“Time is money” is such a rote, overused cliche that I try to avoid typing it unless there’s no alternatives — and when you’re talking frontline, hourly hiring, there sort of isn’t. Time isn’t just money, it’s everything. How fast can you respond to candidates? Schedule? Hire? Onboard? Start? When you’re fast, you win.
For Sport Clips — one of the fastest growing franchise concepts in the country with over 1,800 locations — their target time was 15 minutes. Any slower, and their top candidates were at risk of going elsewhere. So, how do they ensure that doesn’t happen? I recently spoke with Sport Clips Director of TA DeLisa Atkinson about how staffing fuels business impact, strategies for centralizing franchise recruiting, and of course, time.
Erik Schmidt: What are the unique challenges that Sports Clips faces and how have you been able to overcome or manage those challenges to successfully staff your stores?
DeLisa Atkinson: I would say a big challenge within our industry is when people apply to us, unfortunately they're not just applying to us. There's a lot of competition within our industry. If you're in a shopping center, you might see a Sport Clips and then right around the corner you see a Great Clips as well. It’s very competitive, so you have to be quick to respond. We know whoever responds first, whoever sets up an interview first with an applicant, is going to have a higher probability of being the first one to decide if they're the right fit for them and hire them or not. That's one thing that is absolutely important to us and that we really stress with our franchisees is we want our candidates contacted within 15 minutes of applying. That's ideal.
Whoever sets up an interview first with an applicant is going to have a higher probability of being able to be the first one to decide if they're the right fit for them and hire them or not.
ES: So that’s a natural segue into where Paradox comes in. How have we helped you get to candidates faster?
DA: One interesting note is that we’re actually Paradox’s first franchise client. We've been with you for over seven years now. So we use Paradox across the process — candidates can talk to our AI assistant named Kenzie, who is there via chat widget on our career site or via text. Kenzie can respond to candidates immediately and help them get scheduled for interviews within a few minutes. As I mentioned earlier, it's so important that we contact our candidates ASAP. They're not just applying eight to five, Monday through Friday. Questions and applications are coming in after hours. So it’s really impactful that no matter when candidates come in, they can interact with Kenzie and then when someone is back in the office, the interviews are scheduled on their calendars.
ES: What kind of candidates are you looking for, from a personality standpoint? Is there anything unique about that “idea” person you’re looking for compared to competitors?
DA: We really look for personality. That is huge. All of those soft skills are really what we focus on. We look for people who are going to be coachable and trainable. One thing that is unique about Sport Clips is that we hire people with experience and some straight out of school where some brands require one or two years of experience. We really do put a big emphasis on our training program — we truly believe that if you have the right personality and soft skills, we can train you even if you’ve never cut men’s hair before.
ES: Like a lot of hourly, service-based organizations, if you’re not fully staffed it’s going to directly impact your customer experience. Why is being fully so vital for Sport Clips?
DA: For starters, we are not appointment-based. We do have online check-in on both web and a mobile app, but we do have lots of clients who just walk in. So that’s why it's so important we are staffed — if a client comes in, it’s important that they don't have to sit and wait a long time because a long wait could make them want to leave and go elsewhere. Whenever we're in situations where we're tight on staffing, it definitely puts a lot of stress on our team members within the stores. If there's six people sitting in the lobby and there's only three people cutting, that's super stressful knowing you have to focus on the client in your chair but there’s also people waiting.
Then I would say too, the trickle down effect is how staffing impacts our marketing. If we have a store with only three stylists, then we have to scale back marketing because even if we increase traffic to that location, they’re not going to be able to handle that volume. Ultimately, this is directly affecting money for our stylists and the franchisees.
ES: Since you have a partial franchise model, how have you tried to centralize some of your recruiting efforts to make things easier for all your different locations?
DA: We have funds set up for recruitment, marketing, and technology. Franchisees pay into these funds, and that pool of dollars allows us to centralize certain efforts. For example, with Paradox and Indeed job postings, we're able to offer these proactive tools to our franchisees. We can make the decision that certain tools are going to help our franchisees, and then the fund allows us to go out and pay for those tools.
It's really nice because it allows us to innovate, and go, “Okay, let's try this. We'll see if it works.” We typically test in our company stores.Sport Clips owns 81 locations where we can test different tools to see if it works or if it doesn't work. Then we'll roll it out to the franchise system.
