“If we don’t have therapists, we don’t have a business. The power has been on their side since the pandemic — and we had to build something better.”
THE CHALLENGE
When 100+ locations each hired their own way, massage therapist recruiting couldn’t keep pace with the market demand
Massage therapists are the core of every Massage Heights Retreat. Without them, the doors don’t open. And the market for those therapists got dramatically harder over the past several years.
A wave of therapists left the profession during the pandemic, and the ones who stayed gained real leverage. They can choose between resorts, independent practices, medical offices, and competing franchise brands — and the window to reach a qualified candidate before they take another offer is narrow. Licensing requirements add another layer: certifications vary state by state, which means a franchisee can’t draw from a national candidate pool the way some hourly employers can.
Inside the 100+ location network, all of that variation had to be managed 100 different ways. Before Massage Heights brought CareerPlug into the brand fund, the company hosted its own careers page — clunky, multi-click, inconsistent across locations — and individual franchisees were left to figure out the rest on their own.
Some built real hiring habits. Most didn’t have the time. None of them were doing it the same way, which made a coordinated national recruiting effort impossible.
HIRING DATA
The average time to first contact a new applicant in personal care is 4.7 days, and click-to-apply conversion runs below the cross-industry average at 3.5%. When candidates have options and move fast, those numbers are the difference between a hire and a missed one.
Source: CareerPlug Recruiting Metrics Report
THE SOLUTION
Massage Heights brought CareerPlug into the brand fund
Before a single automation was configured, Massage Heights made the structural decision that shaped everything that followed. They brought CareerPlug into the brand fund, turning it from an optional tool into a franchisor-managed investment every location would use. That gave Christy Kuratko, Director of Talent, both the mandate and the infrastructure to rebuild how the whole network hired.
Training franchisees one by one. Coaching the network every month.
With the support of the CareerPlug implementation team and franchise hiring experts, Christy manages the CareerPlug instance for new locations in the network. She helps configure automations, build job posts to spec, and onboard franchisees — a training process that starts with a simple question: “Do you like to drive or do you like to watch?”
The answer tells her how hands-on to be, and from there she walks the franchisee through calendar setup, automation rules, job post formatting, and source tracking until they understand not just what to do but why it works.
Every month, she runs a leaderboard call with franchisees. She pulls the network numbers from PartnerHub, highlights wins, flags where applicant volume is slipping, and coaches franchisees on the specific levers within their control — job post length, achievement boxes, and how Indeed’s algorithm weights recent activity. Best practices that one location discovers become standards the whole network adopts.
The partnership with CareerPlug’s franchise hiring experts amplifies that work. As part of a recurring check-in, the CareerPlug team helped Christy surface a detail that had been hiding in plain sight inside Massage Heights’ own benefits plan: therapists qualify for full benefits at just 26 hours a week. That’s a meaningful recruiting advantage in an industry where full-time benefits are rare for part-time schedules.
Christy added the benefits note to every job description immediately, then turned it into a national banner ad campaign — “Wellness starts with full-time benefits at just 26 hours a week” — running across massage-industry channels every month. One conversation with CareerPlug’s franchise hiring experts became a network-wide recruiting asset for Massage Heights.
From chasing interviews to candidates booking themselves
Before the new system, franchisees were chasing candidates between clients, managing a clunky careers page, and letting leads go cold because they didn’t have time to follow up. Now, CareerPlug software handles first contact and routes candidates to self-scheduled phone screens automatically. Applicants book their own interview time on the calendar while franchisees are running the floor.
The speed of that shift is what convinced franchisees to embrace the new approach. One franchisee came to San Antonio for in-person training, got her automations fully configured, and flew home that Friday. The following Thursday, she texted Christy to tell her that her week was completely booked with phone interviews — set up entirely by the automations she’d configured six days earlier.
The careers page redesign mattered as much as the automation. What used to be a multi-click, hard-to-navigate experience is now clean, fast, and consistent across every location. Traffic from postcards with QR codes, national brand activations, or Indeed branding ads now lands in the same professional experience regardless of which location a candidate is applying to.
What franchisees get from the new system:
- Automated first contact and phone screen scheduling, so leads don't go cold while franchisees are running their business
- A centralized careers page that delivers a consistent brand experience from every traffic source
- Monthly leaderboard coaching that turns wins at one location into playbooks across the network
What the franchisor gets from PartnerHub:
- Source tracking across every recruiting channel, so brand fund dollars can follow the performance data
- Real-time visibility into which locations are performing, which are falling behind, and exactly where to intervene
- Network-wide benchmarks that turn one franchisee's breakthrough into the new standard for everyone
HIRING DATA
CareerPlug clients using Autopilot spend up to 91% less time scheduling interviews and schedule up to 8X more interviews than those who don’t. Text recruiting gets a response rate 8X higher than email and delivers a 32% faster time-to-hire.
Source: CareerPlug internal data
THE RESULTS
From 190 hires to 532 in a single year — and a careers page that became the network’s top source of candidates
In 2024, as Massage Heights was building the system, the network hired 190 people through CareerPlug. In 2025, its first full year running the complete program, that number grew to 532. The rest of the data tells the same story.
Employees hired across the Massage Heights network in 2025 — nearly 3X the 190 hires recorded in 2024, the year before the system was fully built out.
Of applicants contacted through Autopilot converted to a first interview scheduled, consistently month over month across the year. Standard applicants converted at just 3–9% across the same period — less than one-tenth the Autopilot rate.
Of all applicants came through the Massage Heights careers page in 2025, the single largest source of candidates in the network, ahead of Indeed at 37%. The careers page also drove 40% of all hires, making the brand’s owned channel the network’s strongest performing source.
Average time to first contact in 2025, down from 6.62 days in 2024 — a 45% improvement — and well below the personal-care industry benchmark of 4.7 days.
“We made the decision to bring CareerPlug into the brand fund and let the franchisor manage it for the whole system. When we did that, they started to see collectively — this has worked, it is easier.”
THE TAKEAWAY
Hiring should work the way franchising does — build once, run everywhere
Franchising works because the business model is built once and run consistently across every location: brand standards, training programs, and operating playbooks. For most franchise systems though, hiring has been the exception — left to individual locations to figure out, even though it determines whether the brand standards ever reach the customer in the first place.
Massage Heights moved hiring inside the system. The franchisor built the infrastructure, CareerPlug franchise hiring experts brought the benchmarks and best practices, the franchisees got a process they could actually run, and the network stopped being only as strong as its weakest hiring manager. Engaged franchisees got more from the system. Less-engaged locations still performed better than they did alone. And everyone ended up with a better operational approach.
For any franchise brand competing for specialized candidates, the lesson from Massage Heights is structural. The window to reach a new applicant is narrow, and it closes whether or not an individual location is ready. Therapists, technicians, licensed professionals — they have options, and they move on fast. The brands that win this market are the ones running hiring the same way they run everything else that matters: as a system the whole network benefits from.
See what CareerPlug can do for your franchise system
Every franchise brand has a hiring challenge that’s specific to their industry, their candidates, and the way their network is structured. CareerPlug works with 400+ brands to help franchises build winning teams — at every location, across the whole network.
Each Retreat is independently owned and operated by franchisees of Massage Heights franchising(“MHF”)/ Franchisees are the sole employers in their Retreat, and franchisees are not acting as an agent of MHF or its affiliates. Hiring criteria, benefits, and compensation are set by each individually owned and operated Retreat and may vary from location to location. Franchise opportunities available. © 2025.SWG IP, LLC. All Rights Reserved.