Blogs

The Business opportunities link is the latest addition to the HealthyPeople suite of services. This is the place for you to advertise the sale of your club/studio, your Personal Training rental opportunity or your available franchise.

This is the perfect place for lead generation. We have more than 1000 visitors a week that are looking to further their health and fitness career. These are people that may be very interested in an chance to become their own boss. Not only can they learn more about your opportunity, they can view photos and, if interested, send you a query. Unlike our advertised jobs, they do not need to be logged in to so. These profiles are accessible by all visitors to the HealthyPeople web site.

Your franchise/business opportunity is never more than two clicks away.

• Via our home page links on both the professional and employer side.
• Via links within the candidates log in pages
• Via tags on our job ads
• Opportunity specific links are also possible (single click to your opportunity)

Listings are available both on an ongoing basis or for a single month. Prices are available on request.

For more information contact Dennis on 0414 481 525. Alternatively, check out the HealthyPeople Recruitment opportunity under QLD or NSW and send a query via the 'Request more information' link (and get a feel for how easy it is).

In other news:

• I welcome your opinion on our blog regarding the Centrality accreditation process
• Are you aware that there is a link to your employer profile from any jobs you post on HealthyPeople. Have you created yours? It's accessible by candidates on an ongoing basis and a great way to hook into people looking for work in your area. Here's an example of how it comes up when the South Morang tag is selected on a job ad. Click through to the listed profile (note the current available position on the bottom - you do not need to be advertising to have a profile). Contact me for more information.

Tags : Advertise Recruitment South Morang

Our industry has suffered a number of body-blows in the press recently. Many of the comments relating to a lack of faith in our product and our people (eg. www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2766840.htm). In an environment where the general public are repeatedly reminded that anyone can become a qualified Personal Trainer in just weeks, there is considerable value in being able to clearly recognise differences in experience and qualifications.

Enter Centrality.

Last November the Centrality group launched it's 'Centrality Health Consultant' (CHC) program. This is a new certification for the health and fitness industry that provides another way for you, as an employer, to identify candidates with demonstrated success in dealing with clients. As well as setting clearly defined expectations, the CHC certification includes professional indemnity insurance, one free industry accredited training day a year and the ability to work towards getting a health insurance provider number.

More specifically, Centrality advertise the following benefits to employing a Centrality Health Consultant:

• All Centrality Health Consultant’s are minimum Cert IV qualified
• All Centrality Health Consultant’s are Insured for fitness, rehabilitation & corrective exercise services
• No need to track staff CEC’s/PDP’s, First Aid or Insurance; Centrality does it for you
• Employ staff that understand the sales process & sell more one on one consulting time
• Senior/Master CHC’s have a proven track record of delivering Client Results
• Senior/Master CHC services can offer a Private Health Insurance rebate to their clients

For more information, a look at their TV commercial and a full list of their upcoming training sessions head to http://www.centralityhc.com/. For a peak at their CHC Framework booklet head to www.centralityhc.com/data/CHCFramework.pdf.

Providing health and fitness professionals with the ability to differentiate themselves to both employers and clients will ultimately lead to greater confidence in us all as an industry. A lot of work has gone into the development of this certification, in particular, securing insurance and provider numbers. I congratulate Paul Reid and his Centrality group for providing a service with real potential to make a difference.

Please note, candidates can now indicate their CHC certification in their HealthyPeople registration, making it easier for you to identify them in the first instance.

I welcome your views on this. Please add any comments to our blog.

Tags : Advertise Personal Trainer sales Health Consultant

Feedback from some employers is that there are candidates nominating areas to work that are a long way from where they live. In response to this we've added a new feature to the HealthyPeople candidate registration process. It is now a requirement that all candidates provide their suburb. This suburb is now included with their contact details on their HealthyPeople listing. At a glance, you can now see whether the candidate lives locally or otherwise.

While talking about getting people in your area, don't forget that candidates are able to search for your business, view your 'Employer profile' and send you an application at any time, regardless of whether you are currently advertising. For more information head to your 'Update registration' area or contact me directly.

In other news:
Three percent of Australians are 'super obese' (that's about 500,000): http://www.theage.com.au/national/surge-in-obesity-20100116-mdj2.html

Healthy communities creates healthy people - Fairtrade undies: http://www.theage.com.au/national/fairtrade-embraces-the-bottom-line-20100116-mdjh.html and http://pantstopoverty.com.au/

Tags : New Feature

We've recently added a new feature to the HealthyPeople web site that allows employers to promote themselves to candidates on an ongoing basis.

