No One Wants to Work? The Real Problem Is Your Hiring System

Every leader has faced that moment standing in the middle of their shop, factory floor, or team meeting, wondering, why is it so hard to find just one person who shows up, does the work and doesn't quit by week three? Here's the truth. It's not your industry, it's not the economy, and it's definitely not the kids these days. It's the system. And if your hiring system is broken, nothing else in your business will ever feel stable or scalable. I've seen great leaders doing 12 hour days, burning weekends, carrying the weight of the whole business on their shoulders because they're constantly replacing people who never should have been hired in the first place. If you're tired of turnover draining your energy, your time and your profitability, you, my friend, are in the right place. And today we're joined by someone who has mastered the art of frontline hiring. Ryan England, best selling author, CEO of Core Matters, and the force behind the Core Fit hiring system. He has helped thousands of blue collar and service based companies hire better people faster. His work proves that hiring is a marketing activity, culture is a magnet, and the right system fills your bench long before you're desperate. In this conversation, you'll learn how to stop the bleeding, create a consistent flow of quality candidates and put the right people in the right seats without burnout, stress or gambling on resumes. And in a few minutes, Ryan is going to reveal the one counterintuitive shift that instantly upgrades the quality of every hire, even if your industry is notorious for turnover. Hey Ryan, I'm so thrilled to have you on the show today.

Thanks, Jason. I'm excited to be here.

Fantastic. So let's dive in. Ryan, what's that? Real cost leaders are paying financially and perhaps even emotionally. When they keep hiring people they end up wanting to fire on the financial.

Side of the business. We don't quantify this because most people aren't writing a check like I'm actually writing a check. It's not coming out of the account. But you know, Gallup just did a poll and just in the US disengagement's costing you 8.4% of your revenue. Ripped right off the bottom line. So anybody that wants to take the time to do that math, it's a lot of money. And when it comes to that stress, that frustration, like you said, those 12 hour days, which for some people they're thinking, I wish it was only 12 hour days because they're constantly turning people over. And the thing we don't often talk about is what does it do to the Morale of your team, the ones that are there, that want to be there, that are producing, that are productive, that are taking care of your customers, what does it do to their mindset, their emotional drain? There's so much impact to bringing on the wrong people to our team. It's impossible to really quantify it.

Yeah, I think even as leaders, though, we must start turning up differently when we wake up thinking, oh, what am I going to deal with today? I just don't have the right people.

I've never met someone, I get this question all the time, should I fire this person? Should I terminate him? Should I let them go? I'm done. I've never had someone come back to me after they did that and said, I did it too soon, I should have waited. It's always exactly the opposite. Why didn't I do this 18 months ago? What have I been doing? And it's this fear, this lack of confidence that says if they leave, I won't be able to replace them. And we need to shift that mindset and say, if they leave, how much more productive would you and your team be? Because often the drain they're causing is way more than the productivity that they're creating.

Yeah, absolutely. Also, at the top of the show, I just want to point out that just because you have to let someone go doesn't mean that they're a bad person or that they're unskilled. It just means that they're not a right fit for your organization, for your people, for your culture. Let's simplify things just for a little bit. Right?

Yeah.

Explain what you do to a nine year old using only what you'd find in their backpack or lunchbox.

This is going to get messy. I'm going to start in the lunchbox. You know, I would tell them that we fix people problems and the way we do that is let's look at the lunchbox. Things are packed neatly, they're packed in an organized way. And we know what's the main dish, what's the side, what's the snack and dessert. And we know that because we always wait till the end for that dessert. We do the same thing inside of organizations. We develop processes and systems so that we know where things go, who's responsible for what and when we should reward our best people.

What a great way to explain it. I think we could use that explanation in a few boardrooms. It might get a little bit.

I'm going to cut that as a clip, but I'm going to share that because that was pretty Good. Love that question.

So, Ryan, why is hiring harder today than ever before? Or is it perhaps just a story leaders are telling themselves?

