These days, people tend to put more effort and time into taking care of their health. There are ones who want to achieve that perfect body shape, while others simply want to be physically and mentally healthy. With this lifestyle trend, there’s no denying that health and wellness-related businesses are also becoming popular. That also means that the fitness industry offers profitable opportunities.
Are you a fitness and health enthusiast who wants to share your passion with others? Or, an aspiring business owner who wants to take advantage of the growing demand in the fitness industry? The tips listed here can help you get started in opening your own fitness center.
1. Be clear with the job description
Avoid hiring unsuitable people because of inaccurate expectations regarding the position. By creating a perfect job description, you can ensure that you’ll get the right one you’re looking for. Instead of focusing too much on industry-related skills or academic requirements, write the precise performance objectives and responsibility for the open position. You can determine performance objects by taking into account factors such as timeline, client experience, and sales targets, as well as set goals for both soft and hard skills. Keep it detailed and realistic.
2. Consider team interviews
Rather than interviewing potential candidates alone, why not do it with your high-performing staff? This is a great way to ensure that the people you’re hiring can actually communicate well and work with multiple individuals. A fitness center is a social business, where every staff will have to work with different customers every single day.
Regardless of how knowledgeable or fit that candidate is, if he or she can’t confidently and happily receive groups of customers, your business will be affected. Conducting team interviews will also enable you to see how your potential applicants will blend in with your current staff. At the same time, your top employees can greatly help in evaluating the candidate. Your current team’s insights are always something you should listen to and take into account.
3. Consider people skills
Talking about being a social business, your fitness center needs hard-working, patient, and friendly people to cater to the clients’ needs. The way your employees behave and work doesn’t just affect your customer service reputation, but also your bottom line. For such reason, hire ones with appropriate people skills. Your front desk staff or fitness instructors should not only be the ones who have the ability to communicate effectively or build relationships with clients. Everyone in a fitness center plays a customer service role—yes, even the cleaning staff.
4. Use a recruitment tool
If you want to make the process a lot faster and smoother, consider using a job marketing platform. Such tools can improve your social reach, allowing you to connect with more potential candidates, and streamline the tedious collection of your applicants’ data. At the same time, you get to save time and improve your team’s productivity from performing repetitive recruitment tasks like job postings.
Using a recruitment tool will also help you automate the recruitment process and turn your focus to other important human tasks such as reviewing the candidates’ shortlist and conducting in-depth interviews. Plus, you get to effortlessly create engaging and interesting recruitment posts that are sure to attract the best talent.
5. Create an internship program
Many fitness centers nowadays create internship programs not just to get extra help on the ground, but also to find passionate like-minded enthusiasts that can potentially work for them. Several businesses can attest that they find great talent from their interns. An ideal fitness internship program can include private and team training, functional movement screen introduction, guidance on continuing education components and getting the right certifications, hands-on learning, and many more.
6. Conduct workshops and seminars
Last amazing tip for recruiting the best candidates for your fitness center is by conducting community workshops. You can do it locally or not, depending on your budget and goal. Professionals in the fitness industry love attending workshops and seminars to advance their skills and knowledge. By hosting fitness-related workshops, you can attract personal trainers, fitness instructors, and therapists who could potentially be part of your team. If you still don’t have the resources to conduct your own workshop, you can always find clubs and studios that host one and sponsor it.
Fitness centers continuously receive incredible appreciation from both health enthusiasts and average individuals. With such great demand, it’s no surprise that many people are using this opportunity to earn while promoting good health and wellness to the public. Follow our tips here and prepare yourself for the opening of your very own fitness center.
