Technology will not solve all of your recruitment problems, not even close to all. However, it will help. And if you keep it simple and stay focused on specific areas, technology will make a difference. Keep reading and go for it!
1) Private YouTube videos. Have some special select content that your recruiters can use with candidates in the pipeline. This is not about hiding or holding back content… it is about distributing content at the right time. For example, what if you had some existing franchisees record a personal message to candidates about their experience of receiving an award of a franchise? They could both congratulate them and share why they said “Yes” and signed the franchise agreement. That content being public would not make sense. But for a candidate who has attended discovery day and received an award letter… watch out!
2) Personalized dashboards. Think Google Docs and Google Data Studio. Imagine the difference it could make for each of your recruiters to have their own charts and graphs showing the last 13, 26, and 52 weeks of results—with actual conversion ratios for each step and how they compare with others on the team and the industry. Game-changing stuff.
3) Zoom with candidates. Give candidates a choice on the first call, but after that the rest of the discovery process requires candidates to use virtual meeting tools. This is a positive outcome of Covid-19. Franchise companies doing recruitment using audio only? No way, that’s old school for sure. And think about it. Do you really want new franchisees who are not comfortable or sociable enough to use video and engage virtually?
4) Recruitment learning platform. You likely already have a learning management system (LMS) for franchisees. Use this same resource to create a section for the recruitment team. You can put up recordings of calls, quizzes on the FDD, education about your brand’s value proposition, and so much more. And with the LMS, you can assign team members to complete the module, track results, and see how they scored.
5) Appointment setting. There are solutions out there now using artificial intelligence for setting appointments. This is one area to move very cautiously in, but it’s real enough to at least explore. And don’t forget text messaging—it’s now just part of showing up.
6) CRM—change the “C” word! For franchise recruitment it is not “customer,” it’s “candidate.” Okay, so maybe this is more of a mindset thing because my guess is you have a CRM, but I am serious. Recruitment is all about building a relationship where trust is strong enough for a candidate to stick with it long enough to determine if your brand is a fit for them. And that happens only when there is a relationship. Let us all change franchise recruitment to where CRM means Candidate Relationship Management. (Thanks to my U.K. friend Miles for this simple reminder!)
7) Use the CRM. If a team member is not using the CRM at minimum requirement levels, they cannot be on the team. Nothing else to say.
8) Discovery day. Whether you have a virtual or in-person experience, most brands I see are not using technology very well to demonstrate the power of their business model and support. Start with getting your franchisee support team together and asking how discovery day could be enhanced with technology tools already being used in supporting franchisees. You will be amazed what comes out of that session!
9) Automation. This is the overall disclaimer that could apply to discovery day prep, hand-off to onboarding, FDDs, agreement preparation, etc. The message is to look for simple ways to streamline regular activities to become more efficient. Warning: Trying to fully automate manual or semi-automated processes and systems that are not working successfully rarely results in any pickup of results and/or ROI.
Let’s go to work!
regards,
Team S&S
