It’s 11:40 on a Thursday. You’re covering an open shift yourself, and three good applicants from Monday still haven’t heard back. If you’re looking for how to hire employees quickly, you’re in the spot our founder, Clint Smith, describes: “short-staffed and may be temporarily doing the job of the person you are trying to hire.”
When you’re short-staffed, it’s easy to assume you need more applicants. Usually the leak is the first call. Contact every applicant within 24 hours and decide within five days, and you’ll get more out of the applicants you already have.
Our 2025 Recruiting Metrics Report shows why. Restaurants took an average of 6.5 days to make first contact with an applicant, even though the whole hire averaged just 16 days. That’s a big share of the hire spent before anyone says hello.
And speed matters beyond restaurants. Our 2026 Franchise Hiring Report, which analyzed 2025 hiring across more than 46,000 franchise locations in seven service industries, found that applicants contacted within 24 hours were scheduled for interviews at 31%, against 11.5% for those contacted after four weeks, a 2.7x gap.
So hiring faster starts with the applicants already sitting in your inbox. Reply to them first, and let pre-screen questions and automated interview scheduling cut the back-and-forth.
Here’s the system for hiring quickly:
- Step 1: Know exactly who you’re hiring
- Step 2: Hire before you’re desperate
- Step 3: Fish where the fastest hires come from
- Step 4: Contact every applicant within 24 hours
- Step 5: Let pre-screen questions sort your best applicants to the top
- Step 6: Stop the phone tag and prepare the interview
- Step 7: Decide and make the offer within 5 days
- Step 8: Keep the people you hire
- How to hire employees quickly across multiple locations
Step 1: Know exactly who you’re hiring
Speed without a clear picture is how you end up with the wrong person. Write down your must-haves before you post, like the shifts you need covered and the experience that actually matters. Then you can say yes or no fast without lowering the bar.
Clint boils it down to three questions: “Can they do it? (Ability) Will they do it? (Motivation) Will others do it with them? (Culture fit)” He also warns what happens without them: “When you are reactive and desperate while hiring, you let your guard down and compromise your standards.” Our guides to writing effective job descriptions and hiring process steps help you get your answers on paper.
Step 2: Hire before you’re desperate
The fastest hire is the one that’s already warm. Keep a job posted and a pipeline going, so you aren’t starting from zero the day someone quits. Our job posting software helps you keep openings live.
In Clint’s Notes, he puts the cost of waiting this way: “Operators who fall behind in April and May are playing catch-up all summer.” What’s your plan the day someone gives notice?
Step 3: Fish where the fastest hires come from
Where do the fastest, best hires come from? Rarely the biggest pile. Across service franchises, job boards brought 65% of applicants but only 47% of hires. Referrals were 2.5% of applicants but 10.5% of hires, and referred applicants were 5.9x as likely to be hired as job board applicants. Careers pages brought 18% of applicants and 25% of hires. For restaurants specifically, careers pages brought 15% of applicants but 38% of hires.
So recruit like you sell. In Clint’s words, “You need to recruit them. And you need to recruit like you sell.” Keep a careers page open all year and start a simple employee referral program. Clint adds, “Your best customers often come from referrals; the same is true for your best employees.” (Your regulars are often your next employees, too.)
Step 4: Contact every applicant within 24 hours
How fast should you respond? Within a day. Our 24-48-5 rule says to contact applicants within 24 hours, schedule an interview within 48 hours, and hire within five days. And the data shows why. This is what happened to interview scheduling across service franchises, depending on how long applicants waited:
| When the applicant was contacted | Scheduled for an interview |
|---|---|
| Within 24 hours | 31% |
| Within 48 hours | 26.2% |
| After four weeks | 11.5% |
Source: 2026 Franchise Hiring Report
What slows hiring down the most? The wait before the first call. Most candidates “apply to multiple openings in the same job search session,” and “Whoever responds first gets the live conversation.” Restaurants took 6.5 days to first contact on average, and 5.5 days even for the applicants who got hired. The 2026 report adds that even a 48-hour response beats the segment average, so you don’t need to be perfect to pull ahead.
To get there, send “an immediate automated acknowledgment confirming receipt of the application and setting expectations,” and name one person who owns response time. Then text instead of emailing. Our text recruiting software promises to “8x your applicant response rate.”
