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Your team wants to work with great people but they need you to find those people and do it quickly.
Hosts Spencer Horn and Christian Napier discuss a better way to build and strengthen teams in any organization.
Your Team Needs You...to Hire Better People Faster
Season 2 Episode 38 - Your team wants to work with great people but they
need you to find those people and do it quickly. From ever-expanding job
duties to burnout from you being short-staffed, your team needs you to
hire better people. The right people will improve quality, customer
satisfaction, and team morale. We speak with Ryan Englin about the tools
and strategies you need to hire better people faster.
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Christian Hello, everyone. Welcome to a belated episode of the
TeamWork of Better Way podcast. I'm Christian Napier.
Delighted to be joined by Spencer Horn. Who... Spencer,
you're not in your usual digs, so tell us where you are.
Spencer No, I'm not. I'm coming to you live from Las Vegas. I'm
here watching my four grandchildren, and my daughter
lives here with her husband, so I have some different
set ups. And so you got a little sun in my face. But I'm
so excited to be here. So beautiful. The weather is
beautiful, air is clear. Going out and enjoying the red
rocks.
Christian Well, that sounds fantastic. I mean, here in Salt Lake
City, the sun has come out, but it is very, very cold.
Last time I checked, it was 19 degrees here. So it's
very chilly. I suspect it's a little warmer there in
your neck of the woods.
Spencer Yeah, we're only 40 in the morning and it'll warm up,
but it'll be just perfect to, to just get out and enjoy
joy the sun. But, you know, I I miss the snow, I have to
be honest. I mean, I like getting away, but I'll be
happy to come home.
Christian Well, it'll be waiting for you when you return. It's not
going anywhere because it's too cold to melt. The snow
is just not melting. But we've got a fantastic guest
lined up today, and I really appreciate his flexibility
because we've had to move some schedules around because
we're just very busy people. So Spencer, why don't you
take a moment and introduce our guests who you've known
for a long time.
Spencer Yes, that's right. Today we have Ryan Englin, who is
also very, very busy. And the fact that we were able to
get him and he worked with our, with our crazy schedule
this past couple of days is, is absolutely phenomenal.
Ryan and I met back in 2011. Is that right, Ryan? I'm
going to bring you on here.
Ryan Yeah, it was 2011 or twelve.
Spencer Yeah. So it's been a while. And Ryan is someone who is
really focused on helping companies create culture so
that they can attract and hire the best people. I want
to share a little bit about his bio, but I wanted to
tell Ryan, I want you to tell the story why you got into
this, because I think it's really fascinating. But Ryan
is truly a force in disrupting how people hire and
recruit. And he calls himself a disruptive new wave. I
love that, Ryan. And when he speaks, you're going to
sense this particular energy maybe you don't always
hear. And because he is leveling tradition. Love that.
And he's completely revamping the way business owners
across the country think about the next hire. And he's
passionate about supporting small business. And what's
happening is the words getting out. Ryan, it's not just
small business. I mean, medium and large businesses as
well. And I want you to talk a little bit about what got
you into this, but he's going to talk about one of the
single most effective ways to grow your business, and
that's really through quality hires. He is a certified
PDP professional, using pro scan surveys to help his
clients understand the behavioral dynamics of the people
they are hiring and learn more about learn about how
they're going to impact the culture, and the culture is
going to impact those new hires. And since 2011, Ryan
has been the CEO of his company, Core Matters, and it
focuses on the issue of high turnover and high growth
for organizations, along with really what businesses
need to fill those open positions. And not simply fill
them systematically, but fill them with quality
frontline workers. And it's such an important issue.
Ryan and I see the impact almost every day of
organizations that are not filling spots that need to be
filled. And what does that create for the people that
are lifting the extra weight with those gaps? Right?
Ryan Yeah, sure. A lot of things we could talk about. There's
so much out there that needs to be solved. I don't know
if we're going to cover it in 45 minutes, but hopefully
we'll bring some good value to the listeners today.
Yeah.
Spencer So, yeah, just tell us why you got it. What got you
excited about doing this? I mean, what did you see
growing, you know, whatever in your formative years that
said, hey, I want to go help companies hire?
Ryan You know, I grew up in a blue collar household. My dad
was in manufacturing, and he was an owner operator. And
I remember that he would work these crazy hours, six
days a week, twelve hour days, 15 hours days sometimes.
