Franchising Solutions
Hiring and keeping good people across a franchise network
Between your franchisees and your own office, your network makes hundreds of hiring decisions a year, with no shared method behind any of them. Most come down to a CV and a first impression — including for the roles where that tells you least.
How Psych Press helps
We are a firm of organisational psychologists. We give your franchisees a short, structured way to screen the people they hire, we assess candidates for the roles inside your own business, and we find out why people leave — asked the same way in every location, so the answers add up to something you can act on.
Start a conversation with usEvery hire in your network, and none of them yours
Every employment relationship in your network sits with a franchisee, not with you, and there are good reasons to keep it that way. But you carry the result. A location that is always training someone new serves customers worse than one that isn't — same brand, same prices.
Most franchisors leave it alone, because it is the franchisee's business to run. That is fair, but it still leaves you paying for something you have tools to fix.
Your own hiring has the opposite problem. Field consultants, area managers and development managers get recruited the way any business recruits a manager — but the job is not like other management jobs, and the standard process doesn't test for what makes it different.
What that costs
Turnover is charged to your franchisees and paid for by your brand.
- The same locations recruiting and inducting new staff several times a year
- Customers served by people in their first fortnight
- Franchisees covering shifts instead of running the business
- Training that walks out the door with people who were just becoming useful
- Field consultants who can't move their franchisees, because the hire tested for operational knowledge and not for influence
- Units that never reach their numbers because they never hold a team
Two different gaps with one shared cause: hiring decisions made quickly, with no method behind them. You are better placed than your franchisees to fix the first, and better placed than a generic hiring process to fix the second. Choosing the franchisees themselves is a different question again, and that one is what our Franchise Finder is built for.
Why people stay longer in some locations than others
The manager, more than the pay.
Pay matters, but it is rarely the whole story. The same job at the same rate holds people for very different lengths of time, in locations a few suburbs apart.
The most consistent factor in the research is the person managing them. In your network that is the franchisee, or someone the franchisee appointed — which means your retention problem and your leadership problem are the same problem approached from opposite ends.
What a franchisor can do about hiring it doesn't do
Supply the method, not the hires.
You can't make your franchisees' hires, and taking it over isn't the offer. What you can remove is the reason they hire badly, which is usually speed and having no method to use. A franchisee with a shift to fill this week, a thin local pool and no process beyond an interview is not making a considered decision. They are making the only decision available to them.
A short structured screen — paid for centrally, run by the franchisee before the interview, taking 10 to 15 minutes — gives them something better than a gut call. It shows how an applicant handles the situations the job actually involves, which an interview rarely reaches, and it can measure them against the people already doing the job well in your own locations. Hiring this way brings in people who perform better and stay longer.
What the screen looks for depends on the role.
Some of these same tools appear on brand standards, where the question is what the customer receives rather than who you hired.
You take months to choose a franchisee. The person who actually serves your customer gets chosen from a CV and a single conversation.
The roles in your own business that ordinary hiring misses
Your field team has to move people who don't work for them.
Your field consultants, area managers and development managers are the people who carry the network. Their job is unusual: they have to influence franchisees who own their own businesses and have their own money at risk. They hold responsibility for results they can only persuade people into, never instruct.
A standard management hire doesn't test for that, because in most jobs the authority arrives with the title. Someone can have excellent operational judgement, know the brand thoroughly, interview well, and still spend two years unable to get a single franchisee on their patch to change anything.
What predicts it can be measured — how someone persuades without formal authority, how they hold up when pushed back on, how they work without clear lines of control. A management-level selection report tests it before you hire. Where the role matters enough, an assessment centre puts candidates through exercises built to resemble the job, and you watch them do it.
Finding out why people leave, across the whole network
Ask everyone the same questions, so the pattern shows up.
Exit interviews in a franchise network get done inconsistently, by the owner the person is leaving, if they get done at all. Whatever is said stays in that location. People also tell an independent interviewer things they will not tell whoever signed their payslip.
Asked the same way everywhere, the answers add up. One resignation is an anecdote. Forty across a network is a pattern you can act on — and the patterns are usually specific and fixable: a rostering habit, an induction that leaves people stranded in week one, a pay band that has quietly slipped behind locally.
The same applies to the people who haven't left. A climate survey across the network shows you where the next resignations are coming from while you can still do something about them.
How Psych Press helps
We build the instruments and our psychologists interpret the results — for the hires your franchisees make, the hires you make, and the people already in your network.