So yes, it is harder than ever and yes, it's a story we're telling ourselves. We live in a world where we were. We are always connected 24 7. I know what's going on the other side of the world. And as human beings, we have this natural tendency to compare ourselves to everybody else. And so what we do is we compare what we know is our behind the scenes to everybody else's highlight reel, what's on social media, what other companies are doing. And we're saying, oh my gosh, I don't have that. Things are really hard for me. They are much harder over here. They don't get my industry because things are harder over here. And we tell ourselves this because I think it makes us feel better. So we feel like the victim. We're not the problem. And for those listening right now, if you are in a decision making role for hiring, I challenge you to look in the mirror and say what part of the problem and I contributing to because you are, I promise you, you are. So that's the story we tell ourselves. But it is harder. If the pandemic did anything for the job market, what it did was it showed employees that they have options. I can go do final mile delivery and I can make just as much money without a boss breathing over my neck, without having to punch a clock. I get to set my terms. And if I don't want to work today because I don't need the cash, I don't have to. And that's just one example. Like in the US alone, there are over 5 million more drivers on the road doing final mile delivery in the last five years. That's 5 million people that have left the traditional workforce and gone to work for themselves, essentially. And it's made it harder. It's definitely made it harder because we're no longer competing in our industry anymore. The Internet's leveled the playing field. I'm now competing for eyeballs. Quick example, I was talking to a construction contractor who was hiring laborers, craftsmen, journeymen, and they said, oh, no one in my industry can find these people. I go, your competition is not your industry. Your competition is Amazon and Target and Walmart. Because you know what, they pay the same amount of money per hour for these guys and gals to go work in a warehouse, in an air conditioned warehouse, whereas you want them to be out in the field and you're not paying them that much. And I Just remember the look on his face of, I never thought about that before. You're no longer competing against your competitor. You're now competing for eyeballs against every job that exists. So it has made it much harder to hire great people as well.

Yeah, yeah. It's important that we always remember that today people are judging us against their best experience, whether as a customer or as an employee. Regardless of the industry. We don't turn up and say, oh, because you're a plumber, it's okay for you to give us a bad experience to do the half job. It's only when we go to the airport. We want a really great job. We want that really great experience. Everywhere from your vantage point, you get to see what's happening across thousands of businesses of all shapes and sizes and industries. What is the single biggest hiring mistake that almost every leader is still making in 2025?

They do not put themselves in the shoes of the candidate and see the experience that they're creating in the recruiting process and how disruptive it is to that candidate's personal life. I don't know the stats on this exactly. I think it changes a lot. But I heard that somewhere just in the US 92% of people cannot skip a paycheck and still put food on the table. 92%. So if somebody's down on their luck, maybe they just got laid off. Maybe it was so toxic they just had to quit. And they need a job. They don't have time to wait for you for 10 days to get back to them when they apply. They don't have the luxury of waiting two weeks for that next interview. They need a job now. And if you do not move quickly for them, you're going to lose them. 86% of candidates drop out of the recruiting process because it takes too long. And then what do we do? We say, oh, no one wants to work. I'm like, how long do they sit in the pipeline? 11 days. Sounds like no one wants to hire. No one wants to work. And we don't take a second to say, what are they going through? What's the experience we can create for them? Because what does that say to the candidate? You don't care. You're not interested in what I need. Is this a company I even want to work for if they can't call me back? And then, I love this part. We get mad at them because when we do call them back in 11 days, they don't answer and they never call us back. And we're like, look, everybody's Ghosting. I'm like, it took you 11 days to call back someone who said, hey, I'm interested in the job. Who ghosted who first? Not that we're playing fair, but what we've done as employers is we've taught an entire generation of people that we just don't care about them in the recruiting process. We don't care about their needs, we don't care about their situation. All we care about is managing our pipeline on the limited staff that HR typically has. And we'll get to it when we get to it.

What a refreshing way to look at it. It's not that people are ghosting us, it's that we ghosted them first. We get what we sow. We absolutely do. You've been known to say more than once that recruiting is a marketing activity. And that really flips the script around how so many people listening today probably think of recruiting. What do you actually mean by that? And how does it apply to a small business owner or a big business?