And I didn't know any better at the time. I was like, my
dad's a hard worker, and it takes a lot to run a plant.
And I remember going down after school some days with
him to the plant, because we had to run back down there
or go in there on the weekends with him. And I thought I
was hanging out with dad. Well, he put me to work. And
what I realized as I got older is that it wasn't that
there was just too much work to do, it was that my dad
didn't have enough of the right people. Hiring has
always been difficult, and they call it work for a
reason. And if we're not doing the right things to
attract people into the work we need them to do can be a
real challenge. As I got older and I realized that my
dad wasn't a bad place to work, he just didn't have the
skills or the knowledge in how to really recruit and
hire people. So I did like any good son would do, and I
said, I'm not going into the family business. I'm going
into corporate. And I went and I saw in corporate that
they didn't do it any better. But they had something
that most of these small and medium businesses didn't
have, which was a defined process to help them recruit
and hire. And it was just a machine. I remember there
were some days I'd literally interview 100 people in a
day. It was exhausting. But they had a machine for
getting people to apply. So when I started my company
and I realized that most small businesses were
struggling with the same thing my dad was struggling
with, and it was because they didn't have the skills,
they didn't have the process, no one taught them how to
do this stuff. That's when I developed the corporate
hiring system to teach them these things. Because what
I've learned is most people don't go start a business
because they want to work 90 hours, weeks. Start a
business because they want more for their family. They
want more for themselves. They've got personal goals.
And these businesses just suck them dry because they're
not able to bring on enough people.
Christian Well, I've got a question for you, Ryan. So you start
this thing now, some small businesses may not hire
people because they just don't have the cash flow to do
it, but others might have the they might have the
financial means, but then aren't doing it properly. So
as you looked at your own family experience, you looked
at the corporate experience, what was the one thing
maybe they were doing many things wrong, but what was
the one thing that you saw that was really impeding
their progress when it came to recruiting and hiring
talent?
Ryan They think of recruiting as an HR activity. It's about
getting people and what they really need to do. And this
is what they don't do, which is why it doesn't work. If
they don't look at recruiting as a marketing activity,
they need to become attractive to the people they want
to attract. And if they don't do that, they are always
going to struggle to recruit.
Christian Hey, Spencer, you're muted.
Spencer Well, the button said I wasn't, so I'm getting confused
here. Sorry, Ryan. That's really important. It's not
just an HR function. It's an entire organizational
function. And it's really changing a mindset. Can you
talk just a little bit about that and how you do that?
And what's the biggest struggle that you see in helping
your clients make that shift?
Ryan A lot of questions in there. So I think that when they
think of it as a marketing activity, you can't just take
the job description that your lawyer built for HR that
says, this is what the person needs to do, a bulleted
list of all of the activities in town. Because at the
end of the day, if I'm a machine operator, I know what a
machine operator does. Remember, people don't leave
jobs, they leave people. We've all heard that before. So
if that's the case, we need to put ourselves out there
and talk about our people and our culture and our
leadership styles and those job postings we put out
there should not be what Legal wrote for us or
Compliance wrote for us. They need to be something
Marketing wrote for us. We really need to just change
the way we think about the way we attract people into
our business. And I would say the hardest thing for them
to do is to get out of their own way. Anybody that's
worked with small business owners before, they know that
often the leader, the owner of the company, is too
involved in things that they're not experts at. And they
need to get out of their way and trust their people to
make it happen.
Spencer And so as you're working with those CEOs, how are they
doing with that? Do you feel like they are trusting
their people? And if not, what's the impact if they
don't?
Ryan Well, the impact is going to be different for everyone.
But I would say for the most part is it inhibits growth.
So if your goal is to grow your company or even scale
your company, it's going to get in the way of your
ability to do that. So trusting people is really a long
process. But what I coach our clients on is give them
something that is that you would normally not trust them
with, but there's low impact if they mess it up and see
how well your team performs and watch how the
relationship evolves over time and you can start
trusting them with more and more stuff.
Spencer Would you walk us through Ryan? I mean, what is it that
you do when you come into an organization? How do you
get them to start hiring the right people? I mean,
really, that's the focus of today is hire better people
faster. And really our teams deserve to have the best
people. So what's your process? Walk us through that.
