How PureGym cut cost per hire by 59%

The challenge

PureGym is the UK’s largest gym operator: more than 2 million members, more than 680 gyms and around 6,000 employees across eight countries. As the business grew, so did the pressure on a small talent acquisition team, and nowhere more than for personal trainers, the frontline role that carries the member experience and the commercial model.

The problem was not a shortage of applicants. It was that too many of them were not qualified for the role, which created admin, slowed hiring and left key roles at risk of going unfilled. Key metrics were tracked by hand across several systems, so measuring performance or finding the bottleneck meant hours of compiling reports. Recruitment media ran through several credit-based job boards, each needing hands-on management with little visibility of return by role or campaign. Cost per hire was high and there was no reliable way to see why.

PureGym set four objectives with inploi: fewer, better applications; more personal trainers hired to support growth; automation in place of manual workflows, with visibility across the whole application; and decisions made on better data.

What we built

inploi rebuilt the careers site and the application for mobile, in PureGym’s brand, with conversational apply that takes a complete application in under a minute and brings more of the right candidates through to completion. Job distribution took over the recruitment marketing budget: jobs are promoted where they need to be, with social campaigns layered in for hard-to-fill locations, and nobody manages a job board by hand. Dayforce remained the system of record, and completed applications land there through ATS sync.

Analytics and attribution gave the talent acquisition team one view of application quality, drop-off by step and return by campaign. Hiring managers see the same source of truth, which saves them time and takes the guesswork out of the next decision.

What happened

Cost per hire fell 59%. Completing an application takes under a minute. Reporting that used to be assembled by hand is now one dashboard, and decisions across more than 680 locations are made on it. For PureGym, hiring well is not only about filling roles; it is about building a consistent, high-performing team in every market it operates in, and the talent acquisition team now has the time and the data to do that.

In their words

We needed a partner that could help us scale our hiring without compromising on quality. inploi delivered fast: from campaign execution to data clarity.

Jerry James, Talent Acquisition Partner, PureGym