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Luke Szyrmer
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Ryan is a recruiter and marketer focused on blue collar hiring. We discuss hiring during the pandemic, impacts on blue collar industries, and how to become an employer that attracts great candidates. He also ties together how hiring strategy affects every other area of a service-based company, whether you are aware of it or not.
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Engaging, strategic marketing consultant and recruitment marketing expert. Blends talents in brand development with a consultative approach to efficiently recruit and create the ultimate employee experience. Project manager and client advocate. Driven to provide excellence in every interaction and project. Talents in both business management and marketing enable me to coach clients on various aspects of their business so they can generate even stronger results.
[00:00:00] spk_0: you’ve heard that analogy of getting the right people in the right seats on the bus, the gym Colin thing. If your business is a bus just like anything, they’re gonna be breakdowns. They’re gonna be detours. They’re gonna be issues that come up. And so the question is, how do you keep people on the bus when the bus breaks down, the bus takes a detour. Right. Um, I can tell you there’s not a single person on the planet that a year ago today socko vid coming and was ready for it. Every business took a detour in 2020. So how do you keep the people on the bus when there’s a detour? Well, if I’m on the bus and I’m not excited about where the bus is going cause I’m like, I really don’t want to go there again. A soon as there is a detour, the bus breaks down. What’s the first thing I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get off the bus. E don’t wanna go there anyways. And now you’re creating this extra inconvenience in my life. You’re creating stress in my life. You’re creating these things that I don’t want, and I’m really excited about where we’re going, so I’m going to get off the bus and go find another bus to get on. But when people are excited about the destination, Mhm, let’s say we’re all going on a fishing trip up in the mountains and everybody’s excited about going on that fishing trip. Well, if it takes a little couple extra days, months, years to get there. But we’re super excited about the fishing trip, we’re going to still go on a fishing trip. We’re gonna hang out on the bus when it breaks down, or if the bus even breaks down. Maybe we get excited to help get the bus back up and running.
[00:01:28] spk_1: Get it fixed, you
[00:01:29] spk_0: know. So if we’re excited about the destination, you can bring people together and they’re going to be aligned behind that common goal of we want to
[00:01:39] spk_1: get. It’s a fishing trip. You are listening to the align remotely podcast, the show dedicated to helping you lied distributed teams under difficult circumstances. I am the host, Luke Shermer, and I’ve participated in or run distributed teams for almost a decade. As a practitioner, I’m speaking with experts on leadership, strategic alignment and remote work to help you navigate the issues you start facing after you get your working from home gear sorted. Welcome back today on the podcast we have Ryan England, who is a recruiter, focused on a really interesting area, specifically blue collar hiring. The main reason that I wanted to speak with him was to get out of my own comfort zone, so to speak, and to talk about the impact of the pandemic on non let’s, say, computer based jobs, office based jobs and also just talk about hiring in general. So how to think about it? What matters any tipsy has, and we ended up covering ah, lot more than just that. So, for example, how to grow by reducing staff turnover? Why focusing on recruiting can bolster your sales and marketing in service industries? Why you are tripping yourself up if you’re primarily attracting candidates using better pay packages. One thing you really have to do if you want to attract great candidates and also the biggest fear managers have when hiring wrote workers and how to overcome it. So let’s get on with the show. Hi rain. Welcome to the line remotely podcast. So let’s get started with this whole topic of just blue collar and white collar. What do you think?
[00:03:36] spk_0: White collar and blue collars. So different? Uh, just I mean, just the mindset. Just if we started there, forget the work, get all that stuff, you know, But just the mindset of of the two types. What? What
[00:03:52] spk_1: do you mean by the mindset? You
[00:03:55] spk_0: so blue collar? Ah, lot of the mindset is mawr. What results that I get today. Whereas white collar tends to have a little bit longer of, ah, runway on that. Like, hey, have the week go have a month ago, I got a friend of mine that runs 90 companies like by Friday, 10 tickets, you know, is all that’s allowed to be left in the Q and in the blue collar, they’d be like by noon. You’re allowed to have this much not done. It’s like it’s just a different mindset. People leave a lot faster and blue collar to like I’ve got a client that he set a record. It was like an hour and a half in the Yeah, walked off the job. Well, it doesn’t tend to happen in white collar, so in blue collar. They tend to put a lot less effort into hiring because they have this kind of turnover. They’re like, Why invest the time? I’m like, If you invested the time, maybe you wouldn’t have the turnover issues Chicken or the egg one? Yeah.
