Several Hireology team members recently attended the IFA 2018 Convention, the premier event for franchise professionals. At the annual event, thousands of franchise business leaders, as well as industry partners, gather to discuss the latest trends and the rapidly changing world of franchising.
As a strategic hiring partner in franchising, Hireology attended the event to learn more about challenges franchisors and franchisees face today – and how Hireology can address these challenges by helping franchise businesses build their best teams. Below, we’ve pulled together an overview of several key hiring trends we noticed at IFA 2018.
Franchisors Want Insight into Franchisee Hiring
Franchisors are more invested than ever in ensuring their franchisees are hiring the right people. The overall success of any franchise system depends on the success of each location and a franchise location can only provide top-notch customer service with the best team in place. But franchisees wear many hats to run their businesses successfully, leaving little time for hiring. One way franchisors can make hiring easier on location owners is by partnering with an integrated hiring and talent management platform at the brand level to offer all franchisees a repeatable hiring process.
Using a hiring and talent management platform, not only can franchisors provide location owners with a simple, centralized hiring process, but franchise business leaders can gain insight into key hiring metrics by location or manager – including hiring velocity, hiring process adherence, turnover analysis, benefit plan spend, wage spend, headcount analysis and new hire analysis. Using these insights, franchisors can offer actionable next steps for locations and managers to improve their hiring efforts, which leads to building a better team and increasing productivity, customer satisfaction and profitability.
There’s a Growing Need for More Quality Job Candidates
A key challenge many franchise business leaders were talking about at IFA 2018 is, they receive a high volume of job applicants, but many of them aren’t qualified. In some cases, this is because franchisors either don’t have a sourcing strategy in place or spend their entire recruitment budget on 1-2 costly job board postings. Franchisors and franchisees can attract more quality candidates by being more strategic about their applicant sourcing.
One way to be more strategic about applicant sourcing is by maintaining a strong employment brand and career site. A compelling career site is critical, as 30% of quality candidates apply via career sites, the highest across all job applicant sources. To attract top applicants, a career site should include details on the workplace culture, career progression, and overall benefits, helping top candidates see the opportunity your team offers. Franchise businesses should also regularly share engaging content – such as team photos and videos – to get candidates excited about the team culture.
In addition to attracting quality candidates through a career site, franchise business leaders should rethink other applicant sources. Many businesses only post to 1-2 job boards and don’t have a strategy in place to measure the ROI of their applicant sources – which can lead to missing out on quality candidates and spending too much on job boards that aren’t performing. Over time, diversifying sourcing to post across job boards, social feeds and local classified ads enables franchises to reach quality candidates through more sources while saving money that otherwise would have been spent on a single costly job board posting.
Franchise Businesses Spend Too Much Time on Hiring
As a result of many franchise businesses receiving limited quality applicants, they’re also spending too much time on applicants who aren’t a fit. And with the average applicant taking 1 minute and 44 seconds to review, this time adds up quickly. Instead of weeding through every applicant that comes through, one way to save time is by leveraging pre-screen surveys, which can be sent automatically as soon as an application is submitted, and gauges the applicant’s fit for the role. Pre-screen surveys can even include “knock out” questions, eliminating candidates who definitely won’t be a fit – such as asking for a candidate’s availability or if he or she has specific certifications required of the role. Once complete, the surveys are then automatically scored, so only the strongest applicants get moved to the candidate stage of the hiring process, saving franchises time and money – instead of spending time manually reviewing hundreds of applicants.
Hireology CEO Leads Panel Discussion at IFA 2018
In addition to the various trends discussed at IFA, Adam Robinson, Hireology Co-Founder and CEO, moderated a panel discussion at the convention, “Emerging Brands, Not All Franchise Candidates are Created Equal – Evaluating and Accepting Only the Best Candidates into Your System.” Franchise business leaders from Patrice & Associates Franchising Inc., Marco’s Pizza and Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop joined in the discussion, about franchise recruitment.
Rather than highlighting individual employee recruitment, the panel focused on best practices for recruiting franchisees into a franchise system. Recruiting the wrong franchisees can cause significant damage, including financial loss and damage to a franchise system’s reputation.
Franchisors on the panel shared firsthand experience about challenges and lessons learned when it comes to recruiting franchisees. Following the panel, attendees had time to join their peers in roundtable discussions to evaluate key takeaways. Conversation also focused on how to improve franchisee screening in their own systems, and ways to attract high performers.
Hiring is a key challenge across franchise brands, but employees are a main source of competitive advantage at any business. For more information on how to build the best team at your franchise business, download our eBook, “Staffing Up For Success: The Four Things to Do When Hiring For Your New Franchise Location.”
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