Our mission at CareerPlug is to help franchises build winning teams. And my mission is to help CareerPlug build a winning team.
We talk to franchises and small business owners all day about how to recruit, hire, onboard, and retain the right people. We give them software and consultations and resources. We talk about consistent hiring processes and structured onboarding and how to keep the people who power and grow your business.
So it’s fair to ask: do we drink our own champagne?
I’ve been helping hire and build our team at CareerPlug for the last twelve years. We’ve made mistakes, had growing pains, and assembled a community of hardworking, values-aligned people who’ve helped us grow and succeed.
Let’s talk about it.
How I was hired
When I interviewed at CareerPlug over a decade ago I got a taste of that champagne. We already used our applicant tracking software. There was a structured phone interview with a prepared hiring manager. I was even proactively recruited to that interview because my resume was on Indeed and the hiring manager was looking for more applicants than had organically applied.
After getting rejected from the first job I interviewed for at CareerPlug, I was asked about my interest in a newly created position (a good example of building your pipeline). For that second role, after the same structured phone screen, I was offered the job at the start of my in-person interview before any questions were asked. I believe I was the only person considered for the role.
Now, it’s hard to criticize my positive outcome! CareerPlug became a career-defining opportunity. But today I would not advise skipping out on the interview process or solely considering one candidate. 😂
This wasn’t the last time we’d roll the dice, and luck wasn’t always in our favor. But on the whole, in the hundreds of hires we’ve made since my interview, we’ve created a hiring process we trust to hire the right people for our team.
How we attract applicants: 14 of 16 hires in the past year came from our careers page
We hired 16 people in the past twelve months and 14 of those people applied from our careers page. Referrals, posting in networking groups, proactive recruiting, and social media shares all funneled people to our careers page, which highlights our culture, values, employee testimonials, and all open positions.
It’s where we can tell our story beyond job postings. People who align with our values and culture apply, and are more likely to be high-quality candidates. This is true across industries, where our research shows that candidates are 4X more likely to become hires if they apply through your careers page rather than from a job board.
Do we still post to job boards? Absolutely! They are an important piece of our recruiting strategy, but they’re not the recruiting strategy.
An overreliance on one job board can disproportionately control the quality and quantity of your applicants. And when a job board changes its strategy, it may impact how many job seekers see your jobs or push you into sponsoring jobs as your only option.
How we evaluate candidates: a consistent hiring process and behavioral interview questions
Just like a great sales process generates predictable revenue, a great hiring process helps you predictably make the right hires. Consistency is key. Our hiring process has variations depending on the role, but the core is always the same:
- Phone Screen
- Candidate Exercise
- First Interview
- Final Interview
- Reference Checks
- Offer
- Background Check
- Start Date & Onboarding
From application to offer, most of our searches take about four to six weeks, though we always aim to move faster. For many of our clients hiring frontline roles with fewer hiring steps, one to two weeks is a more realistic timeline.
Evaluating for the right hire starts before the post. We spend time getting clear on what we need and who we’re looking for to fill those needs, pushing hiring managers to identify the top three most important things needed for the role – whether certain experience, abilities, or other characteristics.
During the hiring process we make sure we are evaluating candidates against those priorities alongside our core values. We write specific interview questions to help us evaluate and lean heavily on behavioral questions aka “tell me about a time…”
For example, when evaluating how coachable a client support candidate is, we might ask, “Tell me about a time when you received feedback that may have been hard to hear.” We want to know what the feedback was and, more importantly, what they did with that feedback.
To evaluate candidates in alignment with our core values, we often ask about a time it was hard to demonstrate that value. “Tell me about a time when you were kind when it was really hard to be” or “Tell me about a time when you had to work together to accomplish a goal, when it was really hard to work together.”
Prompting candidates to tell stories helps us understand how people show up at work and what’s most important to them.
In reviewing our exit interviews, we learned an important lesson that we translated to the hiring process. A number of exiting employees shared that they hadn’t felt particularly connected to our mission or the franchise and small business communities we serve. Now, we ask about this connection during the interview process. People don’t need franchising experience or to have owned a small business themselves to be the right hire, but they do need to have a passion for the problems we’re trying to solve.
Some of the biggest mistakes in hiring stem from us rushing this process – read: skipping steps or only running one person through the process because we’ve already anchored them as our next hire.
We did this with a high-level hire. We had someone in mind, and although we ran a process, it was just for that one person and it felt like more of a foregone conclusion than a true evaluation.
We never gave ourselves, or them, a real chance to see whether it was the right fit. That person ended up leaving within the year. Because this was a management role, the impact sent waves throughout not only that department, but the whole company. We had to pick up the slack while we went back to the drawing board and rebuilt trust that we could make the right hire for the role. Now, every hiring process includes real comparison with multiple candidates.
