In this article I am going to show you how to hire the right gym staff for your businesses, show you why the quality of your staff matters and how you go about identifying and finding the best possible candidates.
I have grown my own gym from scratch and sold it back in 2017 for seven figures and the one thing I learned very quickly…..Your gym staff are both your strongest and weakest asset, depending on the quality you get through the door.
Hiring the right gym staff for your business is critical for your ongoing success.
The most important asset to most businesses is the quality of their staff, here’s why:
Hiring the Best Gym Staff will save you money in the long run.
Like most things in life, sometimes you have to pay a little more to get a better product or service, as sometimes when you opt for the cheap route, you get exactly what you pay for.
Employment is very similar in this way!
It costs both money and time to create job posts, ring or message candidates, set-up and conduct interviews as well as the time it takes to train your new candidates and allow them settling in time periods to adapt to their new role.
Pay your gym staff appropriately against the market value of the role you’re offering and you will retain staff for longer, reduce annual recruitment costs and most importantly they will drive a bigger return on productivity and income.
Your gym members experience is crucial and what plays a huge part in their experience is your staff.
See below this 5 star review on Pure Gym’s Trustpilot page, where a gym member has highlighted how “welcoming, encouraging and informative” the gym team have been:
Notice how their review doesn’t even mention the equipment, cleanliness, accessibility or anything else for that matter. This is the power of having customer focused team members in your gym.
This high level of customer service leads to improved gym member retention, which consequently improves your bottom line.
There are going to be many times where you’re not around, whether that’s on evenings, weekends or you are on annual leave.
Hiring good quality gym staff is important to ensure the business functions in the same way as if you were there and high quality staff will reduce both your stress and workload.
High calibre gym staff are reliable, will work hard for you and add huge value to both your members and the growth of your gym.
The first place to start when deciding how to hire gym staff is to identify which roles your gym needs based on the type of gym you have.
The style of your gym, business model and target market will determine what gym staff roles you require. For example, a large commercial health club might need all the roles listed below, whereas a more spit and sawdust gym on an industrial estate might only need a few of the roles.
Here are some types of Roles you Might Want to Consider Hiring for:
Front of House Receptionists - If you require an individual(s) to meet and greet members when they enter the gym, make class bookings for members, serve coffees or sell merchandising or supplements.
Gym Sales staff / membership advisor - You might need a sales team member to sell gym memberships, handle new enquiries, process contracts and promote the gym in the local community.
Class Instructors - Are you planning to offer classes? If so you might need to hire some class instructors to deliver engaging classes, that are both fun and motivational.
Personal Trainers - Are you looking to offer Personal Training as a service or maybe have Personal Trainers rent space within your gym? You'll want individuals that
Lifeguards / Pool attendants - Does your gym have a pool? If so you might need to hire a lifeguard or pool attendant depending on the depth of the pool to ensure you're compliant with health and safety regulations.
Swimming Teachers - If you have a pool, you could hire swimming instructors and add swimming teaching as a secondary revenue stream to your gym or health club.
Nutritionists / Dietician - If you offer nutrition plans to clients, you might want to hire a nutritionist or dietician to offer prescribed nutrition plans to cater for those clients with medical conditions, allergies or religious diets.
Physiotherapists - Some premium health clubs offer onsite physiotherapy to help gym members with rehabilitation and injury preventative strategies. Some gyms that have spare office space, convert their dead space into
Sports Massage Therapists -You could hire Sports massage therapists or have them rent a room within your facility. Sports massage therapists help members that sustain muscular based injuries or
Fitness Manager / Personal Training Manager - If you have hired a large number of fitness staff, you may need a Fitness Manager or PT manager to organise them, drive productivity, member experience, as well as things like health and safety on the gym floor and secondary revenue such as selling supplements or heart rate monitors.
Operational Managers - Operations managers are people who oversee the day-to-day operations of the gym, such as equipment maintenance, inventory is stocked, recruitment processes are in place and that the gym is compliant with laws and company policies.
Assistant Manager - If you're the manager of the gym, you might want to hire an assistant gym manager to help you execute your duties and fill in for you when you're not available. An assistant manager can "assist" you with tasks such onboarding new starters, rotas, team meetings, operational compliance, member and sales reports, in addition to conducting training and managing secondary revenue.
