27. How to use Facebook for Salon Recruitment

Hi everyone, this is the weekly Build Your Salon podcast with me, Phil Jackson. I'm here with the tools you need to generate the profits you deserve so that you can lead a fuller life. Welcome, and today we're talking all about how we can use Facebook advertising as an effective tool to help us recruit into our salons. I've talked about recruitment in blogs before, and it seems to me that salon owners and managers are struggling more and more to find the right staff to serve their lovely customers. Salons, in general, love Facebook. Even if salon owners don't particularly like it on a social level, what we do understand is that it's a really useful way of reaching our customers. So most salons and most hairdressers and most beauty therapists have at least some presence on Facebook. So when it's time for us to start recruiting to build our teams, it seems like a very logical place for us to go. But what I'm finding when I talk to salon owners and managers is that lots of them have tried to use Facebook in the past for recruitment purposes, and they've struggled or even failed completely. So what I've put together today, you can use as a kind of checklist next time that you're doing Facebook advertising for recruitment, or a troubleshooting list to see where you went wrong last time. And we're going to use the market message media model to go through Facebook advertising as a tool for salons. So first up, market. So this is your audience in Facebook terms. First thing though, you do realise you're going to be paying for this, right? There is nothing free for businesses on Facebook anymore. The days of having a Facebook page that you could just post content to and expect it to go viral are long gone. You're going to have to put some budget behind this. That said, unless you're recruiting for multiple positions or you're recruiting on behalf of a large salon or salon group, I still think Facebook advertising is an extremely cost effective way of reaching your audience when you compare it to something like print. So assuming that you've made the decision that Facebook is the way forward, how do we reach the audience? Well, you've got some work to do first of all, and this is exactly the same marketing exercise as we have for every other piece of marketing we put out there. You have to know who you're talking to. Once you know exactly who it is that you're trying to reach through your Facebook advertising, that immediately dictates the tone and the content of your advert for optimal results. If you haven't already identified who it is you're looking for, you need to go back.

Go back to episode 19 where we talked about customer avatars and identifying who our marketing was trying to speak to. The only difference in this case is you've also got a job description and perhaps a person profile to help you make those decisions. So once you've got a really clear idea about who it is that you're trying to reach, next it's time to use your Facebook advertising options to narrow down your search a little bit. So who is it exactly that you're looking for? Well, when we're Facebook advertising, either to customers actually or in a recruitment context, there's a little tool that we use called interests and behaviours. So you're going to identify your target market by the things that they're interested in. Unfortunately, however amazing your Facebook page has been for your customers, it's not going to be effective when you're looking for staff. Unless you're running a customer incentive to get them to try and find you another member of staff, which is something that I've tried successfully in the past. But assuming we're trying to reach hairdressers or therapists directly, your Facebook page isn't going to do you a lot of favours. So we need to reach outside using interests and behaviours to promote our posts too. Little trick for me, don't use the job title to narrow your search. So don't look for a beauty therapist or a salon manager. A lot of people don't update their profiles on a regular basis and some people are very private. So they don't put their job role on their profiles at all. So trying to reach people in that way isn't going to work for you. What I do is look at the things that they're interested in instead. And there are lots of things to make it easy for you. So look at the academies, look at the trade press in your area of the industry. So for example, I'm a hairdresser here in the UK and I run a salon where we recruit fairly regularly. So when I'm looking for qualified hairdressers, I will go through the trade magazines. So I'm looking for someone who has ticked as an interest at some stage on their profile page that they're interested in either Hairdressers Journal or Creative Head magazine or BehindTheChair.com or Professional Hairdresser magazine. So if they've indicated that they're interested or they've liked those pages in the past,

they're the people that I'm going to try and reach with my advert. I do limit my adverts geographically as well, but not as far as you think. So for example, I would not run an advert with, say, a radius of 10 miles from the salon. I think that's too close. Depending on how easy it is to commute to your salon, you may find particular senior staff that are willing to travel that little bit further. So up to about 25 miles, something like that. Also bear in mind, there might be people that are looking for jobs because they're relocating. So don't limit yourself too far. Don't narrow your search too far geographically. So once you've identified the behaviours and interests of people and you've identified your region, I would also not limit it by age limit. I don't particularly think it's helpful to have so clear an image in your mind of the person you're trying to recruit that you're only looking for people between the ages of, say, 30 and 35. I think that's a little bit counterintuitive. So keep it broad as far as age limit is concerned. Focus in on the interests and behaviours instead. So once we've identified our audience, we've identified our market for our Facebook advertising, now it's time to look at our message. This is where most people go horribly, horribly wrong with Facebook advertising. In some ways, Facebook advertising is exactly the same as all other marketing that you do. So, for example, in the salon, if you were trying to sell a product, we know that there are two things that you can emphasise to a customer to encourage her to try that product. The first is the product's features. So, for example, this product contains five different essential oils. What actually sells a lot more effectively, though, we know is when we focus on the benefits. So if we said this product will fight frizz in your hair and give you shiny hair for up to three days, that's a benefit. It's exactly the same in recruitment advertising. If you're finding your advert is talking lots about the features of the job, you will not have as good a response as when you can engage on an emotional level with your audience. So what you need to emphasise in your adverts is not, for example, the salary and the hours, though those things are important and we should never shy away from being very upfront about what people are going to be earning. What you need to emphasise is how it feels to work for you.