Ryan Yeah, so it goes back to that idea that if you want good
people, you have to be attractive to good people. And
what's happened is, so often people just look at what
the competitor is doing or they read the newspaper or
they go online and they see what everybody else is
doing. They just go do that. And if recruiting really is
marketing, just like in any good marketing campaign, you
have to stand out. You have to be different, you have to
be noticeable. And if you aren't implementing the things
that you need to do to do that, you're going to get lost
in the crowds. The Internet was great for business
because it leveled the playing field. All of a sudden,
as a company of 500 employees, I could now compete with
a company of 50,000 because the Internet really leveled
the playing field for everybody. I could have a better
website, I could have a better message towards my
customers. It also leveled the playing field for
recruiting. But what happened was we forgot this idea
that recruiting is marketing. And we just put all of our
efforts into the job boards, the indeeds, the monsters,
the career builders, the glass doors of the world. And
what the job boards did was they made the playing field
not level anymore. Now it's who can spend the most
money. If I'm going up against Amazon, who has a $5
million a month recruiting budget, that might be more
than my revenue for the whole year, and they're spending
that just on recruiting in a month. So I have to be
creative. I have to be a little scrappy and figure out
how can I get in front of the people that I want to
attract without having to compete against those giant
corporate budgets?
Spencer That's a really important point. Ryan I know of a tech
company based in Massachusetts with operations in India.
There's probably, what, three to 350 employees. And for
a time, they experienced some advantages with the
Internet. But then with COVID and the work from home
revolution that happened. Now, what was happening is you
talk about the Amazons, the Amazons, and just the
Microsofts and all these major organizations were able
to reach out and take away those advantages. So now it
is about you're recruiting against these huge
organizations because they can go anywhere. You say that
it brings you an advantage. The Internet did, but it
also kind of got taken away pretty quickly.
Ryan Yeah. And more than 90% of job searches start online.
And if you think about the job seekers journey and they
haven't switched jobs in a while, odds are they're going
to go search where they know to search. They're going to
go to Google, they're going to go to a search engine,
and they're going to type in tech jobs. And whatever
Google ranks is what they're going to land on. So indeed
will be on that list. Glassdoor will be on that list,
but so will other large enterprises who have put a lot
of effort into ranking high for those keywords. And you
need to compete with that. And for a lot of people, what
they do is they compete on the job boards. And I look at
job boards as being the local fishing hole that
everybody goes to, and every once in a while, the
fishing hole just is tapped out and there's no more fish
biting.
Spencer Ryan I've often heard it said that in those places
you're looking for the best of the worst or the cream of
the crap.
Ryan Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, who goes to job
boards if you're a job seeker? You go to job board
because you're unemployed or because where you're at is
so bad, you're going to go looking for a job. I mean, if
you think about the experience, three out of four job
seekers say that looking for work is one of life's most
stressful events. No one's going to willingly do that
unless the pain of change is less than the pain of
staying the same. So it has to be so bad. They have to
be so behind on their rent, or they have to be it has to
be one of those things that they are literally making
themselves sick going to work for this company every day
that they're going to go on the job boards. And if
that's where we choose to compete, we're going to get
the people that are bringing baggage that are not
employable, that don't want to work, don't have good
work ethics. Every once in a while, you'll find a good
one there. But what I would encourage you to do is get
off the job boards and go find your own fishing hole,
the one that nobody else is fishing from. And there are
so many ways to do that, especially when you get
involved in grassroots campaigns or you get involved in
the local community or even start targeting people
differently online.
Christian So Ryan, why don't you give us examples of some of these
unknown fishing holes? I mean, I appreciate the fishing
analogy. I love to go fishing when I was a kid and the
last thing you wanted to do is be fishing where
everybody else was fishing. So where are some of these
hidden gems, some of these fishing holes that most
people don't know about? What are some examples that
you've had with some of your clients?
Ryan Well, I would say the easiest one and this one
everybody's heard of but nobody fishes it correctly, is
the employee referral program. It's the easiest, least
expensive, fastest way to go fishing in a different
fishing hole than you've done before. But the problem is
only about 6% of employees are actually going to refer
for money or recognition. So if you think about that for
a second, most employee referral programs are built
around some sort of cash reward, but 94% of your people
are not going to be motivated by that. So you need to
flip the way you think about employee referral programs
and understand why people are actually going to refer.