General Manager - General managers are responsible for how the gym performs from member engagement and satisfaction through to financial performance of the gym. A general manager will performance manage all departments and develop business strategies to help the gym member base grow.
Cleaners - You might need to hire cleaners to ensure the gym is clean, well presented and tidy.
Maintenance Engineer- Are you planning to have equipment engineers contracted or have an onsite engineer to fix any issues with broken equipment.
Marketing Staff - You might need various marketing staff to advertise, promote and generate enquiries into your gym. You can hire a general marketer, or have specifics roles like a PPC marketer if you're planning on running Instagram ads or Google ads or a social media marketer if you need someone to manage your social presence.
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What benefits and value does your company offer for an employee to work at your gym?
In the modern age more than ever gyms are fiercely competing for gym staff talent and you need to make your gym stand out from rivals.
You can quickly add value and benefits when hiring gym employees through a number of ways:
This is a nice gesture to offer gym staff as not just is it good marketing to attract good gym staff, but it’s most likely one of the least productive days of the year for most employees.
See here how Fitness First are offering all staff their birthdays off as part of their employee benefits scheme:
Offering full paid sick pay is a big pulling factor for many gym staff as it offers them security. You can limit the number of paid days per year if you wish to.
All staff love the opportunity to develop and fitness staff in particular would relish the chance to take on extra qualifications.
Sing up to the Cycle to work scheme is an employee benefit which requires employers to sign up to so that staff can buy a bike with no upfront fees and then they pay for the bike via their pay slip each month.
Helping out in your local community or running a fitness charity event is a great way of evidencing to candidate's about your company values and ethos.
See below how Bolton based gym, The Colony ran a free bootcamp for everyone ij the local communty to raise money for Mhist, a mental health independent support team in Bolton. It even got picked up by the local media, giving them further exposure in their area
Allow where possible staff to take lunch against their appointments or start and finish work earlier or later. Adding aspects of flexibility into job roles can help your staff balance their work and social life better and is a big pulling factor for many job seekers.
You could run quarterly social events that are subsidised for by the company. This is not just great to show your gym values your staff, but it can be cross utilised as a team building exercise.
See an example here from Training Provider OriGym, who ran their staff event at Escape Live, an Escape Room style activity:
You can hire gym staff and after they have completed 6 months of service, allow them to have a guest membership for a friend or family member.
Offer Discounts for your gym staff - You can set-up partnerships with other companies where you promote their services to your team in exchange for them giving your gym team exclusive discounts for their products or services.
See this example here by Virgin Active who are showcasing their employee benefits on their website to try and attract applications:
When thinking about how to attract good gym staff, you need to evaluate what career progression you could offer prospective employees.
Nobody wants to work in a dead end job or have no avenue to move up the ladder.
Career Progression can take a few forms that when recruiting gym staff, your potential candidates might value:
Could the job role lead to additional responsibilities within the role they are applying for such as setting the gym rota, managing the class bookings or running gym member reports.
Outline what type of training gym staff will get and most importantly what development plans you have in place to help them improve or widen their skill set.
Are there job roles within the gym that employees could one day aspire to reach such as team leader positions, supervisors or assistant manager roles.
If you want to hire good gym staff a good way of going about this is to ask for qualifications or credentials that actually exceed the role requirements.
For example, most Gym Instructing jobs and fitness coach roles require a Level 2 in Gym Instructing, but you could ask for applicants to have more qualifications such as their Level 3 in Personal Training or a 2:1 degree within a health and fitness related discipline.
This was something that I harnessed in my high end gym for all my Personal Trainers. To even be considered for a role, they would either have to have a Level 4 specialist qualification or a degree within a fitness related field or both!
The reason I did this was two fold:
I used to advertise my gym as a high-end gym and it became known that we only hired the best, which helped boost my gym’s reputation amongst both the local community and with potential employees.
If someone already possessed a Level 4 qualification or had a degree in their back pocket, it already told me a lot about them before I even interviewed them. It tells me that they have a certain level of intelligence, can educate themselves and most likely that they had to work hard to complete said qualifications.
You should promote your jobs for gym staff in a variety of different places as the more visibility they get, the larger the number of applicants you will receive and the more choice you have.
