“How are we doing compared to other brands?”
This is the hiring question that franchisors ask me the most. It’s a fair thing to want to know. And it’s harder to answer than it should be.
Most franchisors don’t have a clear view of their network’s hiring data, at least not in a consolidated way that lets them see how locations are performing or where the trouble spots are. (Well, some do — CareerPlug clients who are using PartnerHub have a network-level dashboard for this.)
Hiring at the location level is a leading indicator for almost everything you care about as a franchisor: franchisee profitability, royalty performance, the pace at which the system opens new units. When hiring breaks down across enough locations, growth slows with it. When it’s working, growth tends to follow.
The reason I’m thinking about this now is that we’ve been working to pull some of that data together. There’s a lot of it — millions of applications from thousands of franchisees who use CareerPlug. The patterns are sharper than I expected, and they line up with what FBCs need to know in order to support franchisees.
That’s the critical piece here. Coaching a franchisee on hiring is fundamentally different from coaching on something like yearly revenue growth, where the KPIs are obvious. Most brands don’t have KPIs for people operations. That means your FBCs are coaching on instinct and whatever they hear from other franchisees — feedback likely based on gut feel, not data. Without industry benchmarks to know what good looks like, you can’t see which locations are quietly falling behind, where the gaps are widening, or what competitors are doing differently.
And believe me, they are doing things differently.
From what I see right now in our data, the top franchise brands are outpacing everyone else in critical points of the hiring process — often filling roles nearly two weeks faster than the rest of the industry.
So, back to the original question: “How are we doing compared to other brands?”
I’m excited to share some of our answers with you very soon.
More soon,
Clint