How To Find The Best Staff For Your Salon Or Spa

So, how to we get great staff? Also known as the million dollar question.

Now, I’m lucky because part of my adventure that led me to where I am today, were three different roles in recruitment – where I had the job of sourcing amazing team members for my clients – and I have clung onto the skills and used them to build my own, excellent team.  Who, incidentally, I honestly believe are some of the best beauty staff in the area.  They are a huge part of our success story.

In fact, I really think that the quality of your business depends on the quality of your team, and the quality of your team can be defined at recruitment stage. I’m so passionate about understanding how to separate the wheat from the chaff – that I’m even writing a full guide on how to do it!  (More on this in the coming weeks!).

But – here are a few essential hints and tips which will give you an incredible team – and subsequently an incredible business.  These are the tools that I use.

Whilst I do encourage outsourcing in many aspects of your business, recruitment is one element that I strongly recommend you do yourself.  Why?  Getting the right person is an important task and their skill set is not the only aspect that needs to be assessed.

Will this team member fit in with your team? Will they love your clients like you do? Will they change the dynamics for the worst?

Only can you ascertain this, and only by meeting them.

If you’ve read any of our other blogs, books or guides, you’ll see we strongly advocate the regular use of social media – and this is one place you should be advertising your roles.

People who follow you and are your fans will know your passions as a business and will likely have visited your business.  They’ll know your business ethics and nature and will be likely to be a stronger fit for your business.

We’ve never been short of applications for roles – except once.  Our ads went up and we got zilch.  Nada.  A trickle finally dropped into our box – all poor quality candidates without the credentials and skills we require.  We can only assume it was the wrong time of year but we realised that if we didn’t take a different route, we’d be one man down – and you and I both know that’s not good in our business!

So, we took a different approach and we used our team members to attract new people by profiling them through social media. By showing people in our area that our team stay with us, get promoted and enjoy their jobs, we managed to create interest with therapists who weren’t necessarily seeking alternative roles but who were attracted to our ethics and business model.

A recruitment email campaign is a great way to get your recruitment message out here – again, you are dealing with people who understand your business model and are happy to communicate with you – which gives you one extra step to finding the right person.  It also shows to any clients who receive the email who are not interested that your business is expanding, you’re a success and you’re going places!   This in turn will attract more clients too.

I have always found that Gumtree has given some good results – and I have sourced a few of my key team members here.  The best thing is that it is free for your first 5 adverts.  But beware as you will recieve a lot of poor applicants through this source so be prepared to sift through them!  That said, there well may be a couple of gems too.

Now you’ve a pool of applicants to sift through, and now the real hard work begins!   Choosing the best ones, interviewing them and the correct recruitment etiquette for the unsuccessful applicants.

These issues, and more, will be address in the second part of this blog.

As always, we’d love to hear from you.   What have you found the best recruitment sources to be?