You should harness fitness specific jobs boards that have your exact target market for your job.
For example, if you want to advertise fitness instructing jobs for your gym, you would benefit from utilising a jobs board that has thousands of fitness instructors within their database. Makes logical sense right?
Head over to our jobs board, which has thousands of gym staff candidates and start posting fitness jobs for free:
You should have a dedicated page on your website for recruitment of gym staff.
You can highlight the benefits of working at your gym, the jobs you’re hiring for and avenues for progression.
Additionally, if you SEO optimise the page properly, you can get it to show high in Google for terms like “Gym staff Careers” or “Gym jobs + “Your Location”.
This will allow candidates to stumble upon your gym recruitment page and you to generate applications all year round for your roles.
See here that Gym64 has a dedicated page so potential gym staff know here to apply:
Partnering with a training provider that offers gym based qualifications is a great way to hire fitness staff for free.
Many fitness based training providers offer guaranteed interviews with gym chains post course.
Drop them an email to try and set-up a partnership where you offer to interview any graduates that live within a certain radius of your facility if they advertise your job to their database.
Linkedin is a social media platform specifically designed for employers and mangers to connect with potential candidates.
You can do targeted job ads that go straight into potential candidates inboxes in your area and even target them based on their current or past job title.
Some of the best gym staff I have hired are from referrals from existing team members.
Referrals in any aspect of business are powerful and this is true of employment referrals.
Promote your jobs internally to your existing gym staff via a referral programme, where you can get high quality staff without paying out a penny in recruitment fees.
Also, If the gym team member is a high quality employee, it’s most likely their friend that they are referring is of a similar ilk and if you have respect for that team member’s opinion, you can get yourself another high performing individual to add to your team.
To set-up a gym referral programme, simply incentivise your staff by offering a reward for referring staff members to your gym and allow them to redeem their reward once the new employee has completed 6 months within the job role.
You can offer extra paid holidays or a recruitment fee bonus, but just make sure it's something of real value to your staff member as otherwise they just won't bother.
Writing a gym staff job description might sound laborious but it’s actually pretty important as this is what candidates see and it says a lot about your business.
Plus, you actually only have to write them out once, just make sure that that one time you do write them, they are awesome using these tips.
Make sure to include your salary and do not hide this from job seekers. Even if you’re not offering the highest rates compared to competitors, you can win elsewhere on things like location, company culture, progression etc. Job seekers are put off by companies that do not disclose their salary guidelines upfront.
Location is one of the most important factors for job seekers. Put the exact location of your gym into your job adverts as candidates need to know exactly how they are going to get to you. If your near good transport links, it’s good to include these in
Include keywords within your job descriptions that match search terms people harness to find your particular gym staff role.
For example, if you’re hiring for a fitness marketer, you should include fitness marketer + [YOUR LOCATION] in the job title and in appropriate places through the job description. This will help you show up in Google search results and drive more applications to your job.
You’ll find some companies posting “become a ninja” or “rockstar” or “champion”. Using terms like these actually hinder your job’s performance, not help it!
According to Insight Globals report of Job Seekers, cliche words like those mentioned above being put off 49% of people they surveyed and I couldn't agree more.
Include the precise details of the job role and their responsibilities.
Job applicants want to see exactly what their duties will consist of Simply list out your responsibilities in bullet point format. You can include things such as:
Break down exactly what tasks they will be doing and how they will be performing those tasks
who they will be working with or reporting to
what success / performance KPIs metrics there are
what systems and processes they need to follow
See how I have used bullet points to make the above easier to read for you. Make sure to do this when listing your jobs responsibilities for potential gym staff.
Anytime someone starts at a new company one of the big concerns they have is how much training and guidance they will receive.
You can alleviate this concern by telling candidates via your job description what training you have in place and what ongoing mentoring you have for the position.
This will help drive applicants and I have had people at interview mention the training referenced in the job description as being something that appeals to them and made them actually apply.
When hiring fitness staff and gym team members try to be really clear and concise for what skills, licenses or certifications they must have so job seekers can make a quick and easy evaluation if they match what you;re looking for.
