Welcome back to our eight-part series on recruiting and hiring strategies for salon owners. Over the next several weeks, I will be sharing some of my favorite tips and tricks for hiring talented salon staff.

Last week, in part one of our series, I discussed the importance of proactively recruiting using your salon’s website. It’s always easier to pull from a pool of applicants rather than scrambling to find a stylist after you’ve had someone quit unexpectedly. By having a dedicated page on your website for recruitment, you can always be collecting resumes and applications so that when the time comes to hire, you are ready to jump into the interview process.

Salon Recruiting Tip: Visit Beauty Schools

Having a website page is a great, low-effort way to keep your recruiting platform in constant motion. However, there are other ways to add qualified applicants to your hiring pool outside of your website.

Which brings me to today’s piece of recruiting advice – take time to visit beauty schools. While hiring a stylist right out of school can be a lot of work, it can also present a great opportunity to mold a young, fresh stylist to fit in with your salon culture and needs. In addition to helping younger stylists refine their talent, it also allows you to create pricing tiers for your stylists which in turn allows you to offer more services at different price points to a wider customer base.

I would recommend scheduling regular visits (about once per quarter) to the beauty schools in your area to not only recruit new talent, but to help establish a relationship and reputation with the beauty schools in your market. During my last beauty school visit, over half of the students already had positions secured in salons, even though they weren’t graduating for a few more months. What this tells me is that those students are eager to start their careers in the beauty industry and have taken the initiative to start their careers out on the right foot. That’s the kind of self-motivation you want in a team member.

By making beauty school visits a regular part of your recruiting strategy, you start to add qualified applicants to your hiring pool for the next time you need to hire a new stylist.

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