HOW TO Grow Your Salon Team Successfully

Whether you're looking to take on your first-ever employee or adding your hundredth, recruitment is a big deal. Here are my tips on growing your salon team successfully. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons. Coming in your eyes and ears again with another dose of Wise Owl Wisdom, and today we are talking about recruitment. And I get that recruitment is a big deal, and I hear, and I promise if you're struggling to recruit, if you're struggling with recruitment marketing, you are not alone. There are people in your town who are struggling too, there are people in your region, there are people around the world who are really struggling to find decent talent to bring into their salon businesses. And I also understand that most of you are running small businesses, and I get that it's a big deal bringing someone new into a small team. Particularly, at the moment, it's a team of one. So how can your Uncle Phil support you? Well, I want to share with you my tips on recruitment. I want to just give you a little bit of food for thought so that we're not jumping in and making some rash decisions. And the overarching theme that I want for this podcast episode is for us not to rush into anything. And it's okay to be recruitment marketing, it's okay to be looking, actively looking for somebody, and find people who are interested in working for you but they're just not good enough. It's okay to say, do you know what, we'll wait. We'll leave it three months for the recruitment market to refresh and then we'll try again. Don't take on anybody unless they are the perfect fit for you. And yes, I know it's frustrating, and I know you're turning clients away, or I know that you've got work that you want to move out of your column into somebody else's, but I promise making the wrong hire will cripple your business in the medium term. The setback that it can give you, the poison that can come from the wrong hire, even with people who have the best intentions in the world. They can do so much damage to your business. I would rather you took on nobody than took on the wrong person. That said, and a bit more positively, how do we have to think about recruitment? Well, the first thing I want you to do is assess whether you really need to recruit at all. And I see a lot of people feeling like they need to grow, and they know that they need to grow their turnover.

They know that they need to grow the profits that are being generated by the business. And their knee-jerk reaction is to start hunting for somebody else to open up a column for. And I think that's a mistake. I think it's much better to revisit the profits that you want to take out of the business. That will tell us how much profit the business needs to generate overall. That will tell us how much turnover we need to generate. Then you need to look at the columns that you have already. Then you need to look at the level of utilization that you think is realistic for you to achieve. And we need to figure out whether you actually have a recruitment problem, or maybe we have a utilization problem. Or maybe we have an efficiency problem, a productivity problem. Is there more we can get from the existing team, which means we don't need to recruit? Now, I'm not discouraging you from recruitment. And I've said before that I think employers are the guardians of our industry. I think without them, we have a very short-lived industry indeed. But equally, I don't want you bringing more people in, adding to your fixed costs, maybe adding to your variable costs, if there's another way for us to generate that income. Because if we can get your existing team members, your existing columns, your existing services more profitable, that's going to add a lot more in terms of bottom line profit than bringing somebody else on well. So firstly, revisit your goals, figure out whether we need to recruit at all. Assuming that we do, then we get into the wonderful world of recruitment marketing. Now, it's a lot easier to think about recruitment if you think about it as a marketing exercise like any other. So how do we approach effective marketing for your salon when we're looking for, let's say, new clients? Well, the first thing we do is figure out the best way to reach those new clients. And then we tailor an offer. We hit the notes in our marketing that we think that ideal clients would be switched on and interested with. And it's exactly the same with recruitment marketing. So I don't particularly think that social media is the best place for us to be doing recruitment marketing, because ultimately that's not where your potential recruits are going to be hanging out or certainly not hanging out on your Facebook page. We've built your Instagram profile on your Facebook page to attract customers, not to attract team members. So I see a lot of people very disappointed when they put their recruitment ad out on social media. And it's absolute crickets. You're going to have to do something to get it off the page, to get it out into the world.

And that means, I think, actually trying to hit notes with your existing customers. I think if we can encourage the people that are part of your profile, are following your page, to share your message beyond the reach that you currently have on Instagram or Facebook, then I think there's a lot more to be gained. So when you're writing recruitment adverts, don't write them necessarily. If they're going on social media, don't write them necessarily for potential candidates. Write them for the customers that you want to share the message. So we're hiring. I think it's a fairly crappy headline anyway, to be honest with you, but I don't think it's going to work, because I don't think your customer will be interested in that. Help us find a superstar. Now, that's an interesting headline. That would make me want to read on. That's encouraging your customers to share your message beyond your reach. Once we're into that recruitment marketing, though, we've talked about hitting the notes with your potential customers. We need to hit the notes with your potential candidates, too. Why would they be interested in applying for a job? We've got to convince them, first of all, that actually it's a good idea to work for somebody. Secondly, that it's a good idea to work for you. And thirdly, that it's a good idea to work for you right now. That's a big ask from a recruitment advert. And we're not going to get there by talking about you. There are so many recruitment ads that tell me all about the fact that you're hiring, all about the history of the company, all about the fact that you think you're fantastic and you're such a leader in the local industry. You haven't talked about me at all. Show that you understand me. What's going on with me? What are the reasons that a potential candidate might want to apply for a position? Now, some of the stuff that we did off the back of Covid was we saw a little bit. We've got this ongoing trend towards self-employment, which I acknowledge. But there was a bit of a kickback after Covid and one or two years after where people started to feel very isolated, wanted to be part of a team again. That's what we noted. That's what we emphasized in the recruitment marketing. Be part of a team. Be part of something again. Come into the family. That's what we pushed in our recruitment marketing. Or perhaps it was around stability, about the financial stability that comes from being employed rather than being at the mercy of self-employment.

