Case Study: Sport Clips Haircuts achieves 30% workforce growth and boosts staff engagement with IBM watsonx Orchestrate (IBM)

A major national franchise, Sport Clips Haircuts, adopts intelligent automation to help its franchisees thrive

Sport Clips Haircuts, a national franchise with about 1,900 locations and 13,000 stylists, needed to grow its workforce by 30% and improve employee productivity and engagement so franchisees could reliably staff and run their stores. To meet that challenge, Sport Clips partnered with IBM and adopted IBM watsonx Orchestrate alongside ThisWay Global’s candidate sourcing and matching platform to bring responsible AI and intelligent automation into its recruiting and store workflows.

Using IBM watsonx Orchestrate to automate routine recruiting tasks and integrate systems, and ThisWay Global to surface diverse, qualified candidates, Sport Clips onboarded franchisees in under an hour and dramatically sped workflows — a candidate outreach task that once took three hours was reduced to about three minutes. IBM’s orchestration plus ThisWay Global’s 169 million‑candidate reach positions Sport Clips to scale from 13,000 to 17,000 stylists (a 30% increase) within 12–18 months while freeing staff from repetitive tasks to focus on customer service.

Sport Clips Haircuts

Gordon Logan

Chairman and Founder