For growing fitness brands, hiring and retention directly impact day-to-day operations, client experience, and long-term growth. Whether you’re working with five franchisees or five hundred, the ability to measure your hiring process is essential.

Recruiting metrics give franchisors the clarity they need to support owners, improve results, and identify where the hiring funnel may be leaking.

This blog outlines the most important hiring metrics for fitness franchisors and how to use them to improve performance.

What are recruiting metrics?

You can learn all about the benefits of recruiting metrics in this blog. But if you want the tl;dr, keep reading.

Recruiting metrics are key data points that help you evaluate how well your hiring process is working. These numbers highlight areas of strength and areas that need improvement across your funnel from job posting through final hire.

At CareerPlug, we analyze data from thousands of franchise locations across multiple industries, including the health and fitness industry. Each year, we publish an industry-specific Recruiting Metrics Report to help franchisors benchmark their performance and identify opportunities for improvement.

Which recruiting metrics should you track?

When you’re managing hiring across multiple locations, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s working and where franchisees may need more support. A solid hiring process starts with understanding the numbers. The following metrics give franchisors a practical way to identify where to focus, what to optimize, and how to deliver real value to the operators in your network.

Applicant and hire sources

Applicant source data shows where your candidates are coming from. This includes job boards like Indeed, niche fitness job sites, your own careers page, and local recruiting efforts.

According to our latest data:

• Applicants from a company careers page are four times more likely to be hired than those from generic job boards.
• Applicants from niche, local, or custom job sources are fourteen times more likely to be hired.

For fitness brands, this insight is especially valuable. This industry has more success with careers pages than any other in our report! Directing traffic to your branded careers page or using fitness-specific job platforms can help your franchisees connect with more qualified candidates.

Conversion rates at each funnel stage

Tracking conversion rates between key hiring stages shows you how many job seekers are applying to open roles, making it to interviews, and getting hired. There are three stages to monitor closely:

• Click-to-Apply Rate: How often people who view a job post actually complete an application.
• Application-to-Interview Rate: How many applicants meet basic qualifications and move forward.
• Interview-to-Hire Rate: How many interviews result in a final hire.

In our latest report, employers received an average of 180 applicants for every hire. However, only 3% of those applicants were invited to interview. Of those interviewed, 27% were hired.

This suggests that many employers could make better use of existing applicants by refining their screening and advancement processes for qualified candidates, rather than focusing on attracting larger volumes.

Average time to contact applicants

Speed matters when hiring fitness staff. 37% of entry-level and hourly workers listed being hired quickly as the most important factor when job seeking. 

The two time-based metrics to watch are:

• Average days to contact all applicants 
• Average days to contact applicants that turn into hires 

The fitness industry has a slower to average time-to-contact than other industries in our study. Using text recruiting can make a big difference here. Clients who use CareerPlug’s text recruiting feature reduce time to hire by 32% on average. 

Time to hire

Time to hire reflects how long it takes from the moment a job is posted to when the offer is accepted. In 2024, the average was about 20 days. We recommend aiming for a time-to-hire of five days or less, especially for hourly fitness roles.

You can improve efficiency by using pre-screening questions, scheduling automation, and pre-built templates for offer letters and rejections.

Tracking hires and retention across locations

Once a hire is made, franchisors still need visibility into outcomes. Monitoring retention and turnover helps identify where additional support is needed and where teams may be struggling to keep staff.

By tracking these metrics regularly, franchisors can create consistency across locations, set clear expectations for operators, and equip field support teams with real insights to drive improvement. These data points also build the foundation for better coaching conversations and smarter decisions about how to allocate resources or adjust hiring strategies in high-priority markets.

Why it’s just as important to track hires and terminations

Recruiting metrics don’t stop once the offer is accepted. For fitness franchisors, visibility into who is being hired, and how long they’re staying, is essential to maintaining a strong member experience across all locations.

Suppose your franchisees aren’t consistently marking when someone is hired (or when they leave). In that case, you lose the ability to understand turnover trends, identify high-performing locations, or offer meaningful support to underperforming ones.

Tracking hires and terminations helps you answer questions like:

• Are certain locations seeing more turnover than others?
• Is our average retention improving year over year?
• Are our staffing issues isolated or systemic?

Fitness brands can’t afford to guess on turnover. Every lost team member means added hiring costs, lost training time, and inconsistent service. When you track these trends, you empower yourself to enhance retention, lower costs, and support franchisees more effectively.

How to take action on your metrics

Once you’ve reviewed your hiring data, it’s time to take action. Use your recruiting metrics to identify what’s working and build a consistent, repeatable process that franchisees can rely on.

1. Create hiring benchmarks by location to spot high or low performers.
2. Equip franchisees with resources when their time-to-hire or applicant conversion rates lag.
3. Automate early steps in the hiring funnel to help speed up responses and improve candidate quality.
4. Build consistency across the brand by standardizing the job post format, interview process, and onboarding flow

Even small changes, such as adding prescreen questions or using text recruiting, can have a measurable impact on quality and speed.

You don’t need a large HR team to start making better hiring decisions. All you need is visibility, the right tools, and the willingness to look at the data.

How to build a stronger hiring process

Fitness brands that want to grow need hiring processes that are fast, consistent, and easy to manage at scale. Tracking recruiting metrics provides franchisors and their operators with the insight to hire more efficiently and reduce turnover across all locations.

With CareerPlug, you can:

• Empower franchisees with tools to hire, onboard, and retain their teams
• Monitor performance across locations
• Create a consistent, scalable experience across your entire network