A candidate who lands on your recruitment page wants three answers fast: what it costs, whether they qualify, and what happens if they raise their hand. Most of the biggest franchise brands in the US don’t give all three. We checked the recruitment pages of the top 100 brands in Entrepreneur’s 2026 Franchise 500 and could score 69 of them. Every brand and result is in the audit.
Use the nine points below on your own page. The first six come straight from that audit, so each one carries the count. The last three we did not measure, and we say so.
1. Show the total investment
Put the investment range on the recruitment page itself, in dollars. Only 25 of 69 pages did.
Ace Hardware shows it plainly: $603,850 to $2,001,550+. Wingstop puts $298,200 to $1,013,500 on the page. A candidate who sees a number can rule themselves in or out before they ever talk to your team, and that saves your reps hours.
Use the same range as your disclosure document. Your franchise counsel should sign off any figure before it goes live.
2. State the capital you need
Say how much liquid capital and net worth a candidate needs. 29 of 69 pages did, in the copy or inside a form question.
Dunkin’ doesn’t show an investment range on its page, but it does state $250,000 liquid assets and $500,000 net worth. That one line does more qualifying than a paragraph about passion and culture.
30 of 69 pages showed neither the investment nor the capital requirement. If your page is one of them, fix this first.
3. Put the form on the page
Let candidates inquire without hunting for it. 31 of 69 pages had a readable inquiry form on the landing page. The rest sent people to another page or behind a button first, and on 5 we couldn’t read the form at all.
Every extra click is a chance to leave. If your form sits on a separate “apply” page, test bringing it onto the main page.
4. Ask about capital on the form
Of the 31 forms we could read, 16 asked about liquid capital, net worth or funds to invest. The other 15 left the rep to find out on the first call.
A capital question with ranges as answers lets you grade every lead before anyone picks up the phone. It also gives Meta and Google something better to learn from than a name and an email. Our guide to grading franchise leads shows how to score the answers.
5. Ask where they want a territory
13 of the 31 forms asked where the candidate wants to open. Without it, you can’t tell a strong lead in a sold-out market from one in a market you’re desperate to fill.
Ask for a city or region, not a street address. If you sell territories by state or by postcode, use the same unit on the form.
6. Ask when they want to start
This is the gap that surprised us. Only 1 of the 31 forms asked about timing: Midas, whose form has a required “Time Frame” question with four answers: ASAP, 1 to 6 months, 6 to 12 months, and over a year.
Timing tells your team who to call today and who to nurture for six months. Copy that pattern. Four fixed answers are enough, and it costs the candidate two seconds.
7. Give recruitment its own address
51 of 69 pages sat on a franchise-only address, such as franchise.brand.com or a separate franchising domain, rather than a page of the customer site.
A separate address keeps candidate traffic apart from customer traffic in your analytics and your ad audiences. It also means a customer looking for a coupon doesn’t fill in your franchise form.
8. Say what happens after they submit
We didn’t measure this one. Tell the candidate, right beside the form, who will contact them, how (call, email or text) and how fast. “A member of our development team will call you within one business day” sets an expectation your team then has to meet.
If you can’t keep that promise, don’t make it. See how fast to call a franchise candidate for a response policy you can actually staff.
9. Show where you’re growing
We didn’t measure this either. If you have markets you want filled, name them on the page. A candidate in Phoenix who sees Phoenix listed reads the page differently from one who has to guess.
If a market is sold out, say that too. It saves both sides a call.
How to use this list
Open your recruitment page on a phone, because that is where most of your ad traffic will see it. Go down the nine points and write yes or no next to each. Fix the money points (1 and 2) and the form questions (4, 5 and 6) first. They cost little to change and they decide how much of your team’s time goes to people who were never going to buy.
Where the numbers come from
The counts come from our franchise recruitment page audit. We loaded each brand’s US recruitment page once on 31 October 2026, saved a screenshot and the page text, and reviewed every result by hand. 69 distinct pages could be scored; six Hilton brands share one development page and count once. A “no” means we didn’t see it on the landing page as loaded, not that the brand doesn’t publish it anywhere. Pages change, so a live page may differ from what we saw. The full dataset is free to download.
Put it to work on your recruitment system
Bring your recruitment page and anonymized stage counts to a diagnostic. We’ll identify what to test and how to measure it.
Discuss your franchisor recruitment system