Likewise, if you think about recruiting, it's about getting the right message. I have this job. I need someone to fill in front of the right people that are qualified at the right time when they're ready to make a jump leap to something else. That's Marketing 101. Right message, right people, right time. Marketing 101. And what we do, especially as small business owners, what we do is we say, you know what? I know how to do my trade, I know how to do my craft. I know how to do the thing that I started the business to do. This whole people thing, I don't know how to do that. And so what we do is we hire a human resources person because we were taught that's who does this stuff, it's human resources. So we hire a human resource person. We say, give it to them. Let them go. Put the right message in front of the right people at the right time. Guess what? Human resource people are compliance driven. They check the box, they manage the reports, the safety, the benefits, the payroll. They are very much focused on the details, not the human condition, which is what marketers understand. Marketers understand how to be persuasive and how to grab people's attention. And how do you capture someone's attention in six seconds? Because that's what you have to do as a marketer. But we give it to HR people that don't understand those concepts. So what they do is they do the thing they were always taught, which is you put together a job description that looks like a lawyer wrote it and then you post it online and you cross your fingers that someone applies for that. And it's just one of those things that if we just took a step back and said, wait a minute, recruiting is really about getting people to want to join our team, just like it's getting customers to want to buy from us. And when we take that responsibility off of hr, which most of them enjoy that, and we give it to marketing, they're like, we need to do something new and exciting and fresh, and it's just transformative to small businesses. So if you are a small business owner, or even if you have the opportunity to bring your marketing team in, I encourage you to do it.

Many years ago, I was chief customer and marketing officer for Volkswagen Group here in Australia. And one of the things that we launched was a website called I am Volkswagen. And it was not a I am a Volkswagen owner. It was I am Volkswagen, as in, are you the right fit to work for Volkswagen? Either in our head office or in our dealerships. And we didn't advertise the site, but we didn't put any paid media behind it. But every single week we would get people expressing their interest in joining the business in one shape of the form, simply because we'd gone through that process that you've explained of getting the right message at the right time and really marketing the recruitment side of the business. It was fantastic. And I'm sure it. It saved us put aside the money. It saved us time.

Yeah.

Because we already had people we could reach out to when we had a vacancy.

Yeah.

It was phenomenal. So if you can just briefly walk us through the core fit hiring system that you've created and what are the key steps that transform chaos into consistency.

Yeah. I think that the thing that we have to remember is that if recruiting is a marketing activity, we need to move from a mindset of finding people to attracting them. And if we are not an attractive employer for a whole bunch of variety of reasons, it really depends on the industry and the people you're looking to recruit. If you're not attractive to them, you're not going to attract them. I tell people, if you aren't attracting the right people to your business, you're probably not attractive to the right people. And that's one of those hard truths. So when we look at the core fit hiring system, we're looking at how do you attract people? And the place to start is at your core. That's why we call it the core fit hiring system. Your core is where your culture lives. It's where the behaviors live. It's where the things that get people excited about joining your team live. It's where your communication and your leadership style lives. It's been said that people don't leave jobs, they leave people. And if we know that and we believe that to be true, which most leaders have assured me they believe it to be true, then we need to start using our people as the method of attraction. Not the job, not the paycheck, not the responsibilities, but the you're going to love it here and here's why. And so that's one of the key components is when you get really clear on your core, who you are and who fits inside your organization. Attracting them becomes so much easier once you've attracted them. Now you need to qualify them. And we turn the interview process, we flip it upside down a little bit in that I'm less interested in what you have to say and more interested in how you behave because I can teach you how to do the job. I cannot teach you how to behave in a way that is going to make you feel like you belong here. I can't teach you to get out of bed on time. I can't teach you to have an owner's mindset. I can't teach those things. But I can teach you to use our computer systems or our tools or scripts to do the sales process. I can teach all of that. So in interviewing, we look for a behavioral match way before we look for someone that can be competent in the skills. Once we've done that, then it's all about onboarding. And onboarding starts at application. I just want everybody to know that onboarding starts out. You don't believe me, Go ask anybody who's been in a long term relationship what their first date was like. And they remember their first date. And that first date set the groundwork for what the rest of the relationship is going to look like. And the application is the same way. That's the hey, I was told to call you because you're interested in someone like me. Call me back. Starts at application. So we have to onboard them. When I believe that onboarding is a 90 day process and helping them belong or feel like they fit on your team is more important than teaching them how to do the work. Once we've done that, then we have to engage them, we have to keep them engaged long term. I've heard this a lot from relationship coaches. You have to date your spouse, you have to keep the spark alive. You have to do these things. Well, that's part of the human condition. Last time I checked, we're hiring humans. Now. I'm not saying date your employees. I'm going to be very clear. It's a whole bunch of legal issues, but you have to engage them, you have to get them excited, you have to remind them why they wanted to join your team. And then once you've done that, I want you to assess everything that's going on. Is your system working? Is your system not working? Are you getting the results you expect? Your marketing team gets this because for them it's all about return on ad spend and cost per clicks. And like they understand the reporting side. I want you to develop reports around your recruiting, hiring, retention processes so that you know if what you're doing is working. It's one thing to know that your turnover's 67%.

