Franchise Employee Recruitment: Steps, Strategies, and Insights

As a franchisee, thinking critically about your recruiting strategy is the best way to attract and retain top talent. The unique challenges of running a franchise business require the right underlying philosophy and the best technical tools to steer your business to talent acquisition success. 

Few franchise owners and managers have reinforced the best practices for talent acquisition with the right tech platform. Harri solves this problem, providing the industry’s best tech tools to attract difference-makers. Harri tracks applicants and helps businesses onboard and retain them with the HCM platform that puts the frontline first. 

Harri’s platform is just one example of how technology and the franchise business landscape are rapidly changing. Those who develop and implement the right recruiting strategy are most likely to succeed. 

By developing the optimal franchise recruitment ecosystem, and using the right technology, you’ll find adding the best new talent will be that much easier. This is your look at how to recruit top talent, the unique challenges of franchise recruiting and the best strategies for adding true difference-making employees to the mix. 

The Current Landscape of Franchise Recruitment

Franchise recruiting presents a distinctive set of challenges that stem from the multiple stakeholders owner/operators must answer to. One of the key hurdles is ensuring that prospective franchisees align with the overarching brand values, while simultaneously adapting to local market dynamics and needs. Overall, it’s not just about hiring individuals; it’s about finding the right people who can replicate the franchise model effectively, manage teams, and maintain quality standards.

Additionally, recruiting high-quality employees is becoming more challenging as the labor market tightens, while keeping new additions on board through training and beyond is another significant challenge in and of itself. Fortunately, Harri is here to help every step of the way.

Understanding Franchise Challenges

Recognize that the competition is targeting the same prospects as your franchise, use technology for a competitive advantage and you’ll maximize your recruiting opportunities.  

There is an art to delicately balancing the unique needs of individual franchisees with the brand’s overarching consistency. Make an effort to reflect the brand’s values while allowing employees to let their personalities shine and your franchise will be perceived as welcoming and community-oriented as opposed to a generic large corporation.

Opportunities in Franchise Recruiting

Carefully structure your franchise recruitment strategy, tinker with it after trial runs and continue to perfect it over time. The most effective recruiting strategies are works in progress that change in accordance with technology and other factors. 

The optimal recruiting strategy will fortify the brand, making each franchise location a coveted place to work. Your brand as an employer is just as important as your brand as a provider of service to customers. 

Depending on the size and organizational structure of your parent franchise, you can enhance your recruitment efforts by sharing information and strategies with fellow franchisees. With patience, this unified recruiting approach will ultimately benefit the franchise as a whole.

Best Practices in Franchise Talent Acquisition

Acquiring new talent comes down to creating and implementing the best recruiting practices. Make a concerted effort to attract difference-makers, track applicants across the hiring journey and strategically onboard them. Harri’s platform is here to help with each of these challenges.

Attracting Top Talent

Recruiting top talent sets the stage for a better customer experience. Moreover, the best acquisitions also inspire current employees to work harder and more efficiently. 

Put yourself in the position of a job-seeker with experience or passion for the industry. Such an individual is likely to be motivated to respond to a job advertisement that is compelling.

Harri is here to help you attract the top candidates. Our tech tools boost brand visibility, enhancing franchise reputation and maximizing the reach of job ads to cast a wide yet focused net. From career branding to multi-channel job broadcasting across top hospitality industry marketplaces, Harri can help you attract and sort through candidates, pinpointing those most qualified for open positions.

Efficient Applicant Tracking

Keep close track of applicant progression through the hiring process, alter that process accordingly and wholeheartedly embrace Harri’s tech solutions. Our platform maximizes tracking efficiency. 

Harri streamlines applicant tracking on your behalf with industry-leading tech tools. The platform’s smooth user experience combined with data and analytics pinpoint elite applicants as well as potential impediments to progression throughout the hiring process. 

The end result is a more rewarding applicant experience made possible through high-tech capabilities including:

  • Video interviews applicants can complete on their own time.
  • Integrated background checks and assessments with top providers.
  • Dedicated hiring manager app for managers to communicate directly with candidates at every stage of the hiring process.

The platform’s speedy screening capability empowers you to accept/reject candidates in a couple seconds or less. Our platform even allows candidates to select their availability through digital means on a convenient self-select form.

And don’t just take our word for it: Harri has delivered real results for industry-leading franchise clients like Papa Johns. Learn more about how Carri, our AI-powered conversational agents helped a large Papa John’s franchise accept applications, screen candidates, and schedule interviews in real-time. The result? Increased applications, decreased candidate “ghosting” and a significantly higher quality hire rate. 

