Fitness Studio Recruiting
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Fitness Studio Recruiting
OVERVIEW
Pure Barre, a boutique fitness studio owned by Xponential Fitness, was established in 2001. The company operates on a franchise basis, bringing the low-impact, high-intensity total body workout to more than half a million clients across the U.S. and Canada.
Texas-based Sarah Hoffman came to own the Houston – West U location after dreaming big and following her fitness destiny. As a passionate Pure Barre student and teacher, Sarah envisioned putting her business and finance backgrounds to use by owning her own studio years down the road.
But her journey to studio ownership was accelerated when the owner of the Houston – West U studio decided to relocate and needed a replacement. At just 25, Sarah took over the franchise in February 2019.
The Challenge
“To be frank,” Sarah explains, “the studio was not in the optimal place.” The team she inherited didn’t have clearly delineated roles. Teaching and admin responsibilities overlapped, making studio operations difficult. But most challenging was finding the right team members to help her build the studio. “One of the hardest things has been hiring and staffing,” Sarah notes.
When trying to build a new team of front desk sales representatives, Sarah tried recruiting Pure Barre members and posting jobs on various boards. Other recruiting sites were cost-prohibitive, and free trials failed to generate relevant traffic. While her “inbox was just getting flooded,” the high volume wasn’t generating the right type of candidates. “The biggest problem was the quality,” she recalls.
In particular, Sarah needed candidates with evening availability, but wasn’t able to easily screen for this on the sites she was using. Instead, she resorted to qualifying these candidates over the phone, which required more effort and increased her time to hire. Overall, the recruiting process was exhausting.
The Solution
“SJM was presented to us on one of our Presidents’ calls by the corporate office’s head of recruiting,” Sarah recalls. As soon as the SJM team started explaining the features and cost of the applicant tracking system (ATS), she was hooked.
Being able to pay an affordable monthly fee and pause her recruiting at any time was perfect for the studio’s seasonal hiring needs. Sarah also appreciated SJM’s ability to automatically syndicate opportunities across a variety of job boards at no extra cost.
Best of all, Sarah was able to get up and running quickly, thanks to SJM’s intuitive interface. By the time Pure Barre Houston – West U was ready to hire, Sarah was able to choose from a robust, organized candidate pipeline.
“What I loved so much about SJM was that it was really easy to create filters to narrow down people you’re actually trying to look at,” Sarah recalls. One of the biggest benefits for her was being able to segment candidates with the Categories feature. “That’s how you’re going to find the gold mine. Otherwise, it’s a needle in a haystack.”
The Results
Having SJM’s comprehensive ATS in place makes things “so much easier,” for the Houston – West U studio. “I don’t have to have 15 different tabs with 15 different sites. I have one place that is my end-all, be-all — my single source of truth — that’s also here to weed through everything.”
Sarah explains that processing applications in SJM speeds her time to hire significantly. During her first round of hiring through the ATS, she “went through about a hundred resumes in about 90 minutes — and sent out about 20 interview requests within that time” using SJM’s customizable Email Templates, Workflow Helpers and Bulk Email capabilities.
“Everything was so clean and easy. I also found that the quality of the people I pulled out from SJM was higher,” Sarah explains, as compared to the results of her previous experiences.
Being able to flag applicants who didn’t have the right availability using Knockout Questions saves Sarah time from having to manually qualify candidates over the phone. She attributes her new efficiency to SJM’s powerful tools, noting that “SJM works so well for me — it streamlines everything like nobody’s business!”
In just her first year, Sarah brought about 16 new team members to the studio — and her first hire through SJM was “the perfect candidate.” As for keeping the studio running smoothly, Sarah explains that “it all starts with the hiring — and with having that be a seamless process upfront — because that sets the tone.”
Thanks to SJM, this passionate franchise owner happily says, “Now, my time is my own.”
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