This most common trap is often the least true. Sometimes yes, but often no. But it’s the easiest action to feel good about; it’s quick, decisive and buys time.

Consider how often recruiters change jobs. Can there be that many bad recruiters in franchising? Not likely. Our experience points to first examining your franchisee recruitment processes. Find and fix the flaws. Just ask. You’ll find them.

A new recruiter is a “do over”. It’s surrender. A new recruiter simply rinses and repeats the existing recruitment process. A new recruiter has to “get up to speed” so your growth goals are further deferred. If the hire doesn’t work out, you’re back to square one.

Fix your franchisee recruitment process first; not the recruiter

Carefully examine the assumptions underlying your franchisee recruitment goal-setting. Good recruiters can’t meet bad goals or execute a flawed process. Good goals require metrics, tracking and accountability.

Goal setting based on so-called industry ratios or “that’s what [insert company here] is doing” can easily send you down a black hole. The most common industry myth about ratios is something like…”if we have 150 leads a month, we should sign one new agreement a month.” Rarely are these mythical ratios supported by the franchise brands history and internal data. But it’s a myth, so we run with it.

Ratios make for great spreadsheets. When not based on your specific franchise data, the underlying assumptions are often wrong. Slow, sometimes no growth is the price paid by many emerging brands.

So if your goal setting isn’t rooted in your brand’s real experience, your recruiter (new or veteran) bears the burden of trying to achieve often unrealistic goals. You end up with one frustrated person trying to do a good job against the wrong set of goals.

If things are going sideways, look first to improve your recruitment and goal-setting processes. Otherwise, more careers, budgets, departments, reputations and your franchise brand will all take a hit.

Failing to get around this trap often leads to frustration.

When goals are in jeopardy the call goes out to “get more leads”. More money is spent on online advertising, portals, webinars or any idea that can get funded. Everyone wants to believe working more leads will put us back in control.

But think about it, recruitment already spends around 43% of work time chasing the leads coming in the door. Three attempts to reach a lead chews up an average 26 minutes per lead week after week, month after month.

Plus it’s highly likely you’ve only actually talked to about 30% of those leads. So if you bring in another 50-100 leads a month your recruiter will spend 10%, 20% even 30% more work time to chase those mostly unqualified leads.

We’ve done time studies. The time taken to speak to ever more leads sucks the energy, enthusiasm and spirit from good recruitment pros. And the results don’t materially change because there’s only so many hours in a day.

The illusion of a false pipeline hurts recruitment and hurts brands. It’s like getting a false positive on a critical medical test. Nothing good comes of it. So how come we see lots of leads enter the top of your recruitment pipeline, yet see the same dismal number of signed agreements at the bottom?

Here is some faulty thinking that leads us directly into this trap…

• “The pipeline will look healthy. We’ll weed them out later.”
• “The cream will rise. Interested leads will get our time and attention.”
• “They feel right, so let’s put them in just in case.”

If too many of the wrong people enter your recruitment funnel, you end up giving the good leads and the bad leads equal attention. Focus wavers. Quality and results suffer as your good leads move on to another brand.

Working smarter to find fewer Qualified Prospects gets more agreements signed instead of weeding out a bunch of people who should never have been advanced in the first place.

Similar to Trap #2, recruiters only speak with roughly 30% of the leads already coming in. Cold-calling more often doesn’t improve the connection rate.

Calling more leads, hoping for more conversations means you’re rolling the dice that those you speak with will be more of the “right” people. That rarely turns out to be the case. More does not equal qualified. But buried among those leads are the right people.

There are qualified people with potential that won’t get the attention they need; qualified people that don’t learn about your opportunity.

To avoid this trap, examine your storytelling. Is your brand story complete and transparent? Do you hide behind gated virtual brochures that turn off visitors? Does your story educate and persuade your leads to want to learn more about your brand?

In our experience, a well-crafted franchise concept story, if correctly presented, engages and

encourages qualified leads to come to you. It mixes both art and science, fully leveraging all the advantages of the Internet.  In over six years, our recruiters haven’t made a single outbound call to a lead, yet we consistently deliver a typical 50% increase in new franchisees signed over previous years’ averages.

Recruiters don’t speak to about 70% of leads. Is it timing? Is it lack of interest? For most, the answer is yes. The challenge: to find the diamonds buried in piles of dormant “leads”. They’re the ones that want to learn about your brand and what it can do for them. Can you find them?

We’re often asked: Is it worth staying in touch with uncontacted leads? The answer is unequivocally yes!

However, often the budget, time and attention required to support effective vs cosmetic re-engagement programs gets shortchanged. Any available budget often goes to pay for more new leads or something else with short-term potential.

Consequently older, dormant leads are rarely relevant. Consider this: Can you tell which leads showed no, a little or a lot of interest in your opportunity? If you can, do you message them differently?