See excerpt example posted by Active Care and Wellbeing who have posted a job on our jobs board for a part-time Personal Trainer in Ipswich:
See how they have used clear bullet points to highlight that they want someone who holds CIMSPA Level 3 qualification in either PT or Exercise Referral, pass a DBS check and have listed their preferred skills.
This makes it really easy for candidates to make an informed calculation to whether this role is applicable to them.
When you market a product or a service, you often find reviews reinforcing the buying process from the likes of via Trustpilot, Amazon or testimonials that the company has collated.
You can do the same with job descriptions and build trust with prospective candidates. Start collecting reviews on the likes of Glassdoor where employees can post about how great it is to work at your gym and showcase these reviews on your job adverts.
Try to avoid overly complicating the recruitment process or having too many blockers in place to prevent applicants from actually applying.
For instance, some companies ask for candidates to answer questionnaires, complete aptitude tests, make presentations or repeat processes
Start posting gym staff roles today with Active Careers, the UK leading Jobs board for Gym Staff
You need to treat Job applicants like potential customers.
You need a streamlined approach to dealing with applications that is both fast and efficient.
Follow my quick step by step process here:
Always ring gym staff applicants within a maximum 48 hours of them applying. Candidates are most likely applying for jobs at multiple organisations and different roles.
Getting there first matters as nothing is worse than coming across a great CV that applied a week ago and they have already accepted another job role.
Additionally, when you leave applications for a week or so, your job is no longer fresh in their mind and they lose familiarity with your brand and what they have applied for.
When recruiting gym staff, make sure to call candidates as your primary form of communication.
This has three major benefits.....
Firstly, you can showcase your personality, discuss the role with the candidate in more detail and most importantly get a better feel for the candidate’s interpersonal skills and motivations before they have even stepped foot in your gym.
The second reason you should call before emailing is that you instantly know where you stand with that candidate as for the ones you get through to you are either offering them an interview at your gym or your disregarding their application. This massively reduces the interview process time cycle.
Lastly, the reason you call candidates first is that you can always email them after if you don’t get through to them. This gives you two forms of communication channels and doubles the chances of you getting through to your potential candidate.
A great tip that I acquired (which really works) for how to hire gym staff is to get your interviews scheduled around your diary and schedule using the alternate closing technique.
The alternate closing technique is normally harnessed by sales consultants to close sales transactions with clients, but it really works for getting interviews scheduled for the times that you really want.
When speaking to prospective candidates on the phone, you should have two dates and times preempted that you’re looking to book them in via.
Ask Candidates to pick WHICH dates suit them when offering interview times out of the two options presented to them.
This creates the illusion of you of choice, but actually you’re just giving them a two options, Date X or Date Y.
It goes something like this:
“WHICH date would suit you best, Wednesday at 10am or Thursday at 11am?
Most candidates tend to pick from the options presented, which helps you align your diary the way you want.
If candidates can’t make either of those options, it’s normally for a valid reason such as work or a family commitment. This is where you do need to be flexible and have backup dates and times.
I mentioned before about treating candidates like prospects.
An extension of this is making sure when you do offer interview times to get them scheduled as close as possible to the time you spoke with them on the phone or initial point of contact.
This is important as it reduces your interview time cycle so that you can get your gym staff position filled, but more paramount is increasing your chances of the candidate showing up and not cancelling.
If you set your interview dates further apart, you will find your cancellations or no shows increase as they may have had another job offer in that time period or had a change of career direction.
When thinking about how to hire good staff, you need to know what to look out for and what skills and attributes will make them a good team member.
It all starts with their CV as this is the first thing you see as an employer.
This document is more important than most people think as it says a huge amount about candidates skills before you have even spoken with them.
Is the CV presented in a professional manner with correct grammar, alignment and spelling. This shows professionalism and attention to detail.
Where candidates make claims within their CV, have they backed that up with any evidence or statistics to prove what they are saying is true and trustworthy.
Yes this is important!....Do they have depth to their personality and have they demonstrated any skills within their hobbies that would be transferable into the workplace.
For example if someone is captain of their Sunday league football team, that shows leadership qualities and organisation.
When you call candidates, do they communicate well with articulate language and a positive tone of voice as this is how they are going to be communicating with your gym members.
Do they know to which job they have applied and sound passionate about the role.
