Episode 7: Hiring and Recruiting A Players

This episode of The Huge Insider podcast dives into effective hiring practices for growing home service businesses. Host Sid Graef spotlights Kyle Ray of Geek Window Cleaning in Austin, Texas, who is scaling quickly through a multi-pronged recruitment strategy. Kyle emphasizes the power of consistent, creative outreach, from social media messages to in-person “shoulder tapping,” group interviews, and a culture that highlights career growth and vision for recruits. He outlines how setting up simple yet systematic hiring processes—like pre-screen filters, regularly scheduled group interviews, and leveraging your current team’s network—can help bring in a constant flow of motivated applicants. Whether you’re under or over the million-dollar mark, Kyle’s tactics can help you attract and retain high-quality team members who fit your company culture.

Show Notes

• Kyle Ray – Geek Window Cleaning (Austin, Texas)

• Frenzy (referral software mentioned) – https://www.frenzy.co/

• Brian Gottlieb (keynote speaker at The Huge Convention; built a $150M business)

• Marcus Sheridan – Author of They Ask You Answer

  • Learn more: https://marcussheridan.com/

• They Ask You Answer (book mentioned by Marcus Sheridan)

Resources

• The Huge Insider newsletter signup
  https://thehugeconvention.com/insider

• The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guide
  http://www.thehugeinsider.com

• The Foundations platform trial offer
  https://thehugeconvention.com/1foundationstrial

• The Huge Mastermind info page
  https://www.thehugemastermind.com/interest

• Facebook group
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/hugefoundations

Transcript
Sid Graef: Hey, welcome back to the Huge Insider podcast, my friend. It’s Sid Graef, and if you’ve caught our first few episodes, you already know this is a new show for home service professionals who are working hard to break the million-dollar revenue mark. And if that’s you, you are definitely in the right place. If you’ve already passed the million-dollar mark, you’ll get even more out of this show for sure.

So here’s the deal. It’s not your typical podcast. It’s not an interview show. It’s certainly not an expert-driven show where one really smart person shares all their insight. Instead, what we’ve done is gather together a whole bunch of seven-figure business owners and eight-figure business owners—people running companies that do anywhere from 2 million a year to 40 million a year, and sometimes more. We bring you their best insights each week, and it’s all focused on a single topic. This month, we’re focused on hiring. It’s March, and it’s time to staff up for the spring rush.

These are real owners, quietly building empires behind the scenes. They’re not on social media looking for attention; they make their money from their businesses. As I said, this is March, our main subject is hiring, and today you’re going to hear from Kyle Ray. Kyle has Geek Window Cleaning in Austin, Texas, and he is growing fast. One of the things he’s doing is hiring dozens of people every week, running them through a system so they can grow and scale.

I asked him a couple of questions: How are you recruiting? How do you make your business a place where A-players want to come and work? And what would you do if you only had two hours a week and had to hire two A-players every single week? What would you do? Here are the answers he gave us. Let’s get into it.

Kyle Ray: Hey, what’s up? Kyle here with Geek Window Cleaning, and here to answer or give my two cents on this month’s hot topic of hiring, letting you guys know what we’re doing over here. So let’s get into it.

There are four different things we do for recruiting: social media, shoulder tapping, circle, and Indeed/ZipRecruiter.

1. Social media: We look for profiles that seem like the person may be a good culture fit with our company. We send them a DM to generate curiosity, invite them to come learn more about our opportunity. We also run ads targeting college-age students on Facebook and Instagram.

2. Shoulder tapping: No matter where I am—restaurants, bars, parks, grocery stores—if I see someone who looks like they’d be a good fit, I go talk to them, ask them a couple of specific questions, create the curiosity, invite them to learn more about our opportunity.

3. Circle: This is where we get a lot of quality people. Your current employees or reps can give you names of people they think might be a good fit, or connect you to someone they know. For instance, “Hey, my friend has a brother,” or whatever the case may be, so a connector. There’s a software called Frenzy you can use to make this super easy for your employees to do, but you probably don’t need it unless you’re hiring at scale.

4. Indeed/ZipRecruiter: We create job ads that speak to the people we want to hire by crafting job ads that are a bit different than a typical job ad you’d see on those platforms.

