Franchising is big business. According to the Canadian Franchise Association, 1 in 10 Canadians works either directly or indirectly in the franchise industry, and the industry generates $96B each year.
Franchisors and franchisees benefit from this unique business model. Franchisors benefit from the entrepreneurial drive and local knowledge of their franchise owners, while franchisees benefit from their associations with a well-known brand and proven business strategies. However, the model can present challenges, especially in recruitment.
Traditionally, franchisors steered clear of HR and recruitment, seeing these functions as the responsibility of the individual franchise owners. To a certain extent this made sense, as franchisees know their local markets and are the ones handling the day-to-day hiring and workforce management. This approach was also deemed to decrease the liability for the franchisor.
However, in a 2016 decision in California, judges suggested McDonald’s could be considered a joint employer–despite the franchise model–and thus be liable for the HR decisions made by franchisees. This prompted franchisors everywhere to start looking at their HR practices.
Addressing liabilities is a great reason to start looking at centralizing recruitment processes. By centralizing your operations, you can ensure consistency and compliance across locations. However, there are many other benefits for franchisors, too.
Decentralized approaches to recruitment can cause fragmentation across the franchise system. For example, let’s say a franchisee has set up in a prime location, and by all accounts should be turning a profit. However, their results are lagging far behind less well-positioned fellow franchisees. Why? The difference may be in their ability to hire quality candidates who are engaged and motivated to drive sales.
Centralizing HR and recruitment can also improve your relationship with individual locations. This is another benefit you can offer franchisees, who are essentially small business owners: they’re passionate about running a business, but probably aren’t HR experts. By offering centralized services like recruitment, you take a load off their plate and let them get back to doing what they do best.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a hassle-free solution to standardize recruitment across a franchise system. Our expert team helps franchisors streamline communications and processes. We help you support franchisees by implementing a process that makes sure every franchise location is presented with quality candidates for all open jobs.
You’ll get access to our deep pool of qualified candidates, a candidate-focused process, and data and insights to keep locations on track. Our solutions can be used for ongoing recruitment needs, or for projects such as seasonal recruitment or the opening of a new franchise location.
Interested in learning how Mindfield can help support your franchise? Contact us to discuss how we can work together.
About Mindfield
Mindfield is a Recruitment Outsourcing solutions provider that partners with companies to create powerful hourly workforces. Our solutions combine a recruitment team, simple to use technology and a data-driven hiring strategy that promises to improve the quality of your hourly workforce. This approach focuses on tying business outcomes such as sales performance, tenure, and engagement to the selection, hiring and measurement of quality candidates.