Interview questions for hiring a Fitness Coach

Do you have any restrictions on the hours and days you can coach?

A simple question that must be known.

Do you have experience with member management systems? Which ones? Which is your favorite to use, and why?

Another easy question to know if they are accustomed to using your preferred platforms.

Why do you want to be a career coach?

People have a lot of options in this world for what to do; this will help you understand why they chose to be a fitness coach as their vocation.

What specifically about our facility made you want to apply with us?

This is to help you know if they had done their homework on your facility and your brand of fitness. You shouldn’t be looking for a generic answer unless you have immediate hiring needs. If you are investing in your staff instead of replacing them, this question has more value. If they are specific, you know they have looked at what you have to offer compared to the other opportunities available elsewhere.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

The beauty of this question is that if they answer owning their gym, they probably have plans on only temporarily being at your facility. However, if you are a franchise owner, or you are going to open more facilities, this can help you identify a future leader in another facility.

How much money do you need to make to have a happy life?

Here you can see the long term potential of the coach and understand if you can pay what they need to be happy. If a coach is expecting much more than the position pays, you should consider a different candidate or you could be setting yourself up for an unhappy employee soon down the road.

What is your experience with personal training?

Another easy question to see how well they can perform one on one session and potentially add to the facility’s bottom line if personal training is a part of the business plan.

What specialty classes could you add to the gym? How would you run them?

This will help you understand their expertise and if they can potentially increase membership and revenue if you run a facility that offers more than one program or training opportunity.

Describe your process for teaching a new member how to Clean and Jerk.

This question seems simple but allows you to hear from them about their training philosophy. If your facility doesn’t use free weights, this question is less important unless you are wanting to see what they know beyond your type of fitness.

As a coach, what is your greatest accomplishment?

When they answer, ask them if they would have done anything different to make that accomplishment even greater.

What is the one aspect of coaching you know so much about people who would want to pay you for a seminar to learn about it from you?

This will help to show you what aspect they find the most interesting, and potentially show you another revenue source for your facility.

If you have a personal training athlete who came to you to increase their vertical, but we have no equipment to measure it, how would you measure the starting height and the improved height?

In this question, we are looking at their problem-solving skills. Ask yourself this before the interview to see how you would answer.

What would be more fulfilling for you? Are you working with 80-year-old members trying to increase their quality of life, or elite athletes trying to get to the World Level Competition?

This helps to identify how they fit into your community based on your population.

If membership prices were removed from our business model, how would you suggest we monetize the gym without losing revenue?

Of course, this will never happen, but you can see how their creative process works in increasing revenue for your facility.

What is your opinion on if whether or not new members should be mandated to participate in a Beginner Class?

There is no wrong answer to this, but it helps you see how they would process working with a group of first-time beginners.

How was it done at your last gym, what would you have changed?

You could even up with a great idea here to increase revenue as well as changes you could make to better your process.

If you won the Powerball tonight, would you be at work next week?

If they love coaching so much that they would do it for free, that shows passion, many of us want to have in our coaches.

If there was one movement you could remove from fitness for the general population, what would it be? Why?

Here we see their experience. They could answer that they would remove the snatch because they feel like there are more straightforward ways to get the same fitness results, they could say muscle-ups because they don’t like the effects it has on the shoulders. There isn’t a wrong answer; it just gives you a more detailed look at their thought process.

What’s the scariest situation you’ve had in a gym? How did you respond? How did the other coaches respond? What would you have done differently knowing what you know now?

It could be as simple as someone hitting the box in a box jump or having to use a defibrillator.

A new member on day one comes to you, she is 59 years old, 60lbs overweight and has had no activity level before joining the gym. She states her first goal is to do a pull-up. How does that conversation go?

As owners, we know how we would answer. Here we have an opportunity to see the maturity and thought process of how this coach will handle these situations, which will come up.

It’s 5 am; you’re not supposed to be coaching. A member calls you and says the gym isn’t open, and they are waiting. What do you do?

This will let you see if they are a person who takes immediate action or tries to find the coach who is supposed to be there.

If you could only choose one song to ever be in the playlist during class, and it was on repeat, forever, which song would you choose?

We ask this because we want to know if they are going to choose their favorite song or one that would be good for the community as a whole. This allows you to see if they think of themselves first or your members.

Name three things about group classes that make you nervous.

This is going to show you their priorities of what they look out for most on the floor during class.

If you had to choose between the two, would you pick coaching every day, or studying the science of coaching every day?

Some people like to do; some people like to learn how to do it. This will show you where the coach is mental.

If a member told you he was thinking about leaving for another gym that was closer to his home, how would that conversation go?

Here we see the retention abilities of the potential coach.

If a 20-year-old male comes into the gym and says they are looking for a gym who can make them a CrossFit Games winner in 2 years, how would that conversation go?

This question is about their ability to sell your class and increase your revenue.

What is the biggest problem in the fitness industry today? How would you fix it?

No wrong answer, but it shows you where they have concerns and how they would fix them.

As the owner, if I programmed heavy snatches and handstand push-ups every day for a week, and you had seen the programming the week before, what would your reaction be?

With this question, we can see how they would approach us, or if they would contact us if they had seen something that didn’t look right. We will know if they are a person who will speak up, tell us we made a mistake, or ask us about our process so they can better understand it and communicate it to our members.

How would you make the people in our community feel more engaged?

Community involvement is one of the most significant aspects of what we do. Here we can see how they can be an asset in helping our community bond.

Of the 100’s of available coaching positions listed on BarbellJobs, why us?

Legitimate question. Every day there are jobs posted looking for coaches, and at any time, there are more than 300 active positions listed on BarbellJobs. This lets us know why we are the perfect fit.

If you run a high traffic facility, you probably have the time to only interview candidates who have been qualified and preinterviewed. If that if you, click below to learn about Talent Acquisition Recruiting.

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