There are a number of positive traits to lo out for when hiring gym staff, but there are a few that canvass across all job roles.
See below questions and observations yu can make during the interview process that will help you decide if a candidate is the right fit for your gym.
In any role, professionalism is important as they will be representing your gym's brand and values. You can either ask the question below to see how they respond or make some general observations that display their professionalism.
For example are they well presented for the interview, were they punctual, what type of language did they use, were they respectful when they refer to past managers or other employers, were they courteous to your staff when coming in for the interview are just a few ways you can determine someone's professionalism.
Q. Can you give me a time where you feel you have demonstrated professionalism in the workplace?
Work Ethic
There is virtually no successful individual where work ethic is not a key part in their underlying success, so identifying a good work ethic for any of your gym’s roles is paramountly important.
Hard workers are also infectious people and help set a precedent of model behaviour for other staff in the gym.
Q. Give me a time where you have displayed excellent work ethic?
Ambition is a trait that some people wrongly think (in my opinion) is a negative characteristic as they might not stick around for long.
The reason ambition is actually a positive trait is that you want people who want to develop, and learn and are driven to exceed your gym’s objectives. Even if they only stay for a year in their role, these types of people have to perform well in order to realise their longer term goals, resulting in high performing staff
I personally would much rather have an excellent employee for one year, than an average employee for four years who doesn’t want to progress.
Q. What are your ambitions for the Future?
You of course want all your gym employees to be honest and have a certain level of integrity. But, this is even more prudent to staff members that handle cash or are in more senior based gym management positions as you need staff that are trustworthy and reliable.
Q. Give me a time either inside or outside of work where you have shown genuine honesty?
Gym’s are customer focused businesses and member retention can be influenced heavily by hiring the right gym staff.
This applies to all roles, whether you’re hiring for a fitness coach, front of house staff or a gym manager. You need gym staff that know what good customer care looks like, how to handle difficult scenarios as well as being competent in communicating and keeping members informed.
Q. Can you give me an instance where you have displayed excellent customer service skills and gone above and beyond for a customer?
In the modern era of employment you do need to sell your positions and company culture.
At the end of the Interview, I like to summarise the role so that firstly it is fully transparent to the applicant what the job entails and what their day to day duties include, but also so I can promote the working ethos and culture of my gym.
I have a mini checklist of things I like to mention:
Tell them about the company benefits that hopefully you have included from earlier in this article.
Mention any company events you have had and ones that you have coming up so you can showoff employee engagement
Inform them of what it is like to work here, this lays down the expectations you have and what they can look forward to if they were successful with the interview.
Mention staff retention levels if they are positive, use some statistics or evidence to back up your claims.
Before hiring gym staff, make sure you have done your own due diligence as a gym owner or manager.
You should as good practice always contact potential candidates references to find out what previous managers and companies they have worked for say about their work rate and performance.
You can even submit job offers with “pending reference checks” if you really wish to.
Either during the onboarding process or before hiring a gym team member, you can always ask for a copy of their credentials or awards that they have claimed on their CV. This could be a copy of their degree, a diploma, a license or an award they have won.
Sending out / emailing an offer letter is both professional and an official way of formally engaging a new employee.
Preferably with the use of headed paper, you can copy and paste this offer letter below. Be sure if you’re sending the job letter as an attachment, to include a brief description within the main email body.
OFFER OF EMPLOYMENT
Dear [Candidate Name]
Following your recent interview,I am delighted to offer you a position with [INSERT COMPANY NAME].
We will issue a Contract of Employment within the next few days, which will provide full details of your terms and conditions of employment with [INSERT COMPANY NAME]. A summary of the key features of our offer are detailed below and if you have any initial queries please do not hesitate to contact me.
POSITION AND SCOPE: [INSERT JOB DESCRIPTION]
BASIC SALARY: [INSERT BASIC SALARY]
TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT:
Our offer of employment is subject to you providing satisfactory references, proof of eligibility to work within the UK and relevant qualifications *if applicable.
Employment Start Date: [INSERT START DATE]
The first 6 months of your employment are considered a probationary period.
We look forward to receiving confirmation of your acceptance to this offer by email.
Should you have any further questions please let me know
Best regards,
[Your Name]
[Your Job Title]
[Your Email]
[Your Phone Number]
When hiring a new gym employee you need to make sure you have a streamlined onboarding process to make sure their transition into their new role is seamless.
