5 tips for franchise recruitment success
The logic goes that it becomes easier to recruit great franchisees during a recession. Economic and labour market turmoil draws people out of stable employment and into thinking self-employment might be an improvement. But just because there are lots of people out there looking to purchase a franchise or franchises does not mean that any of these people will make amazing additions to your business.
So, how can you make your franchise recruitment strategy a success?
Finding the right people is not about how big your talent pool is – it is all about how you spot potential winners.
Lots of people will tell you the secret of success lies in having the biggest possible pool of people to choose from, so you should spend all your energies on advertising. Having a big pool to choose from is one way of going about things, but this is pretty inefficient. You will be spending a fortune on the advertising and then another fortune whittling down your enquiries.
Focusing on efficiently spotting potential winners makes much more sense. Using screening tools at the start of the process can help you identify those who might have the money from those who have both the money and the ability to make a success of running a franchise for you – while not driving you nuts.
What might you screen for? Well, having the finance is the obvious first answer but beyond that how about:
Enthusiasm
Wants Challenge
Wants to Lead
Persistent
Takes Initiative
Collaborative
Planning
Analyses Pitfalls
It can be tough to spot these in a conversation with someone, and especially if they have never run a franchise business before so have no idea if they have these abilities! I have also found that people can talk a good talk, so they will tell you how much they love working collaboratively. This does not tell you if this is something they really enjoy and do naturally.
Time to close the deal is important – great potential franchisees want to be getting on with things
In employee recruitment a key success metric is the “Time to Hire”. How long it takes the successful candidate to get from application to starting the job.
The same goes for recruiting franchisees. Time to Hire shows you how efficient your process is, allowing you to focus on reducing those bottlenecks.
To be brutal, bottlenecks are costing you money – both in terms of increasing costs, but also because they do not give potential franchisees a good impression of your business. This might put off a potential superstar franchisee.
Brilliant Talent Diagnostics like Harrison Assessments help to speed up Time to Hire. By using them as a screening tool at the start of the process, you can easily reduce down your applicant pool to just include those who have the greatest chance of making a big success of franchising for your business. This gives your franchise consultant more time to spend with them and reduces congestion bottlenecks.
Our clients have also found they can have fewer meetings with applicants, or those meetings are able to focus on different subjects. The diagnostics identify potential causes for concern – giving you a head’s up and giving the opportunity to probe those areas in more detail.
Knowing the traits which create success, and the ones that don’t will help you reduce mistakes
Talent Diagnostics are a brilliant tool, but they do not replace your understanding of the traits that create success in your franchise business.
Having a tool which screens for the wrong things will not create franchising success. This is one of the reasons why we test at the start of any client relationship – to make sure that our screening tolls are accurate and spotting the right things.
It is easy to make assumptions about what is important, but how do you know? This is especially true if you always recruit people with a similar background to be your franchisees. By using trait-based tools to screen applicants you may find you acquire franchisees from a range of new backgrounds you hadn’t considered before.
Training, training, training
Induction is incredibly important, but you knew that already. Where many franchisors go wrong is in not putting enough training support together post induction. Or, the training fails to have an impact, leaving both you and the franchisees feeling frustrated. You because you feel you have delivered more than enough training, and them because the training somehow failed to solve their problem.
Training is expensive, and there is no point in doing more if it is not working. But the insights you get from using Talent Diagnostics in your franchisee recruitment process can be used to plan your training programme.
You will be able to see patterns across your franchisees and devise training programmes targeted at improving those areas. After all, there is no point delivering the same sales skills training to people who are quite happy selling and just need to know the key points for your business; and those who are petrified at the prospect and have no idea where to start.
Find out how to effectively manage your training budget for success.
Don’t compromise!!
The best diagnostics in the world can only inform your decision making. If you decide to go ahead and take on someone who is only a 50% match to the requirements for being successful with your franchise business, then at least you know you are in for a bumpy ride. But a better candidate is out there – who will be nicer to work with and get better results for your business. The number is telling you to hold firm, and maybe go back to that advertising strategy………
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