Yeah. It’s these really big organizations that are paying 18 $20 an hour. They’re making it super easy to take a job there. Now Amazon’s a whole different beast, but that’s your competition. Yeah. Is the Amazon’s in the Walmarts and even the companies that do a lot of customer service where you can now work from your home answering calls. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:18): It’s interesting because I think a lot of people got into that work because they wanted to do that work or they were good at doing that work. They’d learned it growing up on the farm or whatever it was. And so they took that work. Maybe not considering that, that paid lesson in retail or something like that, but that’s really no, the, because you have this whole, Amazon is a, is an example. Everybody can relate to, that’s gonna hire a hundred thousand people at Christmas. And so they’re gonna put so much emphasis into that. All of a sudden then that becomes maybe a more attractive option. So a really great point, how big a problem is poaching. I know that’s a lot of the folks that I talk to. They’re like, yeah, let’s just go to our competitors and offer more money, offer the employee more money. I have a sense of what your answer’s gonna be to this, but it is an issue. Isn’t it? So I

Ryan Englin (18:03): Actually have a, a story about this it’s really close to home. So right after we came out of the last recession, you know, the 2008 recession, we saw this happen with electrical contractors. Mm-hmm, where they would drive up to a job site with their truck. And they would say, who’s the foreman. And they would say, go grab your crew, show me your pay stub. I’ll pay you a dollar more an hour. And so the whole crew would jump into the back of the truck, drive to the next job site. Then guess what happened? The guy that just lost his crew would fill up a truck, go down and Hey, I’ll pay you a dollar more an hour. Yeah. And so now you have all these electrical contractors in an industry that’s really designed to support that 24 to $27 an hour, making 35, 36, 30 $7 an hour. People like, how do I afford these people? Yeah. And the unfortunate part is as employers, we’re responsible for the fact that now these people are being overpaid for what their skillset is. Yeah. And so now these people are stuck working for an employer that can afford these wages. They don’t, they can’t leave. So if it becomes toxic, if it starts causing other issues, most people, when they get a raise, they live to their means, they expand their lifestyle. And

John Jantsch (19:05): So, and really anybody who will leave you for a dollar more an hour will come to you, I should say, for a dollar more an hour, we’ll leave you for a dollar more. Absolutely.

Ryan Englin (19:13): Absolutely. Don’t be surprised when they leave for more money. And that’s the other thing too, is people don’t leave for a dollar more an hour. If that foreman and his crew were super happy and they felt well cared for, and they felt like the employer actually had their best interest and their personal interest in mind. They’re not gonna go through that level of stress to, but too often, that’s what happens is employers treat people like a cog and one cog break

John Jantsch (19:36): Show over the years, you’ve built some resources. And obviously I know you have a coaching program and you do some online webinars and training. So, um, maybe sure if people are interested and they hire skilled workers, they aren’t interested in this topic where they can find out, uh, more, uh, about some of, uh, your work. Yeah,

Ryan Englin (19:52): Absolutely. So anybody that’s hiring people below $30 an hour, that is frontline. So they’re actually providing your product or service to your customers. Those are the best fit for us. And we’ve developed a coaching program. We also have a lot of available material on our website, core fit, hiring.com is where they can learn more about not only some of the resources available, but also if they wanna learn more about our coaching and training program and

John Jantsch (20:17): The coaching and training is for the employer or whoever’s doing the hiring of the employee or of the employee, right.

Ryan Englin (20:23): It’s it’s for the employer. Yes. And so we help them implement our entire system. We call it the core fit hiring system. And we have a whole process that we’ve developed everything from. How do you up that core, the story, the, the vision, how do you find the right people? How do you automate the process? And then ultimately, how do you interview ’em and make sure you’re hiring the right people.

John Jantsch (20:40): Awesome. Very timely. Thanks for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast, Ryan. All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in, feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you’ve got employees, if you’ve got a staff member that wants to learn a system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It’s called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.