Cool.

What impacts that 67%? That's what I want to know. And we rarely go deeper because HR doesn't know how to fix a retention problem. They know how to report on it, they don't know how to fix it. And so often they don't go deeper. And so I want you to go deeper. So that's just a quick three minute version of the corporate hiring system. Yeah.

I think it's also important to acknowledge it's not HR's job to fix the retention problem. It's HR's job to help support the leaders in the business fix the retention problem.

Absolutely.

We hear this buzzword about becoming an employer of choice and if you're an employer of choice, that will attract people to you. What does it really take though to become an employer of choice in a crowded marketplace these days?

I want to start how we define employer of choice. Very simple definition. People want to work for you and they want to stay. That's the employer of choice. If you have people that are lining up to work for you, like kind of like you talked about earlier, that idea of the bench, like the passive people coming in ready to go, that you can call and once they get there, they, they'll do what it takes to stay. I would say you're the employer of choice. Here's the thing that I know about most employers and I can't say this is true for all the enterprise, but for a lot of them, they do really cool stuff for their people and they make people feel really good about the work that they do or the team that they belong on. And they are horrible at getting credit for it. They promote their unlimited PTO and their cereal bars and their nap pods and all this other stuff because they think that's what people want. But people don't leave jobs, they leave people. So all of these things, while it creates a little bit of a social atmosphere, that's not what people are looking for an employer. The number one thing that people want right now from employers is someone who trains them and invests in them in their future. That's what they want. When you ask Gen Z what's what they want out of employee, it's not big money, it's not all these perks, it's I want someone who's going to invest and train in me so that I actually have a career. And at least in the world that we work in, which is very heavily in the trades and blue collar, there's been this distancing ourselves as employers from being an educator, from being a trainer, from being a mentor, from being a coach. We don't do that anymore. 40, 50 years ago that was the norm. Today we want someone else to do that. We don't want to do it, we want someone else to do it. And I think that's probably true across a lot of industries.

What do you think's caused that shift though?

I, I think we're always connected and we feel like we're too busy and we don't have time and business is growing and if only I had someone who could start today. This is silly, but we live in a world where people make decisions about where they live based on how convenient things are. And I will tell you that, myself included. When we bought our house, one of the questions besides does it have high speed Internet? Was, was, does it have same day or next day delivery from Amazon Prime? Like that was a legitimate conversation we had. I'm not alone in that. We are in this. Always get instantly get it, instant gratification. Whenever I want, I get what I want. Culture, society. And I think that we've made that shift and we carried into things like employment saying hey, I just want to go to Amazon and say that one and tomorrow they'll be here ready to go. And I think that's what people want. And so they've gotten away from that because they don't have the time. And I'll tell you, we've been doing this a long time and it's right around the six month mark when companies are working with us that I usually get a phone call that says, I'll do whatever I gotta do, just tell me what to do. Because they fought it, they fought it and I've shown them it's not gonna work. It's not gonna work. It's not gonna work. Here's what you need to do. And if they had just listened to me six months ago, they would have that superstar employee right now, super trained up. But they passed on a bunch of people that fit would have belonged in their company, would have been the right culture fit. They passed on them because they didn't have the skills.

So if someone's listening right now, they've bought into your message yet, you know right to that Right now they're still getting guarded, getting garbage applications. What can they change like this week that will immediately improve the candidate quality that they get?

Yeah, I think one of the things that we forget is that when people are applying for jobs, they're using job boards. And if you look at Indeed, for example, Indeed, their tagline is helping people find jobs, not helping employers find quality people. They're not. They're not about the employer. Just newsflash. If you're giving money to Indeed, they're just taking money from you. They're not on your side. They are on the side of the job seeker. And what these job boards have done is made it very easy for someone to go check, check, check, apply all. And so I can apply for 20 jobs in five minutes because my resume is already in the system. I don't even know who you are. I've done no research. And so one of the things you can do is slow the process down. I want to be very clear when I say this, because what people hear is take longer. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I want you to put some resistance into the process, make it a little bit harder for them to apply. One of the ways we do that is we ask screening questions. And be very clear in your screening questions, don't just ask, are you authorized to work? Do you have a driver's license? Are you 18? Ask the hard questions before they even apply, and you'll eliminate about 70% of the garbage applications just by doing that.

