Why You Should Prioritize a Robust Mystery Shopping Program for Your Franchise Recruitment
Picture this scenario: a candidate is considering joining your franchise, and they make a phone call to inquire about the opportunity. The person on the other end of the line represents your brand and has the power to leave a lasting impression. But here’s the catch – many brands have no idea how their recruiters and appointment setters handle these crucial calls.
That’s where mystery shopping comes in, taking the mystery out of your recruitment process.
How is your recruitment team doing? How do they compare to one another? And most importantly, how can you improve your ratios and conversion metrics? These are the questions that mystery shopping helps answer by providing data and third-party analysis to ensure you’re not flying blind when it comes to the recruitment process.
Without the insights gained from mystery shopping, you might be relying solely on your recruiters’ experience and charisma to achieve success.
But that’s a risky bet.
By implementing a mystery shopping program, you’ll understand what works and what doesn’t, ensuring that your recruitment team follows the same processes and best practices to guide potential candidates through the pipeline.
Additionally, with a dedicated mystery shopping program, you’ll be able to identify what works, retain top talent, and maintain a consistent and effective process for your franchise recruitment. The stakes are high. Losing a high-performing recruiter means losing all the knowledge and success they bring to the table.
Mystery shopping expert Jayson Pearl notes that a brand can become a top performer by simply increasing upfront conversions by 1-2%.
With mystery shopping providing invaluable insights into your recruitment process, you have the potential to make dramatic improvements, setting yourself apart from the competition and driving substantial growth for your brand.
Diving Into Mystery Shopping
Now, let’s get to the heart of the matter – the why and how of implementing a robust mystery shopping program for your franchise recruitment success. It all begins with understanding the essentials.
Mystery shopping allows you to assess how effectively your recruiters handle calls with potential candidates, gaining valuable feedback and insights. Armed with this information, you’ll pinpoint areas for improvement, streamline your processes, and optimize conversion rates.
Consistency is a key component of mystery shopping. By evaluating multiple recruiters within your team, you can identify any performance variations. This data empowers you to recognize top-performing recruiters and utilize their strategies as benchmarks to elevate the entire team.
It’s all about establishing best practices that drive success across the board.
Mystery shopping also serves as a powerful training tool. The feedback collected from mystery shoppers helps identify specific areas where individual recruiters may require additional training and development. Instead of relying solely on intuition, you can leverage concrete data to foster stronger and more effective recruiters.
Getting Started With a Robust Mystery Shopping Program
The first step is to partner with a reliable third-party provider specializing in mystery shopping services. This ensures an unbiased evaluation and access to the expertise needed to design a customized program tailored to your specific recruitment goals.
Next, define the diagnostics. Aim for clear objectives and evaluation criteria. What key performance indicators do you want to assess? How will you measure success? These metrics should align with your overarching business goals while providing actionable insights for improvement.
For example, using the Recruitment Operating System® (ROS®) we score based on the “GREAT” criteria. For each conversation, we evaluate the recruiter’s Greeting, Rapport, Expertise, Ask, and Tone.
Once the stage is set, it’s time to implement the program and collect data. The mystery shopping process involves deploying trained shoppers who act as potential candidates and interact with your recruiters.
These interactions are carefully assessed and measured against the established criteria. After gathering the data, you can make objective evaluations, identify patterns and trends, and extract meaningful insights.
To take a step towards improving your recruitment efforts through a proven process, including Mystery Shopping, schedule a 30-minute Discovery Call with the ROS® team. We’ll explore whether your brand is a good fit and guide you to the next steps toward recruitment success.
The Recruitment Operating System® (ROS®) is a proven system to help franchise companies implement and execute a predictable, repeatable, and sustainable franchisee recruitment program.
Based in Temple, Texas, we work with brands worldwide.