Smoothing the Onboarding Process

The onboarding process often dictates the long-term fate of employees. Franchises that go to great lengths to ameliorate the inherently challenging onboarding phase reap the rewards in the form of loyal employees and a high retention rate. Truly effective onboarding sets the stage for retaining your valued employees from day one, ultimately making the most of the money invested in recruiting and hiring. 

Carefully structure the onboarding process and you’ll create a truly welcoming franchise environment that fosters unity and mutual respect. Harri’s onboarding tools have digitized the onboarding system for a truly seamless experience. 

The Harri platform offers payroll and HRIS integration, automated document management and a centralized digital platform to keep all your required information in a single, compliant place. This hub for hiring facilitates the upload of all relevant documents for smooth and efficient first impressions for new acquisitions and ease of use for HR professionals. 

New additions can easily complete all documents through this convenient digital hub. You can even transmit onboarding documents like W4s and I9s through the platform.

Technological Solutions in Franchise Recruitment

Digitizing the Recruitment Process

Take a moment to consider how much more efficient your recruiting process would be if it were completely digital. Transition to digital recruiting highlighted by web-based job portals and platforms and it won’t take long to prime your employment pump. Even reaching out to your online audience through social media channels helps to reach potential recruits in online spaces where they already spend time.

Harri’s platform is essential for digitizing the recruiting process. The platform customizes applicant flows, empowers employees to make referrals and displays all relevant information pertaining to available opportunities. 

Carri, our AI-powered conversational ambassador, makes every application count. This conversational specialist serves as the conduit between your business and job-seekers. 

Carri makes it possible for job candidates to scan, text or message across several channels to start the application process. Conversation between Carri and your candidates conveniently ensues on the web-based chat tool conveniently available on your company’s careers page through SMS text messages, Facebook Messenger, and more. 

Give Carri a try and you’ll find it easier than ever to connect with new talent without a significant investment of money, time or effort. Carri even handles all the logistical challenges including booking interviews.

Additionally, Harri’s Employee Social Referral tool serves as the perfect opportunity to accelerate your franchise’s referral network of friends, family and acquaintances. This is the perfect opportunity to tap into employee networks, pinpointing new contributors who otherwise might not have heard about the business. 

Harri empowers managers to generate unique referral links for applications, connecting candidates to open jobs through email or text. Employees then share the referral link on social media platforms, encouraging interested friends to apply.

Our Customized Applicant Flows optimize the hiring process for franchises hiring across multiple locations. Choose from three unique customized application templates preconfigured for convenience. You can even establish your preferred criteria for individual openings by selecting targeted experience, availability and skills.

Data-Driven Recruitment Insights

The days of making decisions based on gut instinct are long gone. We now live in the information age, Harri is proud to be at the forefront of data-driven recruiting solutions. Take full advantage of data as analyzed and presented on the Harri platform and you’ll make decisions based on actual actionable insights. Our tech identifies trends, patterns and other analytics that help you develop truly accurate business plans. 

Harri IQ is especially helpful for franchise owners and managers. This tech tool is an AI-powered analytics powerhouse that empowers you to search for desired information that paves a path toward meaningful action. Harri’s Spot IQ tool rapidly analyzes data in mere seconds, arming you with the information you need to make prudent decisions. 

 The best part is you don’t need a degree in information technology or a highly-paid analytics professional on board to obtain the full benefit of Big Data. Within the platform, searchable, AI-powered analytics provide curated insights without requiring an analyst.

Transform Your Franchise Recruitment with Harri

Franchise recruiting will become even more competitive as the labor market continues to tighten. Harri’s platform is uniquely positioned to address franchise recruiting needs. 

With Harri, the proof is in our data-driven results from our partners of all sizes across the restaurant and hospitality industry. 

When it comes to franchises, few have expanded quite as quickly and remain universally beloved as Jersey Mike’s Subs. With an already existing 2,000 stores in the U.S. and plans for continued rapid growth, Jersey Mike’s needed a technology partner built to solve unique industry challenges and found a one-stop shop to manage every aspect of day-to-day team operations with Harri. Ultimately, leading franchisees of nearly 1,000 locations partner with Harri to attract, hire, and manage their workforce all in one convenient platform to drive operational efficiency. You can learn more about their strategies enabled by our powerful HR technology by downloading our comprehensive talent playbook. 

Ready to see results for yourself? Your unique franchise-focused recruiting solutions await. Try a demo of the Harri platform today to find out why this employee experience platform is used by more than 20,000 hotels, restaurants and other businesses in the United States and the United Kingdom.

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