They're going to refer because they want to work with
their friends. And if you look at Gallup's engagement
survey, they have a question, do you have a best friend
at work? And people that say yes to that question are
more likely to be engaged than those that don't. So it's
so important that they work with their friends. But if
we're constantly focused on, hey, we're going to give
you money, if you go and ask your buddy to quit their
job and come work here, well, they're not going to
jeopardize the friendship for that. I have a little
cartoon that I put together that is two guys walking
together, and one guy is all beat up, and he's in a cast
and he's on crutches. And he goes, I know that your wife
is still mad at me for that last crazy idea I had, but
if you quit your job, my boss is going to give me $300.
That's what we're asking people to do when we offer a
cash reward for employee referral program. So you need
to flip the way you think about them and then also equip
your people. They're not recruiters. They don't know how
to have these conversations. Teach your people how to
have this conversation so that they want to have it so
they start bringing more people into the business.
Spencer Ryan, how do you get I mean, what's the attitude that
executives have about recruiting friends? Are they
excited that they want to bring that dynamic to the
workplace, or are they resistant to that?
Ryan Two schools of thoughts. There's the, oh, yeah, every
time I get a referral from someone that works here,
they're amazing. And the other school of thought is,
yeah, they're amazing until one of them leaves, then all
of them leave. So I usually go after the second thought
more because, let's just change the way we think. People
are going to leave you. It will happen. People grow,
they outgrow you, you outgrow them. It will happen.
Maximize the time that they're with you. And if that's
your focus, not on them leaving, but on making sure that
it's a quality relationship while they're here, they're
going to stay so much longer.
Spencer I really love that thought. And, you know, it's the same
thought that goes into, should I train my people? What
if I train them and they leave? Well, what if you don't
train them and they stay? Right. I mean, that's a
similar thought, is that you can't allow that thinking
to control how you approach your business. I look at my
son's experience, and he's in university, and he's doing
summer sales, and yet he switched companies this summer
to work with a mission companion where he served a faith
based mission for two years. And they have this great
bond and this great trust, and he's really excited to be
working, and they're recruiting their friends, and it's
a powerful, powerful tool. So I hear what you're saying.
So why do we keep incentivizing people with the wrong
incentives?
Ryan It's easy. Most people are lazy, and they don't want to
get creative, and they don't want to do something
different, and it's easy. That's the bottom line.
Christian Well, if I'm listening to what you're saying correctly,
this notion of recruitment as marketing extends past the
higher date because basically what you're doing is
involving your employees in that effort. And that, along
with some other things, would help potentially you
retain your people longer. I was having a conversation
with a colleague here locally the other day who does
some work with a manufacturer who told me that last year
they lost 50% of their engineers. They were coached or
they left for other reasons. And that also puts a
tremendous burden on hiring, because you got to replace
50% of your workforce if you have this kind of marketing
mindset. This is what I'm kind of inferring here is if I
had that marketing mindset, not just with my recruits,
but I also had it with my employees, maybe the chances
are I could hold on to a few more of them and I maybe
wouldn't lose 50% of my workforce.
Ryan Yeah, I use phishing analogies and dating analogies in a
lot of the work that I do. Think about how well it would
go if I use this. So the recruiting, when you're getting
out there and you're becoming attractive to job seekers,
that's the equivalent of dating. And the interview
process is the equivalent of getting to know each other
and going through that. And you can always tell people.
Most people don't get married after 15 minutes on the
first date. But so many businesses make an offer after a
15 minutes interview, and then three weeks later,
they're disappointed because who is this person? They're
not who I thought they were. And that carries through to
onboarding. So think about the onboarding process as
we're moving in together. We're in the honeymoon stage.
How good do you think that relationship would be in a
year if you moved in together and you said, all right,
hey, let me know if you need anything. I'll be in the
other room there there's some resources if you need
them. I'll see you in 90 days, and we'll do your first
review. How well do you think that relationship would
grow? Or would it become stale? Would it become toxic
and people would run like crazy? I love that.
Christian Sweetie, there's food in the fridge. Help yourself.
Ryan Yeah, have fun. I got an open door policy. If you need
me, I'm in the back room.
Spencer But that's how we treat, and we have to be careful not
to take that too far with that analogy with but here's
the challenge. So how do you date the right people? I
mean, to use your analogy, I mean, how do you find the
right people? So that because I think it's right. I
mean, I use you know, both of us use this pro scan tool.