[00:04:50] spk_1: I mean, I guess you could streamline it a bit. Maybe I’m thinking from too much of a white color perspective. Streamline. It makes it feel a little bit more white glove to the people being on boarded. We’re used to being well,
[00:05:01] spk_0: and that’s a big part of what I dio is e. Take a lot of that white collar mindset, which is more human focused. E No, it’s awful. It’s it sounds awful, but, you know, in the blue collar space, it’s very much there. Are there a cog in the machine, and that’s the way they treat it as a cog in the machine. So they’re almost disposable, you know, like replaceable. So which isn’t true, which is why they’re having problems hiring. But that’s been the mentality for so many years. It’s just it’s harder to change that.
[00:05:40] spk_1: So the mentality on the manager side on the employees
[00:05:43] spk_0: correct employees want to be treated more like, you know, an asset valued and those kinds of things. The management’s like We don’t have time for that crazy. Yeah, that. But I love it s Oh, I love the challenge I
[00:06:01] spk_1: can imagine. So what industries are you typically working on?
[00:06:06] spk_0: A lot of construction. Home services. It’s a big one. Uh, anybody that’s field services and then manufacturing. They’re the ones that I usually
[00:06:18] spk_1: work with. So how they have they all been equally affected by the pandemic, Or
[00:06:27] spk_0: so construction hasn’t really been hit yet. Especially like commercial construction, because those projects were all money was all set aside last year. So they’re still pushing through. They’re going to feel it next year because everybody pulled back for the 2021 2022 projects, Home Services has gone gangbusters because everybody’s working from home. Eso people are like, Oh, that plumbing issue. I need to get fixed and the lights not working in the office anymore. So they’ve just gone nuts. They’ve been buried and then manufacturing. I haven’t really don’t have a lot of manufacturing clients, but it just kind of depends on if you’re in PPE forget it. It just really depends on where you’re at.
[00:07:08] spk_1: So what does? What does BP stand for? Sorry, I don’t
[00:07:11] spk_0: owe personal protective equipment. Gloves, masks, got a face. Shields gallons all that stuff. If you’re in that, it’s gone nuts. But I don’t have any clients. Or in that
[00:07:21] spk_1: I guess you’ve had some experience helping with recruiting of white collar versus blue collar. How did you transition from one to the other?
[00:07:30] spk_0: Well, my corporate experience was all white color. So when I worked in corporate, that’s all it waas Uh, it was bankers. It was underwriters. It was That’s what I did in corporate. And then when I came over to and started my own company, my focus was all home services, and my dad was in manufacturing. I grew up in blue collar. When my client started pulling back on their advertising and on their marketing, I ended up transitioning and saying, Hey, how can I help them hire better people? I have a background in recruiting eso. How do I make that happen? And I went to a couple of them and I found huge success. Primarily, there wasn’t a lot of competition in that space a
[00:08:14] spk_1: good place to start a business
[00:08:16] spk_0: good and bad, like the great thing about being in the Blue Ocean is that there’s no competition. The bad thing about being in the Blue Ocean is sometimes there’s no customers. So, uh, so that’s been the biggest challenge for me is getting people to realize that there’s somebody out here that does what I dio. And so I ended up just staying in the blue collar space and focusing on helping people hire the technician because that was on. It was untapped. There was no one doing that. And I mean, there’s staffing agencies, but they don’t want to solve the problem because their business model is dependent on the problem continuing to exist,
[00:08:54] spk_1: right? So just quickly switch people in and out and yeah, right. So in the very beginning, when your first talking to people were you being perceived as a staffing agency
[00:09:06] spk_0: or one of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome was the idea of me being either staffing agency or recruiter on I’m neither of those.
[00:09:15] spk_1: So how are you different than a recruiter than a staffing agency? I understand.
[00:09:19] spk_0: Yes, I don’t actually source the talent. What we do is we implement our system inside of the companies and we teach them how to source the talent themselves.
[00:09:31] spk_1: Alright, okay. Interesting. Interesting. So I guess these air slightly larger companies done so
[00:09:39] spk_0: my smallest company is getting ready to hire their first person. I smallest client is getting ready for the person. They want to do it right. Um, most of my clients are 30 plus employees, but my largest clients right around 200 2. 50. So I don’t go much larger than that for us. So we’re teaching them how to do it themselves and implementing our processes and systems inside of the company.
[00:10:03] spk_1: Okay. Looping back on the pandemic angle. Have these processes helped handle the rough riding at the moment? Has it not really changed that much?
[00:10:12] spk_0: So my home services clients are going nuts because they can’t find talent fast enough. That was the problem they had before the problem. They still have. But one of the great advantages of our process is that it helps reduce turnover. You slow down the hiring process, you reduce turnover. Most companies hiring issues have to do with back filling open positions, not with just growth. It’s not like every company’s hockey sticking, and they’re growing by 200%. And they just constantly need more people 60 70% of the hiring issues or because they someone vacated a seat and they have to refill it. They’re constantly filling these open seats. And so if we stop that problem, hiring becomes a lot easier.
