Running a franchise is a tremendously difficult venture that requires you to be a master of many different skills. Unfortunately, you may have the business savvy, a fine attention to detail, and a highly coveted product, but if you don’t hire the right people, they could drive your business straight into the ground. It is the demise of many a franchise business, and if you don’t learn from the mistakes of others, you could fall victim to the exact same fate. So how do you avoid this catastrophic phenomenon? You have to have an excellent recruitment strategy so that you know you are always hiring the most eligible employees. Here is how to create a recruitment strategy for your franchise.
- Decide what your ideal employee looks like – you want to use this as a model for your hiring practices. When you are trying to define what your ideal employee looks like, you may want to actually make a sketch of that person. The gender and ethnicity definitely don’t need to be defined, but you do want to think about their posture, style, and idea personality traits.
- Work with your managers to develop a set of criteria – you can use these criteria to formulate the questions that you will ask each and every employee. Each position you are hiring for should have its own individual set of criteria. This should include education, experience, people skills, personality traits, etc. If the prospective employee doesn’t fulfill more than two of your criteria, then you don’t want to risk it.
- Make sure to use multiple formats to get the word out that you are hiring – you can use web based hiring websites, social media and even local press. This will give you a wide range of people to choose from. You want as large a sample of people to interview as possible. It may seem like a daunting task to read that many applications and hold so many interviews, but it will all pay off in the long run.
- Ask the right questions and don’t veer too far off course – ideally, you want your employees to match your vision as closely as possible. A good interview should feel like a fun and casual conversation, but you don’t want it to get too irrelevant to the subject at hand. Allow your interviewees to express a little bit about themselves, but don’t allow yourself to be so seduced by their charms that you forget to ask all of your questions.
- See what other franchises are doing – you can use a website like FranchiseExpo.Com to learn about other franchises and how they are hiring. A franchise recruiting strategy can become more successful if you are learning about different ways to recruit. Indeed, every business will have a different model that they use for their hiring process and if one particular model is tried and true in your particular industry, it will probably be best for you as well.
