Hiring Personal Trainers & Other Staff Members

A Post On Hiring Personal Trainers by Pat Rigsby

In our live meetings we get a lot of questions about hiring personal trainers and other staff members so I thought I’d share some thoughts on the topic.

Hiring is tough.  I’ve been hiring people for almost 17 years now and also spent about 8 years recruiting college athletes – which I’ve found is almost exactly the same.

The first person I ever hired was a guy that I’d be comfortable calling my boyhood idol.

I fired him 3 months later.

I’ve also fired one of the guys that I’d consider among my 5-6 closest friends. 

I’ve probably recruited over 1000 athletes and actually brought about 200 on to my teams.  I’ve personally hired roughly 100 employees. I couldn’t tell you how many I fired (a lot) – but in every case I agonized about it.

But what I have found is that the strategy that helped me enjoy success as a college baseball coach in large part through recruiting has the same type of success when hiring employees.

When I coached, we were the most poorly funded program of all the schools we competed against, so I was often forced to recruit players who weren’t the marquee prospects.  I quickly found out that if I recruited what I call ‘intangibles’ I did a lot better than the coaches who recruited the people they perceived to have a lot of potential.

‘Intangibles’ meant recruiting work ethic, passion, determination, drive.  If I could get players with moderate talent and those things – we would usually beat the teams who got the more highly touted prospects who often had poor work ethic, bad attitudes and a sense of entitlement.

In fact – once we started to enjoy some real success and a few of the highly touted prospects started wanted to come our way, I deviated from the plan that we’d built our success on and added a few of them to the team.

It was a terrible mistake that I quickly recognized and rectified as quickly as I could.

See, you can’t teach work ethic.  You can’t instill drive and determination.  Sometimes, as coaches our egos get the best of us and we think we can coach those things into people – but we can’t.  Sure – in some cases, people can change – but that comes from them rather than us.

But if you hire people who are on time, have great work ethic, passion for fitness, love being around people and helping them – you can teach them the rest.  You can teach them your systems.  You can steer them to the right education on exercise science and nutrition.  You can give them the pieces to the puzzle that they’re missing.

Every time I’ve deviated from this plan and hired ‘potential’ instead of those intangibles it’s backfired on me.

Back when Nick and I started our first training company I hired our first handful of employees.  One applicant who came in had a great resume – he had a Master’s in Ex Phys, had run his own gym at one point and had about everything you’d ever want to see on a resume.

He came on board and it was almost like we (more me than Nick) kept trying to rationalize his (many) flaws and mistakes that were detrimental to our business.  We kept thinking that he had the potential to be a key player in the growth we wanted to have even though he hadn’t really ever shown anything tangible to suggest that.  Over time it became clear that I’d hired a person who was not ever going to achieve much and had values that weren’t consistent with the business values we had.  At the end of his employment with us he was trying to do all those little things that we all worry about with employees like trying to falsify sessions on his time sheet and trying to take our proprietary information to set up a business across town.

I’d looked at the potential – a glowing resume – instead of the facts.  It wasn’t that guy’s fault.  He was who he was – I wasn’t smart enough to recognize it at the time.

On the other hand – not too long after that we hired Melissa Brady to work part time at our Smoothie Bar.  My expectations weren’t anything big.  She was working in a medical office and wanted to do something else part time. She had a degree in music – no background in fitness.

But over time her work ethic and dependability became obvious.  Her passion for fitness grew and she got certified to become a personal trainer.  She soon moved to a point where she was training and serving as our part time office manager.  Though she’d never sold before – she soon had the best closing percentage for new sales on our staff. 

Fast forward to now.  Melissa has been a tremendously important person in the success and growth of our business.  A true key player.  But you wouldn’t have known that by looking at her resume when she first walked in the door.  But she had the intangibles that everything else could build on.

So when you’re hiring – look for people who have the character traits that you want represented in your business. Not necessarily the credentials.  Remember – the employees are only necessary because there is too much demand for what you currently do – so they need to learn your way of doing things anyhow.  There is nothing wrong with having credentials (I am co-owner of a certification-issuing organization) – but if they come attached to someone set in their ways and unwilling to adapt to your systems – or if they come with a sense of entitlement – pass.

Get the right people on your team – then make sure they get the knowledge they need to be successful.  That’s the most effective way to build a team.

Dedicated to Your Success,

Pat

Filed under: Fitness

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