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2026 service franchise hiring report

Get service franchise hiring benchmarks based on millions of applicants, with insights to improve sourcing, candidate response speed, and hiring performance.

Understanding the American Franchise Act

Learn how the American Franchise Act could bring clarity to joint employer rules and help franchisors better support their franchisees.

The Franchise People Playbook

Discover a practical framework to help franchise brands improve hiring, retention, career growth, and team development across every location.

Bar chart comparing childcare hiring sources: sponsored ads generate 30.4% of applicants but only 18.3% of hires, while careers pages and referrals generate a higher share of hires than applicants.

Education and childcare franchises spend more on sponsored job ads than almost any other service industry, and that spend produces some of the weakest conversion in

Most interviews fall apart before they even start, not because the wrong questions get asked, but because there’s no consistent structure behind them at all. Two

Home and commercial services hiring funnel showing 1,399,598 applicants, 45,308 interviews, and 7,700 hires, with 3.2% of applicants interviewed.

Getting a home and commercial services candidate into an interview isn’t where this industry struggles. Closing that interview into a hire is. Franchisees in this segment

Most franchisees don’t actually have a retention problem. They have a retention knowledge gap: they don’t have a clear picture of what’s happening after someone gets

At a franchise brand, the pre-hire assessment you choose runs at every location. It will screen more applicants than any hiring manager in your system ever

Yes, if the extra money is buying you a genuinely better person, evaluated against a real standard, not just a bigger number on the offer letter.

Stop reposting your jobs. Seriously. It used to be one of the best ways to stay visible on job boards, and we recommended it ourselves. But

Automotive hiring chart showing interview scheduling rates dropping from 48.2% when applicants are contacted within 24 hours to 19.8% within 48 hours.

In most industries, a slow reply costs you a little. In automotive, it costs you almost everything at once. Contact a technician candidate on day one

The best Hireology alternatives for franchises in 2026 aren’t just other general ATS platforms. Hireology has quietly repositioned toward automotive, healthcare, and hospitality, with a strong

Most fitness franchises treat hiring as one problem: not enough applicants. CareerPlug’s 2026 Franchise Hiring Report says otherwise. Fitness has two separate hiring problems living side

Bar and line chart showing monthly fitness job postings and applicants per job in 2026, with job postings peaking in October while applicants per job fall to 67.

Fitness franchises post the most jobs in October. Applicants are hardest to find in October. That single mismatch is costing fitness brands hires they could have

Always be hiring means keeping a candidate pipeline going year-round, so your next hire is already in motion before you actually need someone. It’s a system,