How to Scale Hiring Operations as your Business Grows

Reaching a milestone in your business where you can finally start seeing all your hard work pay off is a huge accomplishment. With your success, you’ve probably considered opening another location. But should you?

In this post, we’ll discuss: 

• When’s the right time to open a second location
• How to hire the best general managers
• How to build a scalable hiring process that works across locations 

When to expand hiring operations + open more locations

Here are five signs now’s a good time to open another location. 

1. More demand than supply. If your current business can’t handle more customers because your supplies, space, or employees are consistently at capacity – that’s a good problem to have. High demand indicates that it might be time to open a new location. 
2. You can replicate your current business operations. New businesses experience tons of trial and error before they catch their footing. But, when your business experiences steady growth, you’ll see a pattern of operational processes that play a role in this success.
   Before expanding, you’ll want to document the processes that contributed to your business’s success so you can easily replicate them and hit the ground running at your new location.
3. Identified new market opportunities. One mistake successful businesses make when they consider expanding is not verifying the market’s needs. Even if you have more customers than you can handle at your first location, it’s best to do your research beforehand. Identify if the area you plan to open a second location is worth it from a market fit standpoint.
4. Your current location can operate itself. “Make sure that you have the right team today,” says Howard Shore, a Wizehire partner and CEO of Activate Group. “The team you have may be confident and good enough to do one location. Do they have the confidence to take on extra challenges in a new market?”
   An independent staff allows you to expand your business while feeling confident your flagship is in good hands.
5. You’re financially stable. There’s no getting around it; opening a second location requires capital. Before you start scaling your business, make sure that you have healthy profit margins. Also, when considering financial stability, factor in:

• Financial downturns
• Startup costs
• Operating costs before generating profits

If you’ve run the numbers and can comfortably handle expansion, it might be time.

Picking the right general managers

You’ve done your research and now is a good time to grow; the next step is hiring. You’ll need to hire a general manager to oversee your second location’s day-to-day operations. 

Determine your needs. Your first step is figuring out what you need from your GM. Do you need someone that will be working alongside you in the early days to get that location up and running? Or will you need someone with experience building and managing a team from scratch? 

John Franklin, Co-Founder of Kilo, said, “The best multi-location owners that I know are good at hiring operators that act like owners.” 

If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, hiring coaches can help you narrow it down.

Create a job description that’s easy to understand. An unclear job ad could lead to fewer candidates applying for your position because they’re unsure what it requires. It may also encourage the wrong candidate to apply.

Having a job description with clear requirements, pay transparency, and your employer value proposition can help.

According to Robert Half, 91% of candidates would consider leaving a job within their first month. Out of those who’d leave, 44% say a discrepancy between the job ad and the actual job is the main reason. 

Use a standardized candidate screening process. Reviewing applications one-at-a-time takes time you don’t have. A standardized candidate screening process can help you save time when searching for the right candidate and increase your chances of hiring the right talent for that site. 

Establishing a hiring process that scales

An efficient and scalable hiring process can help you focus more on the big picture and spend less time second-guessing whether you hired the right person for the job. This is key, especially when you have multiple locations, each with its own operations to handle. 

Wizehire’s advanced hiring technology works to help fill your roles with the best talent on the market, providing personalized assistance with everything from creating job ads to interviewing candidates. 

Establish a process to streamline hiring ops for all your current and future locations today.