[00:10:56] spk_1: How does hiring work for blue collar positions?
[00:11:02] spk_0: So I think one of the biggest challenges the blue collar companies that have had is that they have focused on recruiting through pay. And so it’s I’m gonna pay you 50 cents more an hour if you come work for me on That’s been the way they’ve attracted people. Well, that works great for Company B, who stole the employees from Company A. But when Company C does that and Company D does that and then company A comes back to the guy like you work for me two years ago, and now you’re making $8 more our because he’s constantly jumping around making 50 cents or a dollar more an hour, and what it’s done is it’s artificially inflated. Market wages in the blue collar space because there’s a shortage of people coming into the industries. And so now they’re at this point where they’re having to pay so much to get the high quality people because they did this whole. I’ll pay you 50 cents worn out. I mean, I have clients that are like, Bring me your paycheck and I’ll match your pay or pay you more. That’s how they recruit on that. They’ve been doing that for a decade, if not longer. In some areas you’ve got Electrician’s, that air making 8 to $10 more than they should be in that market. And it’s really hard for the employers to control their margins. So our focus is much more. Instead of hiring, instead of attracting people through their paychecks, attract them through things like your culture. Your purpose values the benefits that you can offer them that air, not monetary. That’s all industries. A lot of the modern workforce is given up on this idea of. I need to make a lot of money. I need to work for somebody for 30 years. I need to retire with a pension like that just doesn’t happen anymore, and so what we do is we coach our clients to stop thinking about a paycheck and start thinking about a purpose. Give them a reason to get out of bed in the morning. That’s not I gotta pay the bills, and that’s what will attract people to you. And that’s what keep people long term.
[00:13:05] spk_1: Hi there, this is Luke. And just for a quick bit of back story, this podcast is part of my process to create a book called The Line Remotely, which will cover roughly the same topics as we have on the podcast. If you’d like a free advance copy of the book, I’d be more than happy to give you one. Just to be clear, it’s totally free. There’s eight chapters as of today, available for pre sell, and people are buying it right now, and this offer will go away as soon as the book is fully launched. My main request is that you leave a review of the podcast using rate this podcast dot com slash align remotely. It’s designed to work on your phone, but you can do it at your desk to and then forward me a screen shop of that to customer success at a line remotely dot com, and I’ll hook you right up. Just take a quick break rate this podcast dot com slash a line remotely and get your free copy. Now is there a remote component at all in something like coding services?
[00:14:16] spk_0: The interesting thing about construction home services is they were remote before remote was the thing. If you think about it, your home service tech is behind is in front of a windshield 12 hours a day and out working remotely in the field. Uh, and so keeping someone attached to your company culture and feeling like they’re part of the team has been a challenge for Home Services since the day they started. Uh, most home services companies will have inside sales reps. They’ll have customer support agents. They’ll have billing agents on those air remote positions. Those could work from home. Ah, lot of them, though, because their entire field staff is remote. Ah, lot of them like to keep them in an office, so at least feel some semblance of a team environment. Uh, but yeah, there are components of that the remote, and if you think even construction, you hire these people when they go out to a job site. How do you stay connected with, um, remote? So the same issues that a lot of companies we’re dealing with today around that remote environment of construction and home service has been dealing with that for decades.
[00:15:23] spk_1: So in the case of something like window cleaning, do they have multiple people going together to client sites just to have a little bit more of
[00:15:33] spk_0: sometimes? So, yeah, it really just depends on the business model on the types of jobs in a commercial environment. Yeah, they would have multiple people. Sometimes there’s a safety requirement for that. Just you gotta have someone else. From a safety perspective, I’ve seen a couple of our clients. They’ve started to double up and make teams so that when they go to client site, you’ve got two people working on it, which doubles the billable hours. But it reduces the amount of time there, there, so it washes out, but it then it creates that little bit more of a team environment.
[00:16:04] spk_1: Yeah. Yeah, that’s kind of the dynamic I was asking about. Yeah, because I know that from programming, it’s like a wave have worked better get people to work together, and then they bombed a little bit and figure stuff out together. So
[00:16:17] spk_0: a lot of it’s about letting people create that human connection. I mean, these are human beings with hopes and goals and dreams and and families they want to take care of and all of this stuff. And so a lot of our coaching with our clients is around that concept of having a personal conversation with these people because most of the industry is not investing in people personally. They’re looking at them as a cog in the machine. I mean, and they forget that there’s a human being and a family, and, you know, goals and dreams and all that stuff behind. It s so if we can break down and start having that conversation early on in the employee employer relationship, we can create long term mutual benefit for both, and that’s an important piece of what we dio.