And one of the things I want to know is, are people
showing up as they do on a first date or who they are
when they're married? I want to know what people are
like when they're married, not how they're showing up on
the first date, because they're always showing us the
best side, right when they're coming on that first date.
And then once the commitments made, who they really are
emerges. So what's your process for that?
Ryan Well, the first thing is going back to the dating
analogy. Like, if we're going to become attractive, if
you haven't changed your look in the last decade, which
a lot of companies have not, and you are going out there
to a completely new market. Gen Z are in the market now.
Everybody has to remember, millennials are now in their
40s. So let's stop thinking about millennials as the
kids, but you've got this whole new generation in the
marketplace that wants things done differently. They
want to be communicated with differently, they want to
be swoon differently. They want all of that. So we need
to look first inward and say, what do I need to become
in order to attract the modern workforce? Because I need
to be attractive to them if I'm going to get them to not
only want to show up so I can hire them, but also so
they can stay. So that's the first piece. The second
piece is understanding how they want to be communicated
with. I can't tell you how many times I run into a
career website where it's download our application and
fax it to us. It still happens. Most of these people in
the modern workforce, they have not seen a phone with a
cord, let alone a fax machine. So why are we asking them
to scan or fax something in paper when we're in a
paperless world now? And most people don't even have
access to some of those old tools. So you have to change
your process so that it's easier for them. Text
messaging is a great example if you're struggling to
recruit and you're only emailing well, if their inbox
looks anything like mine, they're getting 100 emails an
hour. Yours is getting lost in that mess. But if you
text me, I get an alert right away. I can respond to you
in a couple of minutes. And the expectation is I can
respond with an emoji, and that's okay. I don't have to
put together some long, drawn out process to reply to
you. So we have to become very in tune with what the
market wants from us. And I'd say a lot of employers are
just way behind the curve on that.
Spencer So does that mean I have to start using Snapchat to
recruit?
Ryan I think Snapchat is dead, but yeah, I mean, TikTok is
one that we definitely talk about a lot for recruiting.
Spencer Well, how do you use TikTok to recruit?
Ryan The question I always ask is, what do you think that
your target market wants? The type of person that's
going to be the right employee for you, the person
that's going to fit in your team, fit in your culture,
going to communicate the way you want. How do you think
that they would want to be communicated with and then go
create that? So if you think about the bombardment of
information that we have in our modern culture, some
studies have shown that in 24 hours, we get advertised
more too than the greatest generation or those that were
born in the did. In their whole lifetime, our brains
have adapted to say, hey, we're going to tune out most
of the stuff because we have to consider it noise. If we
want the good stuff to bubble up, we have to compete
with that. Their attention is being pulled in a hundred
different directions. And so if we want to recruit
people on TikTok, one of the easiest things to do is get
your employees to do it for you. Find out which ones are
active on social media. Have them post about their day.
Have them share about what they've learned or how their
career is growing or what it's like to work for their
boss and create a social media presence based on what
your employees are actually doing. Now, I know there's
some people listening going, well, my employees aren't
allowed to have phones at the desk or in the shop or
wherever they're at. Well, maybe that's part of what we
need to do to change, is to recognize that people do
want to share what their day is like with their friends
or their followers, and that can be huge. To help you
recruit people that are going to be just like them.
Christian Here in park city, we have a client that, as part of
their recruiting process, what they do is they have a
short little video, and they're in park city. They're in
the mountains. It's beautiful. So they're outside and
they have three different employees ask three different
questions on this short little video. It's like a minute
long, but they're in this beautiful scenery, and they
ask these three questions, and it's on video, right? And
so they ask people who are interested in working for
that company to submit a 92nd video of their own
responding to these three questions. This is like a
major evaluation mechanism for determining whether a
person is going to be a good fit if they can 90 seconds
answer these three questions on video, and they make it
very simple. They actually use our software, but they
make it very simple for the person to just see the
little video message, to record their own message, hit
submit, and then it goes in. And it's a great way for
them. It's very innovative. I thought, rather than put
the ad on indeed, or whatever, they're doing it through
these innovative ways. So I think you're right on target
there with empowering your employees, letting them use
social media channels, take advantage of their innate
willingness to share stuff with people to also talk
about your company. I think it's fabulous.
Spencer Yeah, Christian, that just brings up a point. I don't
think Ryan knows about your platform you just talked
about because it seems like that could fit in exactly
with what he's talking about. I'm totally putting you on
the spot, Ryan. But, Christian, I want you to just share
with them how you're using that.
