We’ve put together a series of insightful articles to help you navigate this challenging season and to help your fitness professionals feel confident as they shape or reshape their future in fitness. Our fourth article will provide you with ideas on how to support your facility’s staff.

With the outbreak of COVID-19, fitness facilities were forced to close, and many had to reduce fitness professional staff numbers due to payroll expense. This reality landed hard on facilities as they reopened their doors for members. With a reduced front line of experienced and familiar fitness professionals, operators are left to quickly recruit, hire, and train a new team to support facility operations and vision.

Staff

As an operator, how do you thoughtfully and efficiently tackle the challenge of recruiting and hiring qualified fitness professionals? The temptation is to get people on your team fast so you can start filling member requests and rebuilding your business. However, don’t run ahead without assessing and redefining your personal training vision. You have the opportunity to raise your standard of fitness professional education and customer service with the right strategy and efforts.

Personal Training Vision

In defining your vision, take time to tackle a few hard questions:

• What do you need to provide an outstanding service to your personal training clients? Consider the following fitness professional attributes:
  • Adept programming knowledge and the ability to adapt easily to provide an optimal client experience regardless of available equipment and spacing.
  • Ability to coach with external cues to prompt correct movement and performance.
  • Intangible characteristics of responsibility, maturity, and character – you will want a fitness professional that can manage multiple personalities and opinions, modes of client interaction (virtual, in-person, in-home, or emailed programming), and respect your business needs (policies and procedures).
  • Knowledge and skill set that matches to your facility and departmental training philosophy.
• What does your members' fitness experience need to feel and look like?
  • Personal training philosophy (programming strategy and style, assessments)
• What are your expectations for fitness professional continued education and development?    

These questions can help you develop a clearer understanding of the kind of fitness professional you seek to hire, as well as the structure you can provide for them to flourish and drive your business. As with everything, account for your member demographics, industry trends, and your own facility brand and mission in determining who, what, and how.

Recruit and Hire

Due to COVID-19, many fitness professionals may be looking for a new job or redirecting to serve a different niche. This works well for you as you open your search for staff. Rely on industry organizations for job postings, popular hiring websites, and especially your own personal industry connections for referrals; sometimes the latter is overlooked, but fellow professionals can be an excellent resource for you.

Indeed, the trickiest part of recruiting, hiring, and training a new employee is the interview process. You have only 1-4 hours with the potential employee; within that time, you have to assess character, skill set, and motivation and determine if he or she is the best fit for your team. You essentially have to learn as much as you can as quickly and as appropriately as possible. Following are a few strategies to help you focus your attention and efforts on assessing candidate quality:

• Handle the initial interview via phone, even if the resume is amazing! You know what you are looking for and can easily detect via conversation if it is worth your time to bring the candidate on-site for further interviews and meetings.
• Engage existing facility staff to assist with on-site interviews – even if the staff members are not a part of the fitness department. These staff members are in your trenches and can provide excellent insight into mannerisms and personality.
• Consider holding two separate interviews for character/personality and skill set.
  • Character/personality – Get to know the candidate! Ask questions about past roles, favorite type of training client, ideal schedule (this will tell you a lot), personal workout preferences, continuing education habits, etc.
  • Skill set – Provide a case study for the candidate and request he or she build out 1-3 weeks of programming, as well as present an overall training philosophy.

Think long-term about your interview process: the few hours of time initially invested may save you multiple hours in the future. Your fitness professional team is your front-line staff – set your standard for hiring the “best of the best.”

Train

All of your onboarding efforts should circle back to your established personal training vision. In the interview process, you confirmed your candidate had the technical and soft skills that you needed. Now, it is essential to emphasize your brand, expectations for the member experience, assessment protocols, and the overarching personal training philosophy so that he or she can deliver the “experience” that you want each client and member to have in your facility.

If you have an existing fitness professional that is adept at assessment protocols, programming, and client engagement, allow him or her to mentor the new fitness professional for a period of time before he or she goes live in your facility. This will off-load you in the training process, but also allow for immediate hands-on activity and engagement with members, clients, and staff.  If you are rebuilding your staff, take the first day of employment for your new fit pro and deep dive into necessary protocols and expectations. Then, pop in job shadows (either directly or indirectly) as the days unfold.

For any new employee, set up biweekly check-in meetings for the first two months to help provide time to answer questions and provide coaching. By crafting a thoughtful personal training vision and conducting a thorough interview process, you are on your way to building a fitness professional team that will help you weather the current storm and stand strong in the future.

Help your fitness professionals adapt to the changing climate brought on by COVID. Read our other articles in this series to stay well-informed:

Supporting Fitness Professionals During COVID: Mindset

Supporting Fitness Professionals During COVID: Skills

Supporting Fitness Professionals During COVID: Education