Yeah, I like that. I think most often we use screening questions as a compliance tool as opposed to are you going to be the right fit? If you're not prepared to answer this question, you're probably not going to be a right fit for them.

Well, who posted those screening questions? The compliance team. It makes sense. I don't fault them for that. I love the HR people and for the purpose that they're there, but this isn't their world.

So like you've said, you've been doing this work for a long time. You've worked with thousands of businesses. Once they get it right, what changes inside the business when the hiring stops being reactive and it starts being proactive?

Yeah, there's a point where we're hiring higher quality people. It's taking a little longer, but when they get there, they're excited to be there. And there's this inflection point where it goes from everybody feeling like everything's on fire all the time to this little bit of peace and calm because we're fully staffed and everybody that's here wants to be here. And for some owners, it's scary because they're like, wait a minute, I know how to fix stuff. Like, I want something to break, that I can fix it. But this happens. And then all of a sudden, they could take a step back and say, whoa, I can focus on growth. I can focus on my scale, my plan. I can focus on these things that I haven't been able to focus on for so long because I've always been in a truck on the job site dealing with customer issues, doing whatever, and it's just. It changes the feeling. Like, when you walk in there, you can feel it. People are more calm, they're more relaxed, they're having fun. Like, I've walked into two companies and nobody's smiling, and I'm just like, do they not like it being here? We've all been to a restaurant or ordered a coffee from a barista who clearly did not want to be there that day. I've seen entire teams like that. And when you get to the point where everybody fits and everybody feels like they're a part of the team, it just changes the vibe, and it's an incredible thing. And when it happens, all of a sudden, the confidence level goes up and these people say, you know what? If I did have to hold someone to a high standard for performance and they did get mad at me, I got a team here that's going to help me replace that person. Maybe if I do go to that person, they're going to be like, I had no idea. I want to stay. I'll do whatever it takes. It's a pretty big psychological shift that happens.

Yeah, I can see that. Ryan, as we come towards the end of the show, for the leader listening today, who feels absolutely exhausted and unsupported, what's your message to them right now?

If you have someone above you that you have to go to them and say, hey, we got to do something different and you want the support, I encourage you to Start speaking that person's language. So let's say that you report directly to the owner and you're just not getting through and you don't feel like you have the support. Think about the language that is impactful to the owner. Things like return on investment, things like less customer service issues, things like there's going to be this increased productivity, increased profitability. These are the things that are important to owners. They think about the financial return on investment they get in this business that they're taking a risk on. And that applies whether you're a small company or you're working for hundred thousand employee company. They speak the language of finance. And it's really important to be able to speak that language to them. So don't go to them and just say, hey, I want to do something different. Here's why I want to do something different. Because 8.4% of our revenue is being ripped right off the bottom line because we have a disengaged workforce. Because we can't keep people. And we can't keep people because we've never got clear on our core. And we're not making hiring decisions around our core. And now you're going to have a different conversation with that owner than you would have before.

Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. Ryan, thank you so much. One of the most powerful insights that I think you shared today was that hiring isn't a people problem, it's a system problem. And when you fix the system, everything else gets easier. Today we learned how to stop the hiring chaos by building stability first, attracting better people with clear, clearer expectations and stronger culture signals, and how to create a proactive recruiting engine that fills your bench long before you're desperate. If this episode helped you take a moment right now to follow the show and share it with someone who's hiring under pressure, it might be the episode that changes everything for them. And make sure you check out Ryan's book and the core Fit hiring system. The links are in the show notes. Remember, when you transform the experience, you transform your business and the world around you. Hey, just quickly wanted to reach out and say thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode of Chats with Jason. I'd really appreciate a five star review on your favorite podcasting app. Or if you're watching along on YouTube, give me a thumbs up and show that you like this video. And be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss out on the awesome content and the great guests that we've got coming up for you.