Using your employer profile you can let candidates know about your business, the people you employ and what you look for in your staff. You have the ability to upload a logo and other images showing your facility and/or your team, all of which encouraging the best candidates to get in touch with you. Furthermore, any jobs you have listed with HealthyPeople will appear underneath your profile.

For an example, click here.

Your employer profile remains live throughout the year and can be discovered in one of five ways;

1. When a candidate does a search on your suburb or your business name
2. Via any jobs you may have online
3. Through tags connected to current jobs relating to your suburb/business
4. Via online search engines (these pages are search engine optimised)
5. Via a link from your web site

There is currently no fee for this ongoing presence on HealthyPeople; a high traffic, industry specific employment site. However we do request that you have a link back from your website to your Employer profile (link address is specific to your profile and is detailed in your 'Update registration' area).

So I invite you to take advantage of the traffic to our web site, increase your profile as an employer (especially in your area) and enjoy updating/modifying your profile to suit your circumstances.

To create your employer profile log in to HealthyPeople, head to the 'Update registration' area and select the 'Employer profile' tab.

If you have any questions, please contact me (Dennis) on 0414 481 525 or email me.

Tags : New Feature Albion

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his (or her) level of incompetence."

Referred to as 'The Peter Principle' this is generally applied to large, multi-layered organisations but is just as relevant to smaller businesses in our health and fitness industry.

Promotions are often seen as a way to recognise employees that demonstrate competence in their current position and capitalise on their existing knowledge of the business. Unfortunately, a competent and dedicated employee may find themselves (willingly) promoted to a position in which he or she turns out to be less interested in and/or under skilled.

For example, let's say you have a Personal Trainer that performs the best in your facility on all fronts. They're on time for all appointments, make a lot of clients happy, they stick to the rules, attend meetings and professional development sessions and earn plenty of money for themselves and the facility.

Is this the perfect candidate to train into your next Personal Training Manager role?

Consider this; Are they aware of the recruitment skills required? Do they understand the management and leadership expectations? Are they prepared for the inevitable confrontation that is a part of managing people and the accountability (and targets) that may be expected of them? Are they going to miss the face to face contact with clients? If you promote this person, will you be losing your best Trainer and greatest role model?

If you choose to employ from within, I recommend the following two rules are observed:

Firstly, reconsider promotion of employees who are dedicated to their current jobs. Other methods of reward/recognition should be explored. Possibly parallel career paths, where good technical people can acquire improved pay/status.

Secondly, employees might be promoted only after being sufficiently trained to the new position. This places the burden of discovering individuals with poor managerial capabilities before (as opposed to after) they are promoted.

Even where there are internal candidates there is value in externally advertising all managment roles. It's a great way to ensure internal candidates are screened with the same rigor as external candidates (and you never know what you'll find).

Elevating employees to positions above their abilities can be detrimental to both your business and your valued employee. While sourcing managers from within is always going to be the first choice, the advice is to ensure due process for the benefit of all concerned. Remember, 'Hire hard, manage easy'.

Tags : Personal Trainer Recruitment Personal Training Manager management

All job ads listed on HealthyPeople now have 'tags' associated with them.

'Tags' are key words or phrases that our system will recognise within your ad and list at the bottom of your ad details to provide greater search functionality for job seekers. Tags include (among other things) your business name, your suburb and other specifics about the role, such as 'full time', 'training provided', etc..

How do tags on job ads benefit the employer?

Following are three examples:

• By clicking the tag of your business name a candidate can view all ads posted by you at this time, no matter what job category they are listed under.
• If the candidate is interested in 'training provided' and this phrase is in your ad, when they select the tag, your ad will be included in the resulting list
• Where the candidate selects a tag for a suburb and you have an available position in that suburb, your ad will be displayed in the resulting list.

As an employer there is nothing extra you need to do when creating your job ads, the tag function is managed by our admin and automatically scans your ad for key words.

In another innovation that further improves the chance of finding your ad via popular search engines all job ad page titles are now the heading and summary of that ad. This new feature may not be immediately obvious to all users but is another step forward in our bid to provide a leading service for our industry.

If you have any feedback, comments or questions, please feel free use the comments feature below or contact me directly.

Tags : New Feature full time training provided

I am currently seeking Regional Manager candidates for Holmes Place Poland and Czech Republic.