[00:17:05] spk_1: So it sounds like part of it is just connecting the dots between these things, like the fact that they need to be a little bit, have a little bit more of a connection with the people they hire.
[00:17:17] spk_0: You’ve heard that analogy of getting the right people in the right seats on the bus, The gym Colin thing. If your business is a bus just like anything, they’re gonna be breakdowns. They’re going to be detours. They’re going to be issues that come up. And so the question is, how do you keep people on the bus when the bus breaks down, the bus takes a detour. Right. Um, I can tell you there’s not a single person on the planet that a year ago today socko vid coming and was ready for it. Every business took a detour in 2020. So how do you keep the people on the bus when there’s a detour? Well, if I’m on the bus and I’m not excited about where the bus is going because I’m like, I really don’t want to go there again. A soon as there is a detour, the bus breaks down. What’s the first thing I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get off the bus. E don’t wanna go there anyways. And now you’re creating this extra inconvenience in my life. You’re creating stress in my life. You’re creating these things that I don’t want and I’m really excited about where we’re going, so I’m going to get off the bus and go find another bus to get on. But when people are excited about the destination, Mhm, let’s say we’re all going on a fishing trip up in the mountains and everybody’s excited about going on that fishing trip. Well, if it takes a little couple extra days, months, years to get there. But we’re super excited about the fishing trip, we’re gonna still go on a fishing trip. We’re gonna hang out on the bus when it breaks down or if the bus even breaks down. Maybe we get excited to help get the bus back up and running.
[00:18:46] spk_1: Get it fixed, you
[00:18:47] spk_0: know? So if we’re excited about the destinations, you can bring people together and they’re going to be aligned behind that common goal of we want to get the fishing trip in the example. And so if you think of your business as a bus, getting the right people on the bus is only part of the challenge. The other challenges getting people excited about the destination. And when people are excited about the destination, incredible things can happen. Our focus. We look at vision. We look at purpose and we align people to that. If I know that we’re going on a fishing trip, I’m gonna have that conversation early on and people that aren’t excited about going on a fishing trip. But they’re probably just never get on the bus
[00:19:30] spk_1: with the vision and the purposes that that’s something you worked mostly with the Do you work with the whole company? Do you work mostly with the managers?
[00:19:40] spk_0: We have, ah, component of our process called core, which is the foundational component of the all the work we dio and inside a court to things. And number one is the vision for the organization and with envision, we have values. We have purpose. We have the mission. We have all of that that that foundational component and then we also have what we call the compelling companies. Story is, how do you promote and market the company and that work is done directly with the owner or the leadership team. Once that work is done, everything else we do happens at the level of whoever is doing recruiting, whether it’s an office manager, whether it’s HR, we build those processes and systems there. But that foundational work is done with the leaders of the organization, and then we have processes to help them disseminate that. And a lot of times companies have values. They have their purpose. They’ve already gone through this exercise, whether it’s us or something else. But they’ve never really thought about it from a marketing perspective, because that’s what’s going to draw people to your company. That’s what’s going to get them on the bus, get them excited about it.
[00:20:49] spk_1: So, like marketing to prospective employees, you mean or in general?
[00:20:54] spk_0: Yeah, eso to perspective in place. So we take a like a marketing first approach to recruiting. E believe that if you want to attract good people to your company, you have to be attractive to good people. So that attraction component is marketing its your messaging. It’s your brand. It’s all you know what people say about you, John Line reputation, social proof, all of those marketing pieces of your company impact whether or not you can attract good people to your company.
[00:21:25] spk_1: Uh huh. And then I guess the other side of this is going back. Thio more of a business perspective. I would assume. For these companies, human resource costs are significant portion of their overall costs.
[00:21:39] spk_0: Yeah, yeah, because there what’s producing providing their service or product is human beings. So payroll costs are 80 90% of their expenses. Payroll costs are the number one thing. So if you got high turnover, if you got unproductive employees, everything suffers from that
[00:21:59] spk_1: kind of feel the pain right away. Yeah,
[00:22:03] spk_0: I I actually encourage our clients to start looking at They’re people as a profit center, because if you have unproductive unengaged employees or you’ve got high turnover, that’s just sucking away your profits on def. You start hiring right and you could get people engaged. You get them in productive, you could make them profitable.