Christian We build a platform to help people in organizations
share stories. And so I don't want to turn this into an
ad for our platform by any means because it's not
typically used in an HR or recruitment use case. It's
used either for video, social proof or for knowledge and
learning. But. There's one company that is using it for
that use case. They ask, what could we use them? Like,
why not? You can do this to make it very simple for
people to have these kinds of video interactions with
each other and it's proven to be very popular with them.
They really like that. The ability to just have this
little video go out to the world and then have people
just respond to that video and share their little videos
of their own and that's how people apply for these jobs.
It's cool to see it wasn't the primary use case and it
still isn't, but it's an interesting use case
nonetheless.
Ryan Yeah, it's cool.
Christian We can talk more about that offline.
Ryan But thanks for there are platforms out there. In fact,
we've got a client that's running on a new applicant
tracking system that has that built in, which I thought
was pretty interesting, the video interviewing. Some of
the issues, though that I'm seeing with it, not that I
want to turn this into a diversity conversation, but it
can be a real challenge if you want to have a more
diverse workforce, especially if some of the minority
groups maybe aren't as technology savvy or they don't
have the most advanced mobile devices. It can be a real
challenge if you put those systems in and they don't
have access to it. It can be a really challenge for that
in having more diverse workforce. So just something to
caution our listeners.
Spencer On and I think that's a good point, but I really like
what you're saying, Christian. It's about telling the
stories and that's the same thing that Ryan is saying.
So that's part of the marketing process and switching
from just purely fishing in those highly fished in ponds
and going other places where people are, that's with
referrals. What else, how do we get people to hire
better people faster? You've given us so many things
playing in new fishing holes, getting your people
involved, understanding that what motivates them. It's
not just the money and the rewards. It's working with
people that they love and care about, which is really
engaging and switching the mindset from executives to
understand that this is an ongoing process and it has to
permeate the entire organization. So what else can we
do?
Ryan So I mentioned it before. If we know that people don't
leave jobs, they leave managers, we've all heard that
before. Really think about how do you promote your
leadership team? How do you promote the person that
they're going to be working for? I encourage all of our
clients that if you know who their hiring manager is
going to be or who their supervisor is going to be, talk
about them, talk about their behaviors, talk about their
traits, talk about their personality a little bit.
What's their leadership style, their communication
style? Put that in your job ad before you put it out
online. Because if we know that people want to work for
someone new. That's what they're looking for. They're
not looking for the work. They're looking for a new
employer. So let's talk more about the employer, not the
about US. History pages. We were started in 1972, and
nobody cares about that stuff. Let's talk about now,
what's relevant today. And that's something that I think
a lot of people miss because they give it to a
compliance team. There's nothing wrong with HR, but they
are about compliance. They follow the rules. They don't
like change, they don't like new processes. So they take
what's been done and they continue to do it. So make
sure that you're really getting the relevant information
in front of people today.
Spencer Ryan, I think that is such an important point, and I
want to emphasize this. If you think about sports today,
college football right now, they just closed the
transfer portal. Right. And that is people are leaving
coaches to go play for other coaches. They may love
people on the team, but ultimately they want to play for
someone that they can learn from, that they can grow
from. And so a lot of times, athletes are shopping
coaches that are going to give them the best opportunity
to grow. Is that kind of what you're talking about here?
Ryan Absolutely, yeah. Not just the opportunity to grow.
Sometimes people don't want to really grow in their
career. They just want to be experts at what they do
today, but they got to do it for someone else. One of
the things we see a lot and we hear a lot from employees
during exit interviews is that, oh, my boss was very
passive aggressive. That toxicity, that thing that
creates that bad environment. They're just looking for
someone who's not passive aggressive. They still want to
do the same line of work. They still are going to get
the same training. They still want to do the same thing
with their career. They just want to work for someone
else they can build a relationship with. The reality is,
most people spend more time with the people they work
with than they do with their friends and family. We have
to keep them motivated to want to leave their friends
and family to come and work for us. So you have to give
them an environment where they feel like they belong and
they have fun and they enjoy it. And that's ultimately
going to lead to not only higher retention, but higher
productivity, because when people enjoy the work they
do, they work harder.
Spencer That is so true. Christian, I know you got a question.
