Creating a stronger franchise system starts with the recruitment and selection process of new franchisees. Finding and recruiting top franchisees specific to your business model doesn’t have to be based on gut feelings or guesses by your team. Rather, franchise assessment tools are bringing clarity and consistency to the franchisee recruitment and selection process.
One such tool, Proven Match, has a 93 percent success rate when it comes to predicting the accuracy and future performance of prospective franchisee candidates. The company integrates seven behavioral dimensions into one comprehensive psychometric assessment to identify the profile of top performing franchisees within specific business models.
Identifying those individuals who are most likely to succeed is more than looking at their age, net worth, education and income. What other areas should you focus on before onboarding a new franchisee? Consider the following five areas to qualify candidate compatibility:
- What are the values and motives of the candidate?
Motives are the only true predictors of behavior and performance. Why does this candidate want to be a business owner? What kind of business owner will they be? These questions can be answered by better understanding what the candidate’s driving factors are for wanting to be a franchise business owner.
When speaking with a candidate, you may find that the individual aspires to be an influencer and is excited by innovation and new ideas. If so, a start-up franchise where they can make their mark or perhaps a cause-based business opportunity would be best suited for that candidate. On the other hand, an individual that values stability and security may find success in a mature brand with its firmly established processes and procedures.
- What type of leadership style does your franchise thrive on?
As a franchisor, it’s important to understand what type of leadership skills are required of your franchise owners. Turning towards your current top performing franchisees, you can use their style as a benchmark to compare against incoming candidates.
Does the franchise owner role require the individual to be an autocratic leader, making all of the decisions at the manager level? Or, is a collaborative style more conducive to the work environment? Leadership style will play a direct role in determining the direction of the business and employee motivation. A good leader can produce happy, motivated employees, which translates to higher productivity and a successful business.
- What is your ideal franchisee’s work style?
A candidate’s work style refers to those aspects of their personality pertinent to running a business. This includes managing time and resources. Work style can help determine how a candidate will prioritize, what type of workplace that individual will create, and identify particular strengths and weaknesses.
Take for instance a candidate who has a primary work style of a director. You can expect that individual to have strong administrative and leadership skills, work at a fast pace and create an efficient and structured workplace. If the franchise requires the owner to be the face of the business, then you are looking for a candidate that is enthusiastic, outgoing and social, in other words, a work style characterized as “promoter.”
- How does the candidate respond to rules, systems and procedures?
When assessing your candidates’ ability to follow rules and regulations, what you are reviewing is their compliance score. How willing are they to follow a certain set of procedures?
Depending on the life stage of your franchise, the systems may still be developing and evolving. If so, then it’s important to understand if a candidate can be flexible as those standards are changed and updated. Candidates unable or unwilling to follow policies and procedures, however, may find that franchising is not the best business ownership option for them.
- What core competencies are complementary to the business?
Core competencies refer to a candidate’s set of transferrable professional and technical skills. When reviewing potential franchisee’s skillset and business acumen, look for those areas that complement your own. For instance, does your franchise model thrive on building excellent rapport or helping others make educated decisions? Then perhaps you are looking for someone who has strong sales and promotional skills.
Assessing your candidates prior to bringing them into your franchise system allows you to not only recruit a better quality candidate, but also achieve greater retention. Knowing what to look for, however, begins with assessing your current top performing franchisees. They can be your best reference to understanding what values and motives, leadership and work styles, compliance and core competencies to look for during your recruitment and selection process. If you are ready to develop a consistent and accurate system that takes the guesswork out of identifying top performing franchisee candidates, it may be time to try a proven behavioral science assessment.
*Content provided by Proven Match to Goliath Consulting Group
About Proven Match
Proven Match is a franchise behavioral assessment tool designed for franchisors to recruit and identify ideal franchisee candidates. Powered by franchise industry leader FranNet, the Proven Match process combines neuro-linguistic programming technology with FranNet’s knowledge of more than 25 years in the industry. The comprehensive psychometric assessment is composed of seven behavioral dimensions and equips franchisors with insights about the specific and successful franchisee profiles in their system. For more information on Proven Match, visit www.provenmatch.com