Retail Screening Solution
AssessmentRealistic shop-floor situations for retail applicants, taking 10–15 minutes and run by the franchisee before the interview. It measures problem-solving, following store policy, handling pressure and using initiative in a sale, compares applicants with the people already doing the job well in your own stores, and returns a ranked shortlist the moment they finish.
Hospitality Screening
AssessmentBuilt for hospitality roles: realistic situations on shift, plus questions about how applicants like to work — handling customers, solving problems, service orientation, drive, enjoying people, and coping with confrontation. Useful where turnover is high and a hiring decision often has to be made in a day.
Selection Reports
AssessmentFor the roles you hire yourself. A written report on a candidate's suitability, with packages for management, graduate, sales, customer service and administrative positions, interpreted by one of our psychologists rather than handed to you as a score.
Business Personality Reflections
AssessmentOur own personality assessment, measuring business-related competencies across a wide range of scales, with industry and job-level norms. Used where a role is senior enough to justify a fuller picture than a screen provides.
Exit Interview and Survey
SurveyDeparting employees interviewed or surveyed independently, asked the same questions in every location, and reported network-wide. What you get is not a file of individual complaints but the two or three things your network keeps telling you.
Climate Survey
SurveyThe same questions asked of the people who are still there. It shows which locations are heading for a turnover problem before the resignations arrive, and what is driving it in each case.
For other roles, the Customer Service Predictor and sales screening cover customer-facing and selling positions. The screens can all run inside our e-recruitment platform, so every location's applicants arrive screened the same way. Where a role justifies going further, the Emotional Reasoning Questionnaire — an ability test of how well someone reads what others are feeling — and our assessment centres are available. For security-services networks, the Security Employment Screening Questionnaire combines work history, reasoning, situational judgement and personality.
Our pricing scales with the situation: how many locations, which roles you screen for, how much of your own hiring you want us involved in, and whether surveying runs once or continuously. A scoping call is free and gives you a real figure.
What this looks like in practice
A network of sixty sites makes a screening questionnaire available to every franchisee, funded centrally, and at the same time starts running independent exit interviews across the whole network rather than leaving them to each owner.
The screening changes who gets hired: franchisees who use it report fewer hires that don't last the first month. The exit data does something the franchisor didn't expect. It shows that the heaviest turnover isn't spread across the network at all, but concentrated in the locations with the newest franchisees — and that the reason people give is not pay but rostering they can't plan around.
That is a field-team problem, not a hiring problem, and it gets solved in the operations manual. The two pieces of work answered different questions, and neither would have surfaced that on its own.
Frequently asked questions
Our franchisees hire their own staff. Why would they use our tool?
Because it solves a problem they already have, and it stays their decision. The questionnaire sits with them: they send it to applicants themselves and get a plain-language result back, with no training in psychology needed to act on it. Most franchisees have made a hire that cost them a month, so the offer lands as help rather than oversight. Franchisors typically fund it centrally and make it available across the network.
Won't screening slow hiring down when a shift needs filling?
The front-line screens take 10 to 15 minutes for the applicant and the result comes back automatically, so the questionnaire goes out when the application arrives and the answer is usually there before the interview would have been scheduled. For senior sales roles, a psychologist-written report takes up to two working days, which is still usually quicker than arranging a second interview. In practice it tends to speed the decision up, because the franchisee walks into the interview knowing what to ask about.
Can applicants fake their answers?
Some will try, and well-built instruments are designed with that in mind. It also helps that the screen isn't a pass mark and isn't the decision — it comes back before the interview, and most of what it does is tell the franchisee what to ask about. Someone who has answered strategically tends to claim strengths that rarely sit together in the same person, and those are exactly the claims that come apart when an interviewer asks for a specific example of having done it. For the roles you hire yourself, where one of our psychologists writes the report, that pattern is something they will pick up directly, and the report comes with interview questions aimed at it.
We already have a recruitment process for head office roles. What does this add?
Most recruitment processes are built to test whether someone can do a management job. Field and area roles need something a standard process doesn't look at: whether someone can move people who don't report to them, and who can walk away from the conversation. That is measurable, and it is the part of the role most likely to be the reason a good appointment doesn't work out.
Do franchisees see their own results?
For screening, the result goes to the franchisee because it is their hiring decision. For surveys, reporting can be set up so each franchisee sees their own location against an anonymous network average, which is usually the more useful arrangement — it gives them something to act on rather than a ranking to argue with.
What does it cost?
It depends on the number of locations, which roles are covered and how much of the work you want us to do, so we scope it with you. The figure worth putting it next to is what one location costs you when it recruits the same role three times in a year.
Start a conversation with us
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Or call us on +61 3 9670 0590.