Christian Yeah, it comes back to the timing because to expand on
your dating analogy, what you're trying to do is get
companies to be honest with themselves and look in the
mirror and say, okay, this is really how I am. And if
I'm going to become, quote unquote, attractive to
potential employees out in the market, I need to make a
number of changes. I suspect that some of those could be
made quickly and others might take more time, depending
on the nature and the structure of the organization and
the people who are running it. But in your experience,
how quickly can these extreme makeovers take place? Or
do you have to change everything? Or is it okay to maybe
just make a couple of changes and then you're changing
it over time? What's your experience with these
companies who need to make themselves appear more
attractive on the market?
Ryan Yeah, nobody comes to me and says, hey, I don't need to
hire for three months. Let's just work on our process
and become more attractive. They all need to hire right
away. And so the first thing that we want to make sure
of is that they have a really solid communication
process from application to interview, that's the first
thing we want to do. One of the things that we talk a
lot about is people always ask me, how do I get an A
player? How do I get a rock star? Well, here's the
reality. People that are A players, people that are top
performers in their field, they know it and they're in
demand, and everybody's out there courting them. If you
want to stand out, communicate fast and communicate
effectively, so that's the first thing we work on before
we worry about revamping everything else. Let's just
work on the fact that when they apply, we don't call
them in six days and say, we're so excited to talk to
you because it's been six days. Let's call them in five
minutes and say, oh, my gosh, we're so excited, and
actually create a really solid process going in.
Spencer So don't ghost them is what you're saying.
Ryan Don't ghost them.
Spencer Yeah, but what if you don't want that person?
Ryan Tell them. Just tell them. I don't know why we just
ignore people we don't want. I mean, as employers, I
hear everybody's ghosting me, and no one shows up for
interviews, no one wants to work anymore. Well, if we go
back decades, employers have been ghosting job seekers
for decades.
Spencer Yes. It's a little hypocritical, isn't it?
Ryan A little bit. 90% of employers are being ghosted right
now. Almost 80% of employees have been ghosted during
their job search. So let's just stop ghosting each
other. One of the things that we do as part of that
communication process and we set up the system for this
is if you don't like somebody, tell them right away. We
don't need to think about it. If we don't like them, if
they're not going to be a fit, tell them.
Spencer What's the best way to tell them? Sorry, I just don't
want to go on a date with you.
Ryan Well, I mean, that's a legal question, so talk to your
compliance experts and your attorneys about that. But
something as simple as saying, hey, you know what? You
don't align to the requirements for the position. And so
we've decided to pursue other candidates is pretty much
the typical thing.
Spencer I have just a reality check. What I see is most people
who are doing the hiring are so overwhelmed that they're
focused on the low hanging fruit, and that is focusing
on the candidates they want and not taking any extra
time on people that they don't want. And so in some
cases, it's a matter of survival mentally. Right.
Ryan Well, I think part of it, though, is you can leverage
technology depending on the size of the organization. We
see these applicant tracking systems. I've mentioned it
a couple of times. It's like a CRM for recruiting. You
can automate so much of this stuff to where if someone
doesn't make it through the gates, they can
automatically get a rejection letter. Or if you're
looking at people you're like, maybe later you can just
click a button and they automatically get the rejection
email. Like, you don't have to think. You don't have to
do anything. All you have to do is process their
application.
Spencer Now you're speaking our language, right, Christian?
Christian That's absolutely right. Technology can play a huge
part, but when you talk about the stars going after the
rock stars, it made me think, coming back to Spencer's
College football analogy, right. You have schools that
basically have their pick of five star recruits, right?
So you've got the Alabama as the Ohio States. I mean,
they can pretty much choose anybody that they want. You
have other schools that may not have access to those
five stars, but they've been successful because they put
in processes that allow them to develop two and three
star recruits, even put them in positions that they
normally didn't play in high school, and they can be
very successful. And I'm wondering if there's a parallel
to that in business where you know what? Maybe you
aren't going to get the rock star, but if you can
identify those kinds of people that are the two and
three star people, but they've got some potential that
maybe other people haven't seen, and you can take a
little time and develop them, they could become rock
stars for you. But they're just not known right now as
rock stars.