Next question: How do you make your business a place where A-players want to work? We spend a lot of time building this out because retention is huge. We create curiosity in people by letting them see that this must be a different type of place to work, right? With our culture and everything we do here, it’s done during the pre-screening process and in the group interview process. We hold group interviews, show them our vision of where the company’s going, and where we came from so there’s lots of room for advancement. We’re seed-planting there for retention.

During this interview, we’re casting a vision for them as well—where they can see themselves in five years. We have a five-year program that we talk about. We let them know we are servant leaders and our success hinges on their success. We’re here to make sure they’re successful. We don’t hire people; we invite them to come work with us, and we only invite people that fit our culture and our core values and behaviors.

In terms of “always be recruiting,” yeah, everywhere I go, if I see someone I’m interested in talking to about joining the company, I go talk to them for five to 10 minutes, create that curiosity, give them my number, and walk away. I invite them to a group interview that we hold.

If I only had two hours a week to hire two A-players a month, what system would I use? Well, we’ve already built this out, and this is exactly what we do. I spend 10 to 15 minutes looking at online applications from Indeed/ZipRecruiter, sending them all a message to run them through a secondary filter, because you get a lot of people that just click “apply.” Anyone who passes that filter is invited to our group interview that we hold every other week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and those group interviews take about an hour of my time.

I also spend about 30 minutes here and there on Instagram, sending DMs to people I think would be a good fit. Again, secondary filter, invite to interview. I shoulder tap everywhere I go, and this may take an hour a week, probably. My wife really gets annoyed if we’re out in public or at the grocery store and I’m like, “Hold on, I gotta go talk to this person real quick.” But same thing, secondary filter, invite to interview.

Then we also do our reps’ circles, right? Any friends they may have, or new people we’re onboarding—after they make it through our boot camps and training, we’ll say, “Hey, who do you know?” Because that’s where you can get some quality people.

Sid Graef: That’s a wrap. Tell me, what did you learn about hiring from Kyle? More importantly, what are you going to do with what you learned? His strategies are straightforward and simple, and that’s how he gets results: he just devises the strategy, implements the plan, and keeps going, never quitting. It’s really powerful.

Everything Kyle covered in this episode is in the show notes. Especially take time to download this week’s action guide on hiring—how to attract A-players and how to keep them—it’s going to help you build the business you want. It’s located at thehugeinsider.com, or you can go to the show notes and just click the link.

We’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: our mission at The Huge Convention and The Huge Insider is to help our blue-collar brothers and sisters build a business that works for them—a business that builds money freedom and time freedom. Build your freedom business. We help meet this mission and help you achieve that in several ways:

1. This free podcast.

2. Our free newsletter, called The Huge Insider (notice a simple name, same as this podcast).

3. Another podcast called Huge Transformations Podcast, which is all about stories of seven-, eight-, and even nine-figure business owners talking about how they started from scratch to very successful businesses.

4. We’ve got a free Facebook group, a community where you can share and exchange ideas with peers also working toward their business goals.

5. Every summer—this year, August 20th through 22nd—we host the Huge Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. This is the last year it’s going to be in Nashville for a while, so come to Nashville and check it out. You can find more information at thehugeconvention.com. Right now, tickets are still super cheap, so get yours before the price goes up. This event is where real breakthroughs happen for folks in home service businesses.

6. We’ve got incredible keynote speakers this year: Brian Gottlieb, who built a $150 million-a-year home service business and wrote a book about the whole thing, and Marcus Sheridan, who built a $17 million-a-year home service business on the East Coast. He still owns it, and he also published a best-selling book called They Ask You Answer. He’s going to be one of our keynotes. Get your ticket to The Huge Convention.

7. Lastly, there’s our mastermind, simply called The Huge Mastermind. It’s for folks who’ve already crossed the million-dollar mark in revenue and have at least five employees. This is where we help you go from running a great business to running an exceptional business—one that frees you from daily operations. You’ve got to check it out. Again, all of this is in the show notes.

The last thing I want to mention is, if you have a story of success from something you’ve learned on the show (or otherwise), we’d love to hear from you. If you have a story of failure—where you tried something, fell flat on your face, and learned a painful lesson that set you up for future success—we’d like to hear that too. You can give us your feedback or tell your story by calling 804-600-HUGE (that’s 804-600-4843), and we might just feature your story on an upcoming episode. We’d love to do that.

That’s it for this week. Remember, don’t just listen—take action. We want you to win and prosper. This is Sid Graef, host of The Huge Insider podcast. We will see you next time.