A 54% interview-to-hire rate is completely normal in fitness. That same rate in cleaning services would be more than four times the industry’s actual average. Compare either franchise to one blended, segment-wide number, and you’ll flag the wrong one as the problem.
That’s the mistake buried in most franchise hiring benchmarks: they treat a caregiver role, a personal trainer role, and a house cleaner role as if the hiring dynamics were identical. They aren’t. Our 2026 Service Franchise Hiring Report pulled data from more than 46,000 franchise locations, 6.2 million applicants across seven service franchise industries. The differences between industries are often larger than the differences between a strong operator and a struggling one within the same industry.
Here’s what the real numbers look like, industry by industry, and how to use them correctly.
The full picture: hiring benchmarks by industry
Applicants needed per hire, days to first contact, total days from application to hire, and what share of applicants even get an interview, side by side:
| Industry | Applicants per hire | Days to first contact | Days, application to hire | Interview rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Education & childcare | 48 | 4.66 | 24 | 7.5% |
| Healthcare | 53 | 3.99 | 22 | 7.8% |
| Personal care | 75 | 3.47 | 21 | 3.8% |
| Fitness | 116 | 6.78 | 24 | 1.6% |
| Home & commercial services | 182 | 4.35 | 23 | 3.2% |
| Automotive | 187 | 4.36 | 18 | 3.7% |
| Cleaning | 211 | 4.5 | 18 | 3.8% |
A few things jump out immediately. Cleaning needs more than four times the applicants that education and childcare needs to make a single hire, but cleaning and automotive actually close the fastest, at 18 days from application to hire. Fitness has the lowest interview rate of any industry, just 1.6% of applicants get an interview, yet still averages 24 days to fill a role, tied for the longest cycle in the dataset. None of these numbers make sense pulled out of context. All of them make sense once you know the industry.
Interview-to-hire rates vary even more than applicant volume
The share of interviews that actually convert to a hire is where the differences get starkest:
| Industry | Interview-to-hire rate |
|---|---|
| Fitness | 54% |
| Personal care | 36% |
| Home & commercial services | 17% |
| Cleaning | 12% |
Cleaning’s 12% isn’t a sign of bad interviewing on its own. It’s a structural reality: cleaning attracts the widest, most accessible applicant pool of any industry in the data, since most roles don’t require licensing, certification, or specialized experience. That pool includes a lot of people casting a wide net across retail, food service, and hospitality at the same time, not people specifically targeting a cleaning franchise.
Home & commercial services’ 17% has a different cause. It’s a franchise running two hiring systems under one roof: office and customer-service roles pull in 80-plus applicants per hire, while trades roles like technicians and electricians convert at meaningfully higher rates from a much smaller pool. Blending those two into one interview-to-hire number obscures both problems.
Even within an industry, role-level comparisons can mislead
In personal care, licensed massage therapist roles converted at just 8.1 applicants per hire, the lowest ratio of any role in the entire dataset, because candidates who apply are already specifically seeking out that brand. In fitness, personal trainer roles converted at 16.2 applicants per hire, while sales associate and membership roles, the largest role cluster in fitness, needed 51.7 applicants per hire from the same industry.
The pattern repeats in home & commercial services: office manager roles averaged 89 applicants per posting, customer service rep roles 124, both with ratios above 80 applicants per hire. Trades roles like field technicians and electricians pulled from a much smaller pool, roughly 30 to 60 applicants per posting, and converted at meaningfully higher rates. A franchisee looking at “applicants per hire” without knowing which role, and which industry, they’re comparing against has almost no way to tell if 60 applicants is a strong result or a warning sign.
Speed matters everywhere, but not the same way everywhere
Applicants contacted within 24 hours schedule interviews at meaningfully higher rates than applicants contacted weeks later, but how much higher depends entirely on the industry. Automotive shows the steepest cliff in the whole dataset: contact within 24 hours and you’re near a 50% schedule rate; wait just one more day and that number is cut nearly in half. Personal care shows a real but far gentler slope, because candidates there are more often brand-loyal and exploring than actively job-hunting the way a licensed technician is.
That difference isn’t about how hard a franchisee is working the phone. It reflects how differently candidates behave in each labor market: credentialed, in-demand candidates disappear fast; brand-affinity candidates stick around longer because they’re not really comparison shopping the way a job-board candidate is.
Fast-hiring brands prove the industry gap is closable
Education and childcare franchises face some of the tightest constraints in the segment, state licensing requirements shrink the candidate pool before a franchisee even starts recruiting, and lead teacher roles carry ratio requirements that make a vacancy a real operational problem, not just an inconvenience. Even inside that constrained environment, the largest brand in our data filled lead teacher roles in 60 days, nearly two weeks faster than the rest of the segment.
That gap isn’t about the franchisee working harder. It’s what mature hiring infrastructure looks like at scale: purpose-built workflows, established relationships with the credentialing pipeline, and dedicated recruiting support that most single-location or smaller-network franchisees don’t have access to on their own. If your numbers run closer to the segment average than to that leading edge, that’s the typical range for your industry, not a sign you’re falling behind. It’s a ceiling worth working toward, not a floor you’re already failing to meet.
How to benchmark your own franchise correctly
Three things matter more than the raw numbers:
- Compare against your own industry, not a segment-wide average. A 54% interview-to-hire rate that’s normal in fitness would be a massive outlier in cleaning, and vice versa.
- Know what your industry actually rewards. A fast time-to-fill matters more in automotive, where candidates disappear within a day of applying. A low interview rate matters less in fitness, where the funnel is naturally wide and brand affinity does more of the filtering work than the interview itself.
- Track the gap against your own baseline, not just the number itself. Where you’re meaningfully off from your industry’s benchmark, especially on metrics you actually control, like time to first contact, that’s where to look first.
This is also where the diagnosis becomes a franchisor’s job, not just a franchisee’s. If most locations in a network fall on the wrong side of the same benchmark, that’s not eight or ten individual franchisee problems. That’s a network-level investment opportunity.
The full 2026 Service Franchise Hiring Report breaks all of this down industry by industry, with specific benchmarks, seasonal patterns, tactical playbooks and a scorecard you can run against your own network’s numbers. Get the full 2026 Service Franchise Hiring Report.
Already a CareerPlug client? Your Partnership Manager can pull your 2025 numbers from PartnerHub and build your scorecard against your industry’s real benchmarks. Just reach out to get started.