How we treat candidates: pay transparency and no ghosting
Every offer we’ve made to a candidate in 2026 was accepted, and I credit that primarily to the care we put into the candidate experience. No matter how the labor market changes, we remember that the best people always have their choice of where to work.
This starts with showing people who we are through our employment branding on our careers page, continues with the job description that clearly lists outcomes the role is accountable for, and extends to clear communication through the process.
Exact compensation is listed in our job postings, with a link to our full compensation philosophy, which shares more about how people can expect their pay to grow while at CareerPlug.
We also recently added a note to job descriptions about AI – where we do and don’t use it during the hiring process and expectations we have for candidates using AI.
We respond to most applicants within one to two days of applying. We let candidates know what to expect at every step of the way, including who will be in interviews and when they’ll hear about next steps. We also share our company vision before the final interview with our executive team so candidates can come prepared with even more context about CareerPlug and our long-term goals.
During interviews, all interviewers are prepared and ready to represent CareerPlug, and we always leave time for candidate questions. Plus, our process caps the number of interviews so candidates aren’t dragged to a fourth, fifth, or sixth conversation before they have an answer.
And we give every candidate an answer. Even if it’s a no, even if you only applied and never had an interview, you’ll hear from us. I know firsthand that a no isn’t always the end of the story; those candidates may still be future hires so, as a rule, we never ghost.
When candidates understand the job, the pay, and who you are as a company early on (which starts on your careers page), there are no surprises at the offer stage.
How we onboard: the four parts of our onboarding process
The number one recruiting strategy will always be retention. Keep your best people and hire for growth. Our average employee tenure is currently over 4 years, and our 2026 year-to-date retention rate is 92.1%. Retention starts with onboarding.
At CareerPlug we think about onboarding as a combination of 1) the compliance logistics (W-4, I-9, setting up payroll, and other paperwork), 2) training on how to do the job, 3) connecting new hires to our mission, values, and vision, and 4) creating opportunities for new hires to form strong relationships with their manager and peers.
Compliance: We manage all our HR forms and compliance checklists in our CareerPlug account so nothing gets missed.
Training: All new hires go through standard training on CareerPlug’s product and users, then we layer on department- and job-specific training. Much of this is managed by checklists in CareerPlug so we create a consistent experience.
Company Connection: On day one I sit down with new hires and walk through our company values and how they show up at CareerPlug. Later in onboarding, all new hires meet with our Founder & CEO, Clint Smith, so he can tell the story of why he started the business and connect it to the vision we’re pursuing today. This is the same mission connection departing employees told us they’d been missing, so we’ve made a point to integrate it into our onboarding.
Creating Relationships: Beyond meeting with their manager and direct team, we set up department introduction meetings throughout the first month. This way new hires can learn about all the teams at CareerPlug and get to know leaders across the organization. We also set new hires up in our Donut Chat Slack channel where employees get randomly paired with someone each week to have an informal non-work conversation and get to know each other.
This is a nonexhaustive list – there’s a lot that goes into onboarding – but I believe the most important thing we do is ask for feedback regularly and iterate often to improve the onboarding experience.
How we use CareerPlug to hire and onboard everyday
Short answer: we’re in the CareerPlug software every day, every step of the way for hiring and onboarding. We post jobs, review applicants, automatically schedule interviews with Autopilot, move candidates through the hiring process, take interview notes, complete onboarding paperwork, and assign new hire training tasks.
We love being beta testers and engage with nearly all of our Labs features. These are early tools and improvements available to clients to try as our product team learns and iterates before a wider launch.
Using and testing our own product every day also means we’re able to experience the same friction users might feel, and we can translate that into product feedback that improves the tool for everyone.
So, do we drink our own champagne?
Our hiring and onboarding process is not perfect and we’ll keep making mistakes and learning from them.
But I’m still here, twelve years after my own imperfect process, not because of one process or checklist we’ve mastered, but because of the core values we’ve lived by every day.
In the end, I don’t remember what interview questions I was asked or how clear my onboarding checklist was (not clear – I didn’t have one!). I do remember moving the interview with Clint outside the small conference room so we could enjoy the fresh air and talk about what he needed in someone joining the team. I do remember my first day, a Friday, where the whole company gathered in one of the office rooms and ended the week with shout-outs for each other, all tied to the company core values (a practice we’ve kept alive today). I remember that my car was in the shop, so Clint drove me home.
We built our process to make sure every new hire gets their own version of my first day.
A hiring and onboarding process should help show people who you are. You keep people by living up to that promise.
Want to hire and onboard the way we do?
CareerPlug helps you hire and onboard in one place, with the same tools we use every day. See how it works.
For the full playbook on hiring and keeping great people, read Clint’s book, How to Hire.