6 Tips For Fitness Business Hiring

Here at the Fitness Business Asia podcast (available on Apple or Spotify) we've decided to convert some of our most popular podcasts to articles.

If you missed it, here's our last article on 7 Common Mistakes Fitness Studios Make (and how to solve them)

Hiring the right people for your fitness business will make or break it.

In our industry, a strong team that represents your offering and brand in the right way will take your company from strength to strength.

Bad, toxic hires, left unchecked, can rot the company from the inside out.

This article isn’t a guide to fix and sort out your recruitment process in 5 minutes but it should give you some solid ideas on what you need to work on.

If you can pick just one thing from this list to delve into and develop, then this will be 5 minutes well spent.

OK, here are our top six tips on strong recruitment for your fitness business.

Hire Slow

Take your time with the recruitment process.

When we hire at BASE, we'll have multiple meetings with any new recruit. For coaching hires, we always have to see them in action with a trial training session. This is non-negotiable for us and is one reason we find it hard to hire from abroad.

A pivotal part of the process for me is giving them constructive feedback after the trial training session.

How do they handle feedback on how they could improve? If they get upset or overly defensive then I know they won't be a good fit for our culture, as we give a lot of feedback to keep our coaches at the top of the industry.

In the past, I have not hired a coach because although overall things looked good, when I gave some constructive feedback, which was very diplomatically phrased, they became very defensive and emotional.

This instantly told me that they wouldn’t be a good fit for our company and swayed the recruiting decision against them.

Fire Fast

Tip number 2 completes the phrase 'hire slow, fire fast', which has served me well in my fitness business journey.

You will not always get it right. No matter how robust and comprehensive your process is, you will not always recruit the right people for your business.

Sometimes they may be very good at hiding poor traits in interviews, or perhaps you decided to give them a bit of a chance and took a risk.

Maybe you wanted to see something in them so badly that you overlooked some of their qualities that made them the wrong fit for you.

I believe that even the worst hires should shine in the first few weeks or months. If they are showing early warning signs and red flags from the very beginning, there’s a very low chance that things will improve.

When this happens, I have one very frank and direct discussion on what we need to see at our company and the issues at hand. I would explain why these things are so important to us and would like to see their agreement on the importance of the things that have concerned us.

Hopefully, after this initial meeting you can make your standards clear and you can both move forwards together positively. If, after a clear and positive early discussion you don’t see improvements, you should almost certainly end things there, for everyone’s sake.

Ask yourself ‘are they a good fit’, rather than ‘are they good people’.

I don’t believe that there are bad and good employees and employers, there are only good and bad fits between the two. If someone doesn’t work out for us, then it’s simply not a good fit, and that’s not necessarily anyone’s fault, it’s just the way it is.

This may seem idealistic and a bit fluffy, but it’s absolutely true.

Let’s take an example – at BASE, punctuality is extremely important to us. We need to see coaches and staff arrive early, pumped and ready to deliver a great session. If a member of staff is really struggling with this and after repeated discussions just cannot get it, then their approach to punctuality is simply not a good fit with ours.

A work environment that isn’t so insistent and hot on being early or prepared would be a better fit for this employee, and there are plenty of workplaces and professions where this will be the case.

Some people I’m sure will think we go too far with this and that’s fine – again, simply not a good fit, and the team we have now are on the same page and get it and our business runs well due to it.

Recruit in line with your values

You hear a lot about mission, vision and values and for good reason. You need to know what you, your team and your company stand for as this guides you in the decisions you make, and that certainly includes your HR decisions.

I’m often asked what I would do differently if I could go back to the start of our company, and one thing I would say is establishing our values earlier. After about a year of operation we had a process of getting our values down which involved the whole team and it really was a pivotal moment for the company.

Giving reasons our actions suddenly became much easier, as we could clearly define if it was in line with our values, or not.

This couldn’t be more true than for our hiring decisions.

Now many companies - and I think this was us to a certain extent - will naturally live by certain values without even knowing it, but getting these things down is important.

