Driver Hire Nationwide was named the UK’s top franchise at the British Franchise Association HSBC ‘Franchisor of the Year’ 2019 awards. What does that mean to you?  

It’s obviously a good story for Driver Hire, but it’s also a good story for recruitment. Franchising is big, worth £17bn to the UK economy, but very few recruiters follow this model – and many aren’t even aware that’s it’s an option.

We’ve been doing this for over 30 years, and this award shows what can be achieved. Franchising provides a safer opportunity for ambitious people, willing to work hard, to set up and run a profitable recruitment business – with the support to help them run business the right way.

And what is the right way?

It’s nothing people don’t already know. Training matters. And one thing customers dislike about our industry is when candidates are just fired at them, with little more than a superficial skills match. We spend 90 minutes with every candidate, and we’ve got a 150-point checklist at the start of the process. It might not follow the trend for reducing face-time, but our surveys show that 96% of our customers rate our service as good or excellent, while 94% of candidates are proud to work for us.

We’ve also invested £3m in technology over the past three years to increase transparency with clients around driver checks and skills assessments, for example. Our systems help our franchisees with compliance. But ultimately technology for us is about making our processes slicker without losing that all-important human interaction.