Staying Consistent with Decentralized Hiring: No Sweat

Everyone wants to hire the best talent for each position, yet it’s so easy to overlook one aspect of quality — consistency.

Indeed, if you can’t count on processes and technology to be reliable, you can’t turn hiring into a key business success driver. And It becomes even more of a challenge when operating a decentralized hiring model, yet still need highly specialized talent.

A recent SmartRecruiters case study explains how one of our clients, Equinox, manages dozens of upscale luxury fitness clubs with hundreds of hiring managers spread across the US, Canada and Europe. They certainly maintain high quality and consistency. In fact, the company won the “Best Quality of Hire” award at our recent Hiring Success 17 conference.

With such a diverse organization, Equinox operates under a decentralized hiring model, which creates a challenge: How do you best balance the need to be nimble and flexible at the local level and maintain high consistency across the entire brand?

Supporting high growth: Hiring the best personal trainers for every club.

As Yannick Riveti, Director of Field Recruiting at Equinox explains, “People are the core of our business. To deliver highly personalized local service, we need our subject matter experts to be in front of it.”

He says that consistency is a key success driver because, “Equinox is more than a place to work. It’s a place to achieve life goals. Something like that is special – essential to our brand and mission critical for us as an execution point.”

Achieving that level of hiring success required more than technology, but also a partner to help them adapt that technology to a unique organization, which Mr. Riveti explains encompasses “solutions designed around great local execution for our managers, regardless of discipline, whether a personal trainer or other specialized role” and that it was essential to acquire tools and design processes to quickly scale, change, and grow as the company expanded into new markets.

“We definitely wanted to partner with a company offering technology advanced enough to handle back-end processes, but also be easy to use for our local teams who focus on many other things throughout the day,” Mr. Riveti says. In 2013, Equinox partnered with SmartRecruiters to deploy our talent acquisition suite as the company rolled out its decentralized hiring model worldwide.

Massive Adoption: Consistency in Local Hiring, No Bottlenecks.

Equinox now has more than 600 SmartRecruiters users, including hiring managers, interviewers, and other leaders. Mr. Riveti says that this “massive adoption has exceeded expectations, giving multiple individuals in multiple areas a flexible system to participate in talent selection.”

He adds that Equinox hiring managers “are always on their feet, always on the move for customers. They need a solution right in their back pocket to connect with peers that may not be in the same location or even on email,” noting that mobility and collaboration are two attributes that help his organization achieve high consistency in processes that have delivered excellent results — such as a 45 percent increase in career site traffic.

“Our team was unbelievably thrilled. It just reinforced that we made the right decision for the organization in selecting SmartRecruiters,” he says.

We’re thrilled, too! Again, congratulations to Yannick. Riveti and everyone at Equinox for winning the “Best Quality of Hire” award at Hiring Success 17.

Download the full Equinox case study here.