Let’s give a practical example so it makes more sense.

One of our values at BASE is that we are centers of positivity and we work to create an environment for everyone in the company – both staff and clients – that’s free of drama and negativity.

Based on the conversations we have with potential staff we can often see if this is something that’s important to them. You can ask questions about how their last workplace was, how they deal with difficult clients or how they would resolve conflict with another member of staff or a client.

During the recruitment process, some applicants make it blindingly obvious what their values are and this makes it very easy to see if they’re a good fit with yours.

If they're very much an 'open book' with their personality, it makes it easy to see if they will slot in well and be a strong part of your team... or not.

Sometimes this makes it easy to recruit, sometimes it makes it an easy decision not to recruit.

Other applicants on the other hand may be very good at hiding certain traits they have, knowing that it might not be a good fit for your company. They’ll basically say whatever needs to be said to get the job.

Some may not even know how they are – they might really believe they are positive, open and hard working – but your standards and interpretation of these things might be different to theirs.

Two things you can do to handle this – one is to ask lots of open questions and let them talk as much as possible. Don’t say much, just ask questions to dig deeper into their thoughts on things. If they start saying something that’s a potential red flag then just nod and smile and encourage them to talk more about it.

The second thing is to use the probation to see if what they’ve shown you during the interview process is consistent with how they are day-to-day long-term. If it is, then great, you’ve made a good hire and you can move forwards towards a permanent role. If it’s not consistent, then go to tip 2, fire fast.

Set Expectations Early

Early on in the recruitment process you need to let your new staff know exactly what is expected of them in this role. You cannot be clear enough on this.

Firstly, if you don’t let them know what’s expected then it’s not really giving them a fair chance to do fulfill the duties of the position well.

Also, once this is done, it makes conversations about things not being done as you expect them much easier

Again, let’s take an example to clarify.

Let’s say you run a yoga studio and you tell your new instructor to come early to each class to prepare. They start the role full of energy and come to the studio 30 minutes early and they get the room, the music and everything set up perfectly. After a week it becomes 20 minutes early but you think, it’s all good, it’s still enough time. That becomes 15 minutes and you’re still ok with this. Then a week later it’s 10 minutes and hurrying through the class set up. You then pull them aside and say that’s not how you want it done, they then go back to 30 minutes which you’re really happy about but then it becomes 20 minutes... and so the cycle continues.

I’ve spoken to many studio owners and this is a common problem. What it needs is a clear, objective expectation that’s communicated properly, such as:

You must be at the studio 20 minutes before the start time of the class.

Let’s say in the second week they arrive 18 minutes before the class, you can pull them aside and remind them that they must arrive 20 minutes before, explain why this is important to the class experience and get their agreement. This nips it in the bud early and sets the expectation. It’s hard to let this slip as it’s so clear.

If this is done right, you start to create a culture whereby everyone knows and feels that coming in 15 minutes before the class is not OK. Not by the company’s standards and hopefully by now, if you’ve set the expectations in the right way, not by their standards either.

This is just one example, you should set clear expectations like this across all aspects of the role and company.

Repeat this process until it becomes an innate part of the DNA of your company.

They're interviewing you, too

Remember that this process is also them interviewing you, to see if your company is a good fit for them.

This is certainly true of the very best staff.

If you don’t have much in place for recruitment, good quality staff will actually be turned off by you not investing much into the process and decision. It will be a red flag for them.

Reframe the interview process as ‘getting to know whether you’re a good fit for each other’, rather than whether you ‘accept’ them to be part of your company.

When you come across a superstar member of staff, this will help show them that you're a top place to work and will value this as a two way working relationship.

Summary

Invest time and energy into your recruitment process and the benefits of company culture and atmosphere will be returned 10x.

If you have a slick and robust recruitment and on-boarding process then high quality staff will appreciate and see that your company will be a great place to work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jack Thomas is a Bangkok-based Brit and the founder and CEO of BASE.

Jack hosts the Fitness Business Asia podcast which releases a fresh episode each Monday.