Company
With around 80 locations in the US, Canada and Europe, Equinox has become the benchmark for high quality gym and fitness clubs around the world. The company prides itself on creating bespoke experiences with their customers, providing ample face-to-face time with highly trained and knowledgeable professionals.
Hiring success for this human-centric business is therefore of critical importance. The employees and their experience are the very product Equinox aims to sell and to achieve this they need to be able to find and hire the best people out there.
Equinox uses a decentralized system for recruitment in which local branch managers conduct their own hiring based on their requirements. This approach utilizes around 20 full-time recruiters supported by over 300 local hiring managers who also often carry out many other Equinox activities on a day-to-day basis.
“For the first time in the history of Equinox, we have a centralized digital record of every application to every position, affording a talent pipeline and insight into the recruiting process we could never have imagined.”
Yannick RivetiDirector of Field Recruiting
Challenges
Although this approach provides the flexibility local managers need to keep their branches well staffed, it also comes packaged with some inherent issues. Most importantly is the concern a highly decentralized approach will suffer from a lack of consistency in the long run.
Equinox’s brand depends on all their branches meeting the same high-quality standards customers have come to expect. Several, or perhaps even a single, poor hire in one branch could potentially cause ongoing brand problems for Equinox, especially considering they primarily court luxury customers.
Another issue concerns the tools Equinox needs to fulfill this hiring goal. The core strength and value of the company comes from the knowledge of its trainers and professionals in relation to their chosen speciality. This specialist knowledge is unlikely to be possessed by full-time recruiters and hiring managers. Therefore, it makes sense for Equinox to allow its trainers, nutritionists and instructors to conduct hiring themselves. For this to be effective, they need to have access to an easy to use platform that economises their time because the last thing an Equinox trainer wants to do is spend hours trying to work with clunky software in a backroom.
Solution
To solve this problem, Equinox joined SmartRecruiters in 2013. Here’s why they haven’t looked back:
- SmartRecruiters has collaboration as a keystone of the platform, allowing diverse hiring managers from across the country to openly and conveniently discuss candidates. This was particularly useful for Equinox, since knowledge from other branches could be brought into the hiring process if it was not locally available.
- The platform is also incredibly flexible and mobile, allowing trainers-cum-hiring managers to hire on the move, saving them vast amounts of time and allowing them to concentrate on other responsibilities.
- The use of SmartRecruiters’ customizable scorecards allows recruiters to create a consistent assessment process to be used across the board. This ensures that although local managers have the freedom to work on their own, they also adhere to the high quality standards required.
- All of these factors, combined with SmartRecruiters’ support for social media and one-click-applications, results in a great candidate experience which supports the brand Equinox wishes to project.
Results
After teaming up with SmartRecruiters, Equinox quickly saw an increase in applications — to the tune of 45 percent. Additionally, they saw an increase of 9 percent in terms of new hires, while 80 percent of individuals who saw a job posting applied to it.