Ryan Yeah, I tell our clients, and they do a lot of this in
our workshops, is to really understand that I believe
that past performance is not an indicator of future
success, which is really contrary to what a lot of
recruiting experts would tell you, because you don't
know how toxic of a relationship they were in. You don't
know if they were working for an organization that
didn't have solid metrics or didn't hold people
accountable. You have no idea how bad things could have
been for them. And so when you're recruiting, you need
to look at the things that are non negotiable, and those
are things that you can't or won't teach. And if we just
boil it down to that. We can find these people that are
not perceived as rock stars working for someone else,
hire them into our organization, teach them what they
need to know, and they can absolutely become rock stars.
And one of the primary things we need to look at is, do
they fit in with our culture? I can't teach somebody a
value system. I can't teach somebody how to behave
differently. One of the ones that we run into a lot
because we do a lot of work with frontline employees is
can people get to work on time? Well, I don't know how
to teach somebody to get out of bed on time and get in
the carpool lane and get to work on time. I don't know
how to teach that. So that needs to be part of my
interview process, is can they get to the interview on
time? Because if they can't, I can promise you they're
never going to show up to work on time. And so what are
those non negotiables? And if we just focus on those,
like those smaller colleges might focus on, what are the
things that are going to say, hey, this is someone with
potential that fits in with who we are, and they'll be
engaged, and they'll have that heart and that drive and
those things we can't teach. And then we'll teach them
the rest of the stuff. We'll teach them how to play in a
different position. We'll teach them some different
skills that maybe they've never thought they could adopt
before.
Spencer I just have one more question, Christian, and that is
can you share? Will you share just maybe a success
story? I know that I've had the opportunity, thanks to
you, Ryan, of actually working with you on a client that
you've been working with for many years to help recruit
and retrain people. And it's a company that had so much
success, they were actually on a major television show.
Right. Can you give us something?
Ryan Yeah, that one. They actually got picked up for the
premiere episode of the reboot of Dirty Jobs with Mike
Rowe. And it was because they wanted someone from that
industry. And every time they Googled or asked, that
company kept coming up because we did such a good job of
marketing who they were. And no one else in the industry
was really thinking about recruiting its marketing
activity. So they didn't have any marketing. So it was
almost like, by default, they got picked to be on the
premiere of that. But one of our recent examples is we
worked with a roofing company that had pretty much given
up on taking new jobs, and we sat down with them for 90
days, and we worked through building out our process.
And inside of 90 days, they hired 35 roofers. And we got
to the end, and we met with the leadership team, and
they're like, I don't know what happened but I never
thought this would be possible to hire that many people
in such a short period of time. And HR is like, whoa,
we're done. And then as soon as that happened,
leadership came to them and said, we're taking on three
more jobs that we originally passed on, but no one else
won them, so we're taking them on. So get back to
recruiting. But now they have a system that they could
trust to continue recruiting that people. And just for
reference, in the 90 days prior they hired one.
Spencer That is perfect. That's exactly what we're looking for.
And I know you're doing such a great job. It's one of
the reasons why you're so busy right now. And I think
that segues into your question. Christian yeah.
Christian So this has been a fantastic conversation. Ryan, I
really appreciate you taking the time to join us today.
If our listeners or viewers want to learn more about the
work that you're doing, core matters, the core fit
hiring method. What is the best way for them to reach
out and connect with you?
Ryan Go to our website@corematters.com. We got tons of
information about our process. We've got hiring tips,
book downloads. I've got a free master class where they
can learn a little bit more about our process and why
it's so effective. Make it really easy for them to
schedule a call with my team if they want to learn more.
Corematters.com all right, fantastic.
Christian We'll definitely be checking that out. And Spencer,
you're there in Vegas, but I know you are accessible by
people around the world. As you're helping so many
people and organizations, how can our viewers and
listeners reach out and connect with you?
Spencer The easiest way, LinkedIn. Just find me Spencer Horn on
LinkedIn. I get so many reach outs on that. That's a
perfect way. And Christian, likewise with Ryan, do
you see why I have why I have this association with this
great guy? He's so smart. Christian and you help so many
people. I know you actually have to go because you're
working on a major sporting event bid, so you need to
go. So how can people reach you?
Christian LinkedIn as well? Thank you for the kind words, Spencer.
Just look up Christian Napier on LinkedIn. You'll find me
there. So Ryan, Spencer. It was a pleasure. Thank you so
much for having this 45 minutes conversation with us.
And viewers and listeners, thanks for joining us. Please
stay in touch and subscribe and like us and we'll see
you again soon.
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