Do you have, for example, a fantastic, friendly team that is going to change the way they feel about work on a day-to-day basis? Do you invest more in education as well so that people are going to have a meteoric rise to the top? Does your son bring with it a lot of prestige because you're doing a lot of work, for example, for celebrity clients or behind the scenes at fashion shows? So emphasise how people are going to feel, connect with them on an emotional level and start to push the features away from your advertising a little bit. And I think your message will come across a lot better. Also, bear in mind that we are on Facebook. So your message needs to be quite light. It needs to be social. It needs to be friendly. If your advert reads like a press ad from the 1980s, I'm afraid you're not going to get much of a response at all. This brings us nicely onto media. So there are some quirks around Facebook advertising. The first is that we need to keep it very light, we need to keep it very bubbly, we need to keep it very social. Second, you will increase your engagement on Facebook advertising if you keep people on platform. This is actually true of all advertising. So, for example, if you are advertising on your website, you will get a much better response if you keep people online. So if you are advertising something on your website, they can click a link and book straight away on your online booking service. You will get a better response than if you are asking people to send in a voucher or call up the salon. It's exactly the same on Facebook. So if you want an excellent response on Facebook, don't ask people to put pen to paper and post in a CV. What you want them to do is respond while they are on Facebook. So I would actually accept applications in the first instance through Facebook Messenger if you can. If not, ask for a text message or a phone call because most people will be looking at Facebook on their mobile device. So the closer you can keep them to the platform where they see your message, the better your response rate will be. In the same way as your marketing for your customers is about building a relationship slowly and over time. So there's a depth of relationship. Exactly the same as that is true when we're recruitment advertising. Do not go from somebody seeing your Facebook post to a full on face to face interview in one step. Keep it very light, keep it casual. So initially I would go for a Facebook Messenger conversation and then say,

Can I give you a call in a day or two for a quick chat? Go from there to a coffee and don't call it a face to face interview at all if you don't absolutely need to. If you use Facebook at all yourself, start to notice which posts catch your eye. So unfortunately a text-based ad on Facebook, however easy they are to put together, is not going to work for you. Images are much more eye-catching or even better, if you're brave enough, get in there and put yourself a video out. Honestly people will connect to you in a much better way and actually video ads on Facebook are much cheaper to promote at the moment. I've got a link in the description to a Facebook ad that I did on video. I'll be honest with you now, it's a bit cringy. I do inwardly die when I watch it, but for results it was superb. I got three qualified members of my team just from this video advert. I would change it slightly now. If you follow the link and have a look at the advert, you'll see that I asked people to send me a text message, an SMS for more details or if they were interested in the position. Now I would change that. I would go Facebook Messenger all the way. And my final point on recruitment is keep the conversation alive, even if it's bad timing. And I'll give you an example of what I mean. If you, for example, are having your mind that you are looking for a senior stylist with ten years experience, and you end up in a conversation with somebody who's got two years experience, so they're not quite right for that position, but you think they could be good for your team in the future, keep the conversation alive. Because if your junior stylist walks out without notice or gets sent off on maternity leave, you've immediately got a pool of people who you can call on to start to fill those positions. You won't be left quite so high and dry again. I hope that's been useful to you. This subject was suggested to me by somebody who follows the Build Your Salon Facebook page. So if there's something that you would like me to cover in one of my videos, please get in touch. Either comment or send me an email, phil at buildyoursalon.uk, or find me on Facebook or Twitter. I hope you've already subscribed to this channel. If you have, I will see you again next week. If not, click subscribe now because I would hate you to miss out on the content that I'm putting out every Monday. See you soon. Hey everyone, it's Phil again. I hope you enjoyed the episode.

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