Often decrease in sales in a fitness club, haunting its owners, results not from specific nature of the service market, but from errors committed yet when starting business. The source of problems in club promotion is often poor selection of personnel. How can mistakes be avoided when hiring personnel?

Fitness business personnel plays an important and key role as commercial promotion of a successful fitness club as well as its business reputation and image are directly dependent on the professionalism of the personnel, that is, on its qualifications and personal qualities. It would seem that such an obvious truth has long been known to all owners of fitness business. But nevertheless, in practice errors related to personnel management are not rare and to them the following can be referred:
? lack of expertise in recruitment;
? poor working conditions;
? failure to provide career growth;
? appointment of relatives to management positions.
Future errors are often built in at the initial stage of personnel selection.
The owner of a fitness club needs people with extensive sport and professional experience, specialized education and ability to hold a dialogue (communication skills), in other words, he/she needs employees who know how to increase sales in a fitness club.
This is exactly that all the errors are hidden in, because these things are not always taken into account when recruiting.
Firstly, a person with experience can be a “job-hopper” who easily changes his/her place of work;
Secondly, people with high sporting achievements may have “stardom syndrome” and his/her good communication skills were advertized, as it turns out later, by unreliable sources. And if we add to this the fact that the best instructor is much more expensive than other employees,…
When hiring an employee you must first of all determine his/her culture, intellectual abilities, vocabulary, and above all – his/her delicacy and tactfulness. Professional knowledge can always be mastered, but the culture and way of thinking of an employee are almost unlikely to be changed.
If successful activity of employees is persistently ignored, and they realize that further on their efforts on the job will not be properly evaluated, they either leave such fitness club, or sabotage its activities. In this situation, the main mistakes of fitness establishment owners usually are: reluctance to fulfill promises and inability to maintain consistent personnel management. Successful activities of employees should be promptly recorded and rewarded, and career development of professionals should be linked to their abilities and achievements.