[00:22:22] spk_1: Yeah, that’s great in terms of advice that you would have for people who are hiring remotely for these types of roles. For the first time,
[00:22:32] spk_0: there’s two pieces that, and I’ll answer both of them. If so, one is advice for helping people higher, and then the other part is the remote hiring. So one of the things that I’ve seen businesses do over the last decade has put a lot of energy and effort into their sales and marketing processes. We’ve gotta have a way to market to customers. We have to have a way to close customers. We have to have a way to service customers, and they put a ton of effort into those processes. But they’ve never really put a lot of effort into their people processes. And I would suggest that you flip where you put the effort, because if you put your effort into your people, your people will build your sales and marketing processes for you. The right people will want to take care of your customers. The right people will help you close more customers, right people will help you market to your customers. So my challenge everybody to start thinking about their people, their recruiting processes, their on boarding processes, the way they engage employees and start putting as much or mawr effort into that. Then you have your sales and marketing processes because most businesses have never really thought about the recruiting engine, if you will. They’ve always put their effort into their sales and marketing engine. Yeah, and what we see is if you can put your energy into your recruiting engine and you get the right people on the bus, they’re gonna help you keep that bus running. They’re gonna help you get to that destination every time. And so if you could get people that are bought into your vision and everything else, it’s gonna be a game changer for you. So that would be the first thing is really start thinking about your recruiting processes. What are you doing to measure that measure effectiveness? What systems do you have in place? And I would say there’s probably some medium sized companies that have never even heard of an applicant tracking system. Um, applicant tracking systems, a game changer for recruiting. It’s like a CRM except the focuses on applications on the remote side of things realize that the right people and again, I’m gonna go back to this like the people that are lying to the destination of your company. They’re gonna be productive remotely Now. It might be weird hours. There might be accommodations you have to provide, especially if they have kids at home and those guys, things like my kids are back doing distance learning at home. That’s a super distraction. So we’ve had to put boundaries in place around when I’m available and those kinds of things. And I think if you recognize that your employees want to do good work like inherently, I believe that people want toe work and they want to do a good job. I believe that. And if we take that approach and say OK, they want toe work. But I have to accommodate some things. I have to maybe give them a flexible start time, or I have to give them some flexibility around breaks throughout the day, and I focus on what outputs am I getting. You had a guest not too long ago about the results. Only work environment. When you think about remote work, if you focus on their results and not their inputs, you’re going to engage people. And so I think a lot of the companies that have had to make this massive shift and do it quickly to remote work have forgotten about the fact that they have to change their processes and their systems to accommodate the people that are doing about work. It’s not the same as it used to be, where you could just walk up, knock on their desk and Hey, you got a minute? E Got that? Got that? Got a minute? Culture? I talk about that with my clients. I’m like, Do you have a got a minute culture around here? Like what? The got him in a culture. You know, if someone knocks on your door like, Hey, you got a minute? 15 minutes later, they’re still talking to you. Like I was in the middle of something. I was almost done on your minute turned into 15. Now I’m gonna take an hour to figure out where I waas like that culture is bad, by the way. I don’t think that’s a healthy culture. But if you’re not willing to make the accommodations to remote environment, your people are never going to be productive. And I think that’s the thing that most people are scared of when they’re hiring remote people is what if this person can’t work from home on their own? What if they can’t work remotely on there? And what if I have to micromanage them? And you have to realize that you’ve got to set clear boundaries with people, provide them the accommodations? I know a couple of clients that have really struggled with this remote idea, but it’s crazy. When you hire good people, they’ll get on, they’ll get online and they’ll start working again after the kids go to bed, even though that’s not the normal defined workday eso understanding that and providing accommodations for that I think is really critical and being really clear in your job ad about it. So if you’re looking to hire good people from a remote remotely get really clear up front, this is our expectations. This is our process. This is the accommodations were willing to provide. Believe it or not, people do read job ads. Still, you know, a lot of employers would say, Do they even read this stuff? But the people that want to work for you, they
[00:27:44] spk_1: will read those to just be really clear up front on what you’re willing to provide. That was really a great conversation with Ryan. I picked up quite a few things which I didn’t know before. For one, I was surprised Blue collar was in the fields and therefore remote in a way that I didn’t quite connect the dots. But it does make sense that ah, lot of the issues that companies have with remote workers in the blue collar area. They were already also experiencing them when they were working at client sites. The other thing that I thought was quite useful was the whole idea that great hiring has lots of implications. It reduces turnover in your cost around that. But also it helps with marketing and sales and that customer experience is so much better. Which leads to a great word of mouth marketing. Tune in. Next week, we’ll continue with Part two of the Interview with Ryan, England. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Align Remotely podcast. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes, Google podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. No.
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