This is a challenging health and fitness manager role where great people skills and a passion for the Holmes Place vision of "Inspiring People to Live Well" is a must.

Candidates must have relevant industry experience and must relish the challenge of working in an environment where things are "a little bit different"! Driving sales requires the ability to inspire and coach the sales process. Holding the team to account for results will be a key priority in this role.

Quoted salary is 50,000 Euro (approx AUD$84,000).

You do not need to be able to speak another language - the important thing is that you have relevant industry experience (I was in Prague earlier this year and met with Neil Burton, the COO, and other managers, many were from the UK and all spoke English).

They are looking to fill the Regional Manager role ASAP (by December at the latest).

A job description is available here.

Club Manager roles also available!

Do you know of someone that you think would thrive in the Holmes Place culture? Let me know!

Tags : Club Manager Regional Manager Holmes Place Europe

Here's another reason to advertise your available health and fitness job on HealthyPeople;

Statistics from Seek show that ads listed by HealthyPeople outperfom all other ads in the same job category by as much as 84%!

Some of you may be thinking, 'receiving more applications is no good if the applicants are unsuitable'. As it happens, statistics also show that HealthyPeople ads perform better at filtering candidates in the search results area.

So remember, when you post your ad through HealthyPeople, not only do you get the industry specificity of a listing on HealthyPeople and the direct mailout to our categorised database, you also get a better performing ad on Seek, Australia's most visited job board.

Tags : Advertise Statistics

Good day to all,

The big news from HealthyPeople is the addition of the comments feature on our blog (formerly newsletter) page. Aspects of this new feature include:

• Rather than a monthly newsletter email, you can now be notified of blogs as they are posted - you can turn this on/off in your 'Update registration' area.
• Where a particular post is of interest to you, you have the option to be notified of any other comments to that post as they are listed.
• You have the ability to post anonymously.
• If you think a particular comment from another user is inappropriate, there is a link to send a notification to myself and, if necessary, the comment will be removed.

I invite you to add a comment to say 'hi' to myself and other employers, familiarise yourself with how it works and provide any feedback.

In addition to the above update we have a number of further improvements to the site being released over the coming weeks. I'll post a blog explaining each as they are added.

With regards to posting job ads, many of you may be aware that in addition to listing positions on HealthyPeople and Seek, we have also been listing positions on Facebook, Twitter and LinikedIn. A greater understanding of Facebook has resulted in the movement away from our Facebook Group to a HealthyPeople Facebook Fan Page. The primary reason for this is functionality. If you are posting an ad though HealthyPeople, feel free to comment on the job summary that is listed on our HealthyPeople Fan Page. My intention is that you, the employer, can build a greater rapport with potential candidates by adding your own comments and answering questions they may ask online. If you are on Facebook, I invite you to become a Fan (http://www.facebook.com/pages/HealthyPeople/124295604311).

Do you have a Fan page on Facebook for your studio/facility? Let me know and we will include it in our favourites on the HealthyPeople Fan page.

Do you have an employment section on your website? Why not let potential candidates know where you source your staff with a link to the HealthyPeople website. By referring interested candidates to HealthyPeople you are making your recruitment process easier:

• You save time in screening candidates, let us do this for you
• You may not have a job for them now but with HealthyPeople you know they will be informed of your available positions when they arise.
• You may not want to say 'no' to a known candidate (a member perhaps). Through HealthyPeople you have a buffer between yourself and the applicant.
• We'll provide you with an attractive button that will add pizzazz to any web page

If you'd like to add a link to HealthyPeople from your employment page, please contact me at dennis@healthypeople.com.au.

Whether via the blog, the fan page or more conventional means, I look forward to communicating with you soon.

Regards, Dennis Hosking.

Tags : New Feature Recruitment

I was flicking through an old Marie Clare in a pizza shop (I'm human) the other day and came across an article comparing different things. One of them was the difference between becoming a Dog Trainer and  Personal Trainer.

It takes eight months of part-time training to earn a Certificate III in Dog Behaviour and Training, according to the National Dog Trainers Federation. This includes a study program and 96 hours of practical work.

To become a Personal Trainer takes eight weeks of part time study where you will earn a Certificate IV in Fitness. Practical experience is advised, but isn't compulsory.

Is it too hard to become a Dog Trainer? Or is it too easy to become a Personal Trainer?

Tags : Personal Trainer