Use my gym manager onboarding checklist below as an indicator of some of the tasks you will need to cover:
Give your new starter a tour of the building so they know where everything is and who is responsible for certain tasks within the gym. Make sure to point out fire exits, toilets and break out areas.
Remember to have ordered their uniform and ascertain their size before they start working at the gym.
You can tie this into the building tour, but make sure to introduce them to all staff that are on shift and whose roles are responsible for which operation in the gym.
t’s best practice to send out the contract prior to the new gym employee starting so they can digest the contract in their own time and ask any questions if they need to.
Either yourself or someone from HR should walk employees through the HR policies and procedures so the employee knows what is expected of them and what to do in certain circumstances.
It’s poor practice to simply shove a huge file of procedures in front of employees and say “sign here”.
Set-up or order all devices and equipment that a new starter may need such as laptop, softwares, keycards to access the premises,
Create logins for your new starter, including setting up their company email address, logins for any software you may use, keycards,
During their first day it's important to establish the company culture with new recruits so they know the expectations you have for them snd other staff members.
Set check in dates with your employees to ensure they feel supported and that they understand what is being required of them. Set your initial checkin date quite close after their initial induction training and then you can separate them out a little further from there as they may be stuck, but feel reluctant to ask questions until they feel more settled.
Try and improve yourself and ask your new gym hire if they have any constructive feedback on the onboarding process. Listen to their feedback and refine your practices.
I have done this for my gym and got some valuable feedback from one of the gym sales staff who suggested we offer more support on how to take payments over the phone. They were right, so we added this to our induction training protocols for sales team members.
As mentioned right at this start of this article, it costs time and money to hire gym staff. Not just that, you might lose a good team member and then find their replacement not at the same level despite doing everything right in this article.
This is why retaining your best gym staff is important to your ongoing success. See below some wsys you can increase your staff retention levels.
It is very easy when managing a team to highlight negatives and be critical when giving feedback and yu need to try and avoid this pitfall as it will negatively impact your staff retention levels.
I always like to give a positive when engaging with a staff member, even if I really have to work hard to find one. This just acts as buffer before I highlight areas of improvement.
When discussing areas of improvement, I will try and phrase it in an educational way that does not patronise or coming across threatening,
Most employees come to work to do a good job and sometimes just need some guidance, support or motivation.
They do not come to work to be abused, shouted at or spoken down to.
Your staff want to feel valued and as part of that, you want to give your key team members full ownership and authority over the tasks within their job description.
To do this you must place trust in your employees and hand allow them to showcase their skills and abilities. They will, like all humans do, make mistakes, but make it clear that making errors are part of the process. You and your gym will benefit form this longer term.
Every team member has a life outside of work and it's impossible to keep them segregated from one another.
If you are seen as the gym owner or manager that cares about their employees welfare you should embrace work life balance, instead of pushing against it.
Encourage your team members to take small mini breaks throughout the day, help team members when something goes wrong in their personal life and be accommodating to this. You can be flexible with time off requests and review workloads and schedules when your team raises concerns. This is what being a good gym manager is all about.
When hiring staff for your gym, remember to praise them when they do things right, no matter how big or small the task.
Praise goes a long way to producing a productive and motivated workforce and it makes team embers respect you and want to work for you.
Reward your team with things they will really value when you hit milestones, whether that's a monthly sales target, customer satisfaction survey or even doing well on a compliance check. Rewards need to be of value, which can be things like a paid day off, free tickets to an event they would all enjoy or just a financial bonus. You just need to ensure the reward is delivered on time and as promised without changing the goals posts.
People will leave your gym, but that's not always a bad thing. Maybe they went onto a managerial role or wanted to switch industries or moved house. These are legitimate reasons for staff moving on and sometimes it;s out of yuor control.
The key thing to take away is from those that don't leave for one of those reasons and perhaps they cite, bad management, poor working culture, feeling overworked or being disengaged.
Performing an exit interview with staff where the can be open and transparent about their reasoning, is where you will find out how you can improve aspects of your gym. All you need to do is to learn from it and take action if it's appropriate to do so to prevent other team members taking a similar route.
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