Or maybe it's that there's training opportunities that, you know, as a self-employed person to firstly take time off work and secondly invest in high quality training. That's a big investment. Maybe we can emphasize the fact that we have ongoing training, high quality training as part of the package when we're bringing people on. So these are the notes that we need to be hitting. We need to be finding reasons, emotive reasons, why somebody would want to be employed by you. Emphasize that. Show me that you understand me in your recruitment ad. Don't just tell me that you're hiring. Incidentally, you will get a much higher rate, a much higher hit rate if you keep people on platform. So it always makes me smile when I see people putting recruitment ads on Facebook and Instagram and they're asking people to send in a CV. I mean, who's got their CV to hand when they're watching Netflix and scrolling through Facebook? It just doesn't happen. So you'll be doing much, much better if we can keep people on platform. And that means making it easy for people to apply. Now, I think there's an overarching strategy of making it easy anyway, because I think our, well, I know our industry attracts a disproportionate number of people who struggle with written communication. We've always had a lot of people who find written communication tricky coming into hairdressing, beauty therapy and aesthetics. So putting together a CV for someone who might have those difficulties is really, really challenging. Make it easy for me to apply because you're missing out on high quality talent by putting hurdles in the way. If you're advertising a vacancy on Facebook or Instagram, why not just get someone to send you a message? Start a conversation because at the end of the day, that's keeping people on platform. You're asking people to send in CVs. They're going to be jumping through all kinds of hoops. You're going to lose interest. The other thing I would make available is some kind of application form, because I think that filling in an application form with tick boxes and small boxes where you want me to summarize my experience and my expertise. I think that's less intimidating. I know what you want from me rather than just putting together a CV. The other thing I would say is we also attract people very early on in their careers. So we quite often get people 16, 17, 18 years old applying for these jobs, asking people to put together a CV when there's not very much to put on it. It's off putting, whereas I think an application form is a lot less intimidating. The other thing I want you to buy into is a process of continual recruitment marketing. That means making sure there's a page on your website which tells people about the kinds of vacancies that you have, where people can raise a hand even if you're not actively recruiting.

Have that page live, have it available, have it optimized for search engine, and make sure that we're getting people to raise a hand. Now, at the end of the day, you might say, well, why would I want people to apply for a position if I don't have a position available? And we're not cheating anyone. We're not saying that we've got vacancies when we haven't. But having your job descriptions, emphasizing the kind of place it is to work, I think is really good marketing anyway. But also, to be honest with you, let's say you're running a hair salon and you're not actively recruiting at the moment because you don't need to. Are you telling me that if an incredible stylist came along who'd just come from a salon down the road that was closing, so they had a clientele to bring with them as well, are you telling me you wouldn't try and find space? Of course you bloody well would. So let's not kid ourselves. Let's keep the opportunities flowing. And I have heard of salons with a hiring page where they're getting four or five inquiries per month. Now, even if you don't have space right now, that's four or five people that you could be tapping into when a vacancy does arise. So we keep those people's details. We get back in touch with them, keep in contact with them. In my own salon, we actually had a separate mailing list for people that had raised a hand and said they might be interested. Then if somebody does leave or they decide they're going to go on maternity leave early and it feels a bit like the rug has been pulled from underneath you, you've got a small black book of people that you can get in contact with and start having conversations to. Finally, I want to talk about how we make a recruit start to and this sounds very mercenary, but start to pay for themselves. And the first part of that comes from the onboarding process. We've got to get them up to speed and running as quickly as possible. And that means that your induction process, it means that any early wins, as far as training is concerned, need to happen really, really quickly. So your induction process have a really good think about how we can speed things up, how we can make things a lot more fluid for people when they first start working for us. I know of at least one salon who has a whole induction process that they can send out to a new starter before they even set foot through the door on the first day. So what my friend Sarah has done down on the south coast of England is her whole employee manual is video format. So she's put together a set of videos on the way that her salon does business called the EQ Lounge. So the way that the EQ Lounge does business, what they're about, she's projecting their ethos.

She's talking about the company culture, but she's also talking about a set of standards that all employees need to adhere to. All of that is sent out to the new starter for them to watch ahead of their first day. Save Sarah a huge amount of time, but also it gives her a chance to properly enforce the company culture rather than trying to do it really, really quickly on the first day because you've got so much to cover in the induction. Market your new recruit really hard. And I think we should be setting very strong performance targets from the get go. Those performance measures need to be really clear. They need to be in your job description and we need to be coaching them towards interim targets as quickly as possible. In my salon, we had a set of interim targets. You had 90 days to get to a certain level of utilization and a certain average bill. I know that my marketing strong. I know I can get you enough new clients. You need to show me that you can get the average bill up, that you can keep them rebooking, that you can make sure those customers are really happy. And that process of performance management needs to start early, needs to be frequent, and it needs to be continual. We need to be meeting our team members in the early days at least once a week, feeding back on their performance, making sure our expectations are really clear, and making sure that they are swimming, not drowning. So there we have it, my tips on recruitment. Reach out and let me know if there's anything I've missed. What are you doing in your salon business to make sure recruitment is a success? Or perhaps you're struggling, perhaps you've got questions, in which case reach out too. I'm taking questions for my next Ask Me Anything episode. I'd love to be tackling the issues that are going on in your salon business. Also reach out if you'd like to be a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I'm determined to get some interviews up and running for early in 2025. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears again, and until then, take care.