Clint’s line fits: “Great leads are like French fries: they are at their best when they are fresh and hot!” He notes that “Some clients say that the shelf life of a good applicant in their field is 48 hours.” And he adds, “Speed gets you ahead of your competition, but persistence is often what gets you the sale.” How long does a new applicant wait on you right now?
Step 5: Let pre-screen questions sort your best applicants to the top
How do pre-screen questions get you to your best candidates first? Ask knockout questions about availability and your must-haves, and Fast Track contacts the applicants who meet them automatically. Clint says prescreen questions “may be the biggest time saver in the entire hiring process.”
Rally DeLeon, an operator at a Chick-fil-A in North Hills (Raleigh, NC), had plenty of walk-in and referral applicants but wanted to “find quality applicants faster.” He screens for experience and availability, then personality, and uses Fast Track to reach the best applicants “before competitors.” He built his interview standards from Chick-fil-A’s core values, has interviewed hundreds of applicants since partnering with us, and says the assessment tool “helps me focus on the best candidates faster.”
Marshall Wireless, a 15-location retailer in the St. Louis area, uses prescreen questions and Fast Track and received almost 3,000 applicants in six months. Its team says, “It has saved us an immense amount of time and money on wasted interviews by eliminating unqualified candidates immediately.” You can do the same with our applicant screening software.
Step 6: Stop the phone tag and prepare the interview
How does automated scheduling speed things up? As our 2026 report puts it, “The candidate picks an available time, the interview goes on the calendar.” Our automated interview scheduling page says Autopilot can “Schedule up to 8x more interviews” and “Reduce scheduling time up to 91%.” For more, see our tips to schedule interviews.
Then prepare your questions ahead of time, built on Clint’s three, and see the work where you can, like a short paid tryout shift. (Check the U.S. Department of Labor or your state labor office before you set one up.) As Clint puts it, “There is no substitute for seeing how candidates actually work.” Our restaurant interview questions are a good start.
Automate the scheduling and keep the hiring decision yours. In Clint’s Notes: “All of that can and should be automated. But evaluating whether someone should be hired? That isn’t something you want to hand off to an algorithm.”
Step 7: Decide and make the offer within 5 days
How do you make a decision and an offer before a competitor does? Decide against the profile you wrote in Step 1 and check references and red flags, but don’t let it drag. CareerPlug President Jenny Leman says “taking more than 5 days to hire causes a dramatic drop off in an employer’s ability to close the hire with the right applicant.” Restaurants convert interviews to hires at 41%, against 27% across all industries, so once you’ve interviewed, move.
Be clear about pay and schedule up front so the offer holds no surprises, and read up on why candidates turn down job offers. How many of your last offers went out within five days?
P.S. Running a franchise system? The Franchise People Playbook shows franchisors how to make fast, consistent hiring a standard across every location.
Step 8: Keep the people you hire
The fastest hire is the one you don’t have to make. Clint is plain about it: “The #1 recruiting strategy is retention.” And he’s clear about where it starts: “Your new hire’s first week sets the tone and trajectory for their time with you.” People who stay refer the next hire, which feeds Step 3. Our guides to onboarding and team management and preventing turnover without raising pay show how.
How to hire employees quickly across multiple locations
How do you keep hiring fast across several locations? One slow location hurts everyone, because job boards “down-rank postings from brands that ghost applicants.” Set one response-time standard and one set of templates and pre-screen questions for every location.
Moseley, Regional Recruiter for franchisee Chris Monteverde at Big O Tires, recruits for 24 stores in Northern California and Texas and hires for more than 100 positions a year. Saved job templates let him post quickly and manage several postings at once, and pre-qualifying lets him focus on stronger candidates. He made 18 hires in the first six weeks. Our franchise hiring software is built for exactly this.
Wrapping up: call back last week’s applicants today
Here’s your next step: pull up every applicant from the past week and call or text each one today. How long does hiring take, anyway? Restaurants averaged 16 days, and the report says they “made the hire quicker than any other industry.” Service franchises ran 18 to 24 days, depending on the industry. If you feel stuck, Clint says, “Staying stuck is almost always more expensive than moving forward.”
See how restaurants use CareerPlug to hire faster. For a quick list of tactics, see our earlier guide, How to Hire Faster: 8 Plays to Hire in 5 Days.
This guide is the short version. The full playbook for hiring and keeping great people is Clint’s book, How to Hire.