Franchising – licensing a brand, business model, or product to a separate entity – is a popular way to run a business. And for good reason: some of the world’s best-known brands are built that way. Take American Recruiters, for example. They’re recognized by Forbes as one of America’s top professional and executive recruiting firms.
President and CEO of American Recruiters – Gino Scialdone – began his franchise program over 20 years ago. Since then, it’s grown from strength to strength.
We spoke to Gino to discover why his franchise model is a great fit for recruiters, and how the right ATS and CRM – in the shape of PCRecruiter – helps drive success.
Franchising is about systems and processes. The beauty of the franchise model is that it gives people the chance to run their own business for themselves, but not by themselves.
We started franchising for one reason: to better serve our customers’ needs.
Gino Scialdone, President and CEO, American Recruiters
This is really important in an industry like recruiting, where being able to tap into networks of people and organizations is so vital. It also helps to mitigate some of the risks involved with starting a new business. So it’s no surprise that there are nearly 800,000 franchise establishments in the US alone.
American Recruiters serves a wide range of industries – including healthcare, IT, engineering, and manufacturing – with specialist recruiters. Whether our clients are large enterprises or small businesses, they have one thing in common: they need help to bring in the right talent for multiple roles.
That’s where PCRecruiter comes in. American Recruiters uses a centralized database – a single source of truth – for all their franchisees so that people with the client relationships are clearly signposted and so “the right hand knows what the left hand is doing”.
This is similar to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system used by Realtors, where property details are listed alongside the brokers. Like an MLS, American Recruiters’ database gives franchise owners access to a ready-made network and a customer-base with an ongoing need to fill open roles.
Building a database in a recruiting CRM like PCRecruiter creates the opportunity for cross-selling and upselling. Take the healthcare sector, for example. A hospital system needs to recruit nurses, but they might also need someone for their accounting department or IT department.
The American Recruiters franchise model creates the opportunity to introduce other franchisees – experts from within the network – and get them in front of the right people. Using a single private database inside PCRecruiter, American Recruiters can look across the platform to see who their clients are, the openings they have, and then knock on some different doors within an organization.
Our franchise model does two things: it enables us to go wider and deeper with our customers, and it gives new franchisees the chance to compress the bell curve and get their business started.
Gino Scialdone, President and CEO, American Recruiters
Relationships with companies that fill permanent placements through American Recruiters present opportunities to offer contract staffing – staffing solutions for temporary positions on projects, maternity leave, and so on. At the same time, their franchise model gives new franchise owners the chance to ramp up business faster than if they were doing it on their own.
The relationships between franchisees are also a strong mechanism for support – they help each other out, working on placements together and going to each other for advice. That’s important because around 60% of placements made by American Recruiters are internal splits between franchisees. Recruiting really is a team sport.
Recruitment is a people business. American Recruiters’ top franchisees use their previous relationships to garner business for their recruiting practice. They’re real go-getters; people who are always open for business, working across timezones and leading and influencing others. Alongside the ability to build relationships, successful franchisees have three things in common: energy, engagement, and ambition.
It’s all about relationships. Either developing them with existing franchisees and their network, customers in the database, or with people outside our database.
Gino Scialdone, President and CEO, American Recruiters
Recruiting experience is an obvious feature of their resumes, but that’s not always a prerequisite. One tried and tested route to becoming a successful franchisee is for executives in transition. These individuals move from being the leader of an organization within a particular sector to becoming an executive search consultant. Seasoned executives know their business, know the people, and they know their industry.
Specializing works because it’s difficult to be all things to all people. In the type of recruitment that American Recruiters does, franchisees need to be entrenched in a core practice. They may diversify their specialties over time, but specific knowledge of a niche is invaluable for executive search. Couple that knowledge with good experience of sales, and you have the recipe for recruiting franchise success.
In recruiting, collaboration is key. American Recruiters’ private database in PCRecruiter enables franchisees to work as a team rather than being siloed. Franchisees also benefit from exceptional brand resilience; they move forward with the power of the American Recruiters brand behind them.
Over the years, American Recruiters has weathered multiple financial storms, from Black Monday in 1987 to the Great Recession in 2008, and more recently the global pandemic that wiped out around 40% of recruiting firms. That’s just one reason why Forbes has recognized American Recruiters as one of the top 250 professional recruiting and staffing firms since 2016.
No matter how stellar the recruitment tech, if you can’t get someone on the phone to walk you through something – like training or setting up a new feature – the shine quickly diminishes. With PCRecruiter there’s always someone there to help.
Gino Scialdone, President and CEO, American Recruiters
This endorsement makes the brand attractive to both companies seeking a high-performing recruiting firm and potential franchisees looking to grow their own business by being part of an established recruiting brand. They also get peace of mind from PCRecruiter’s robust security protocols, which ensure the database is protected from nefarious external parties. At the same time, they benefit from reliable, high-quality, and on-demand customer support. After all, successful recruiting – and recruiting tech – is all about people.
To discover more about American Recruiters’ winning franchise model, visit their website at https://www.americanrecruiters.com/franchise-now/
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Sounds interesting! Can non-US based recruitment businesses connect in, in any way? For example, if I had a US based client seeking to recruit? Or a candidate seeking a role in the US – and possibly already studying/working there legally…
Hi Greg! We’ll find out and get in touch. Thanks for reading!