Now more than ever, franchise hiring is a major challenge. With financial upheaval and massive staffing changes for many business owners during the pandemic, franchisees are struggling to get fully staffed in a new world. When you need workers in place now, the idea of recruiting and hiring can be daunting—but there are tools to make sure you’re getting the best candidates to fill your positions. Upping your recruiting game can help with high turnover by making it a smoother and better experience for both you and your employees.

Start By Taking The Time To Evaluate Your Needs Fully

When things are busy, it can feel like franchise hiring and recruiting are overwhelming. Posting job descriptions, screening applicants, getting trainees up to speed, and balancing the needs of your current employees—it’s a lot. But by taking some time upfront to sit down and figure out what you need, you’ll have an easier time breaking the process down into manageable chunks.

Before you start recruiting, ask yourself these questions:

• What positions do you need filled now? Which positions are you likely to need to fill in the near future (like the next six months to a year)?
  
• How much do you plan to pay these employees? Is it in line with what similar jobs in your area? Are you offering any benefits as part of this hiring package?
  
• Are you able to offer opportunities for new employees’ advancement, like management training programs or a clear promotion path if they hit performance goals?
  
• How many employees do you need to have to operate well and maintain good experiences for both customers and employees? What are the essential operations that you don’t want to compromise with understaffing or overwhelmed employees?

Once you have a clear sense of your needs, you can really start the hiring game plan. It’ll give you a checklist of sorts to keep as you move through the hiring process, making it more efficient for your busy work life.

Get The Right Tools In Place

It used to be that when a manager needed to fill roles, it would require going out, posting job ads, taking applications in person or by email, and moving through a very manual process until you have an employee in place. Now, the leaps and bounds in digital screening tools and artificial intelligence (AI) mean you can take some of the biggest time drags and pain points out of the hiring process.

Programmatic platforms can do a lot of the recruiting grunt work for you: posting job ads online, taking applications, screening for certain criteria, scheduling interviews, and even doing preliminary tests or questionnaires. Using this kind of platform, you can set the data you want, and get back involved once there are candidates who are qualified by the criteria you set. You can also get real-time data about what kinds of job postings are fruitful, and which ones aren’t working so well. You can re-target your valuable resources where they’re more likely to succeed.

Programmatic recruiting tools can also help you build a pipeline of potential applicants, which can be invaluable for the times when you can’t avoid turnover. Remember the overhauled job descriptions? You can store them in a programmatic system (tweaking them as needed) so that they can be sent out to your best-recruiting channels in an instant.

Have Clear Job Descriptions For Positions

One of the most important things you can do now is to write detailed job descriptions for every role in your franchise. That way, if you do find yourself having to fill a role on short notice, you have a document ready to go. It may seem cynical, but really it’s practical. And if you have a detailed, informative job description at your fingertips, the better you can find people who meet those requirements on short notice.

Keep Your Franchise’s Social Media Accounts Robust

Sometimes, it may feel like the last thing you have time for is keeping up with Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. But although it may feel like a chore, in reality, you’re building a network. It’s a great way to connect with customers, sure—but it’s also a way to recruit instantly when you have openings.

When time is of the essence and you’re already dealing with the day-to-day challenges of running a successful franchise, filling open positions doesn’t have to be so painful. By investing in tools and plans that can help build a lean, mean recruiting machine, you’re putting yourself in a better position to not just hire people—but rather, hire the people you really need.