Unifying Franchise HCM Data for Smarter Hiring
- By Harri Insider Team | October 21, 2021
When it comes to hiring hourly employees, hospitality brands are feeling the heat. Workers have left the industry for a variety of reasons ranging from work/life balance and compensation needs to a stronger desire for long-term career growth.
Franchises are pouring all of their resources into winning over a thinning talent pool. Hiring events, signing bonuses, and even Tiktok applications are our new normal.
But in a hospitality franchise ecosystem, smarter hiring starts from the bottom up. And unless franchises begin unifying their HCM data, their hiring strategies will never reach their fullest potential.
No matter how creative you get in your hunt for talent, your unit-level managers need to be empowered so that they can successfully screen, engage with, and eventually hire incoming candidates.
Charting the future of franchise technology
There is an oversaturation of HCM tools available in the market, but they do not all communicate with each other.
When your systems don’t talk to each other, it’s near impossible to understand what’s working and what isn’t. At the very least, it becomes a tedious job to do so.
If that doesn’t ring alarm bells for you, the labor shortage might light a fire under your seat.
As operators struggle to attract talent, candidate needs have shifted from a “nice to have” to mission-critical items. They want fast, engaging, hiring processes and flexible scheduling.
How does your brand measure up to the competition? How successful are your outcomes. You need to be able to answer these questions at the unit level and for the franchise as a whole.
So before you dive any deeper into talent acquisition strategies, let’s see why a unified data analytics platform is so important.
Unified data, smarter hiring
Owning and operating multiple restaurant franchises, especially across different states, can result in confusing hiring processes. There are so many pieces of data that restaurant owners and operators work with on a daily basis, ranging from retention rates to daily schedules.
Tracking key metrics when your franchisees are using unique systems further complicates the process. Data from Franchisee X might arrive in a completely different format from Franchisee Y.
Spending time piecing together fragmented datasets takes away from a regional franchise manager’s ability to identify operational gaps across various locations. It also opens the possibility of conflating the data when, really, it needs to be understood both individually and as a holistic story.
From a hiring perspective, there’s plenty of datasets that are tracked in different systems. But when you create a single source of truth across your entire franchise, your teams are empowered to make data-driven hiring decisions.
Let’s look at some key datapoints you can unify across your franchise to bolster recruiting strategies.
Critical franchise hiring data for hourly workers
Time-to-Hire
Understand how long it takes for an employee to get hired starting the moment they filled out an application.
Identify which franchises are hiring fastest and apply those recruiting strategies across your brand.
Time-to-Interview
This is the piece of data that tells you how long it takes for an employee to get an interview starting the moment they fill out an application. A bit more specialized than time-to-hire, this datapoint can uncover exact moments in your hiring process that are prone to friction. Perhaps a particular manager is slow to respond to applicants — that might be a great entry point for tech-based assistance!
Job Board Success Rate
Understand which job postings yield the most candidates, the most hires, and the hires that do not drop off after 3 months.
Does one job board get more sets of views than another? Understand if this is a geographic-specific phenomenon, or if your brand as a whole finds success using that platform.
One platform may bring in large numbers of candidates, but if those candidates have a tendency to drop off mid-process it might be time to invest in a new, more specialized job board.
Role Filling Speed
Identify how fast a particular role is filled versus other roles. This often goes hand-in-hand with time-to-hire and can help franchise owners figure out which roles are easier to hire for than others.
Are back of house positions filling faster than front of house? Franchisees can collaborate to learn what hiring tactics are most appealing to customer-facing employees.
Salary Averages
Understand how much a particular role pays on average across your brand. If a particular role is not receiving applications or filling up quickly, this may mean that you need to bump up pay to match up to competitors.
This is also helpful for multi-state franchises where salary ranges can vary greatly. Applying a brand-wide $15/hr pay for one position might not make sense at the moment if lower-pay states are performing well.
With access to various hiring datapoints across the franchise, streamlining recruiting processes and strengthening the brand’s presence becomes that much easier. In addition, franchisees are offered a very clear picture of individual store health to make micro and macro decisions with the immense data we provide in every aspect of the employee life cycle.
That applies to retention just as much as it does hiring.
For example, if employees are happy with their schedules in location X but not location Y, location X may have higher retention rates.
If this is the case, corporate managers should be able to identify the difference between the two schedules and make adjustments in an effort to increase location Y’s retention rates. Could it be a skills shortage? Or is one manager not maneuvering local labor laws as effectively as possible? You can’t dive into the details until you can paint the full picture.
Tying the data together using an end-to-end hiring platform
An all-in-one HCM platform like Harri is the best way to collect and analyze critical data required to successfully run multiple franchise locations…and save you money at the same time.
Because Harri interconnects all aspects of human capital management, operators are empowered to find the stories within the data.
Gather key hiring metrics to optimize talent acquisition strategies without getting bogged down by an overabundance of disjointed data — a common challenge when working with multiple point solutions.
Transition that early-stage employee data throughout their entire lifecycle with your business to understand which hires are least likely to succumb to early-stage turnover. Then utilize day-to-day data related to scheduling, time and attendance, payroll, and more, to continually optimize in-store operations.
And yes, it’s all accessible from a highly customizable dashboard, giving operators the data clarity they need that wouldn’t otherwise be possible when using fragmented solutions.
One franchise with unified data, report formats, and goal tracking across all locations. Now that’s an outcome worth exploring.
As your franchise navigates the labor shortage, remember that it’s imperative to work smarter, not harder, in order to hire effectively. Learn how an all-in-one HCM platform like Harri can provide your team with the insights they need to optimize talent acquisition processes across your brand.
