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Earlier this summer, The Gym Group opened its 248th UK site in Edinburgh, growing from 200 locations in 2021.
There are no plans to slow down the impressive expansion, with 14 to 16 more openings planned for 2025 alone.
Rapid expansion has required extensive workforce growth in both gym staff and operational roles, and in turn, the need to reshape the company’s HR efforts, led by The Gym Group’s Chief People Officer, Ruth Jackson.
Jackson speaks to HR Grapevine about The Gym Group’s ongoing expansion, revealing why she has evolved her lean department from a group of HR generalists to a squad of specialists across wellbeing, careers, and more.
She discusses how the approach has helped the company secure an influx of culturally aligned candidates and build a highly engaged workplace where employees love to work, grow, and build their careers.
The Gym Group has grown a lot since 2021 – what has this meant for the people team?
Although it hasn’t grown in numbers, some of the roles within the team have changed. The people team has evolved from being quite ‘generalist’ to more ‘specialist.’ We’ve got specialist capabilities when it comes to talent acquisition, employee relations, payroll, learning and development, and so on.
We have an EDI & Wellbeing Manager role that didn't exist a few years ago, and an Early Careers Manager role, shifting our focus to the key areas we now need to look after. It’s a very intentional team, embedding tools, behaviours, and a culture to support the people-first business that we've got.
In 2024, we were awarded the Sunday Times Best Places to Work. This year, we retained our Gold We Invest in People accreditation and improved from Silver to Gold for We Invest in Wellbeing, so it’s a testament to the work the people team does.
How are you set up to meet your extensive hiring needs in such a fast-paced sector?
Firstly, it’s about setting up the tools. We've got an embedded HRIS and a tool that supports Gym Managers to be effective in their recruitment, enabling them through training to be effective at quick, high-volume hiring.
The people team has evolved from being quite ‘generalist’ to more ‘specialist.’ We’ve got specialist capabilities when it comes to talent acquisition, employee relations, payroll, learning and development
Secondly, we need to attract new talent into the fitness sector and make sure we shout about how good we are as a company to work for, so that people want to join. And once they have joined, we make sure their actual lived experience is such that they want to stick around.
Is it a challenge to attract new people to the fitness industry?
There are definitely challenges in the fast-paced fitness industry. Take personal trainers, qualified with a Level 3 qualification, for example. The industry as a whole has seen a challenge in the number of people available to do those roles. We’ve had to be quite creative and innovative to go and look for new people to come and join us.
To accelerate PT hiring – this is where our specialist early careers work came in – we work in partnership with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and job centers. People get a qualification through the DWP, then we give them the opportunity to come and work in our gyms and kick-start a new career.
Over the last 6 to 9 months, we've also been working on our Gym Group Academy. We advertise in our gyms: “Have you ever thought about being a personal trainer?”
We’ve had such a phenomenal response, exceeding all our expectations, with thousands of inquiries from people exploring the opportunity.
300 people signed up to do their training qualification through our accredited partner, and 65 have qualified before joining us as a PT in our business. It's quite early days, but we're seeing really good retention in terms of those people who come through that channel, too, as well as a good diversity split of male to female.
