Leighann Emo, a hiring strategist at Wizehire, shares four steps you can take to streamline the candidate screening process.
When it comes to recruitment, fitness studio and gym owners have unique needs. You want to hire people who have the skills, experience and personality needed to help members achieve their fitness goals.
But it’s almost impossible to tell if someone fits the bill just by reading their resume.
Here are four steps you can take to streamline the candidate screening process and make sure you find the right people for your growing business.
Craft Job- and Role-Specific Interview Questions
For health club owners, one of the biggest recruitment challenges is the diversity of roles to fill. Hiring a trainer is a different process than finding the right person for the front desk. The experience and qualifications of a yoga teacher are different from those of a Les Mills BODYPUMP instructor.
Creating a database of job-specific questions and checklists helps you capture the exact information you need to find the right employee for every role. Every time.
Get Better Insights from Behavioral and Situational Questions
Finding a person with the right background and training is step one. Step two is making sure they have the soft skills necessary to work directly with members.
Behavioral and situational questions can help you get a sense of the candidate’s personality, mindset and how they respond to stressful situations.
For example:
- “Describe a time when you had to address the concerns of a dissatisfied gym member.”
- “How would you correct a client who is using the equipment incorrectly—without making the situation awkward or embarrassing?”
You can ask these questions on your application form, on phone or Zoom screenings, or during in-person interviews.
Incorporate Practical Skills Assessments in the Hiring Process
Practical skills assessments let you move beyond the hypothetical to see how candidates respond to real-world situations that happen in health clubs every day.
These might include helping someone perfect their squat form or responding to a health emergency. Other practical skills assessments could include maintaining or cleaning fitness machines, leading a small group class or selling a training program to a prospective member.
Embrace Tools that Make it Easier to Screen Candidates
Capturing and organizing all this information is a tall task. Especially if hiring managers are spread out across multiple locations.
But there are tools gyms can use to streamline and standardize all the information they collect about each candidate — from initial application to first phone screen to final reference check.
Free apps let you manually create databases of questions, forms and checklists. You can also upgrade to a paid solution designed specifically for recruiting and hiring.
One bonus of the paid tools: They can help filter out information that might introduce bias into the screening process. Hiring managers may unconsciously judge someone by their name, address, or educational background.
By focusing only on the information that matters, club owners can find the right people for their growing team while strengthening their candidate experience.
