How To Recruit Top Salon Talent Using Social Media
Do you ever wonder why recruiting talented, experienced beauty therapists and hairstylists is so hard these days?
Hiring is always a red hot topic whenever salon owners get together, so in this guest blog Alice Kirby from Lockhart Meyer Salon Marketing looks at how social media can zip up your salon recruitment marketing.
1. Join The Best Salon Team In Town
Did you know 67% of job candidates check out your local reputation and social media profile before applying for a job? (study: LinkedIn)
So building a strong reputation as a great place to work is your first step to attracting and hiring top talent for your hair or beauty business.
There’s even a marketing name for it: employer branding.
Employer branding is all about building your reputation as a brilliant place to work, especially to potential job applicants.
The better you are at employer branding the more likely you are to attract the best local talent. Whether that super-talented therapist or stylist decides to join your salon, or prefers a competitor’s job offer, is often down to the strength of your brand and local reputation (your employer brand).
Now it’s one thing to claim your salon is a great place to work, but it’s another to prove it to potential applicants.
Step forward social media.
Social media is the easiest (and quickest) place to start creating your employer brand to ensure you attract and retain a top team.
By regularly posting social content that showcases your business culture, values and team you paint a picture of what it’s like to work for your hair or beauty business, and what makes it such a great place to work.
Try these social post ideas to boost your employer brand:
2. Showcase Your Salon Culture On Social
Give potential applicants a peek behind the scenes with posts revealing what it’s like to work on your team:
- Videos or photos of your team giving client treatments and services, or just being friendly at reception. Smiley, happy faces speak volumes.
- Post about your employees’ charity fundraising and volunteer work like this Facebook post from The Chapel salons.
- Show potential job applicants what fantastic training you offer with posts from education events. Your clients will be impressed too.
- Talk about the fun side of working with your team: from crazy Christmas jumpers to team building activities and fun evenings out.
- Visiting Salon International or Pro Beauty with your team? Then snap and post on social to show you take educating your employees seriously.
- Flaunt career opportunities with posts from award events or backstage at runway shows.
Shine the social spotlight on your team too, so job candidates see you nurture individuals, reward excellence and recognise outstanding achievements:
- Give a shout out to the stylist/therapist when posting client before & afters.
- Video a stylist/therapist talking about why they love and recommend a retail product.
- Introduce and welcome new salon employees on social.
- Shoot a ‘day in the life’ video and post on social (and your website career page). This one from Marriot is very slick and professional, but a homemade 45 second video would do the job too.
- Post client testimonials mentioning a team member. They make ideal social material building trust and credibility with clients, and motivating employees.
3. Get More People To See Your Hair Or Beauty Job Vacancy
Whether you’re hiring a beauty therapist, hair stylist, aesthetic practitioner or front-of-house team your target recruitment audience is on social.
Regardless of which other recruitment marketing channels you’re using – Monster, Indeed, specialist job boards and agencies or your local newspaper website job board – you can’t afford not to advertise your vacancy on social media.
Which Social Platform Should I Choose?
Facebook has over 2.3 billion monthly users and is by far the biggest social channel. It also allows you to be highly targeted in your recruitment advertising. And yes, you do need to advertise on Facebook and not just rely on organic (unpaid) posts.
If I only advertised on one social platform I’d opt for Facebook. But if you have an Instagram account I’d use that as well as (but not instead of) Facebook. Instagram is owned by Facebook so when you’re placing a recruitment advert on Facebook it’s just a case of ticking a box to have the same advert appear on Instagram.
Plus, because Instagram is very visual and imagery based, and because stylists and therapists tend to be visual, creative people there is a high chance your target candidates are on Instagram.
If you have a LinkedIn account and are looking for a more senior management candidate then I’d add this to the list.
4. Reduce Your Recruitment Marketing Costs
Social recruitment marketing is much cheaper on the face of it than traditional hiring routes but be careful as the advertising costs soon mount up.
Not advertised on Facebook before? No worries…
Download our free Recruitment Marketing & Hiring guide for hair, beauty and aesthetic businesses. I walk you through each step with easy to follow screenshots plus tips on writing an effective, successful social media recruitment advert.
5. Target The Right Job Applicants With Social
Don’t forget your advert needs to appeal to your target recruitment audience. In the same way as ‘not everyone is your ideal client’ then ‘not everyone is your ideal employee’.
Take this brilliant recruitment advert from NAF salon…
It’s instantly clear that they want to hire a bubbly, fun-loving, zany technician who has nailed nail art (pun intended). This social advert would not appeal to all technicians, but NAF have targeted it to the type of candidate they are looking for. Social media is the perfect platform for this.
Having designed and written your social post to appeal to your target recruitment audience, Facebook also lets you target who sees your job advert in their feed with laser accuracy. I explain how to do this action by action in our free Recruitment Marketing Guide which you can download here if you haven’t already.
6. Speed Up Recruitment With Social
If a stylist or therapist has just handed in their notice you need to recruit the right replacement FAST.
You’re already active on your business social so it’s a ready-made instant platform to recruit on. It takes minutes to set up a recruitment advert on Facebook (which you can push out simultaneously on Insta), and you’re in business.
PRO TIP
Why not prepare a couple of template job adverts for the key roles in your hair or beauty business? Then if you’re taken on the hop by your superstar employee handing in their notice you have something to work from and can produce a polished Facebook advert quickly. It also seems a lot less daunting than starting with a blank sheet.
7. Get Your Salon Team Recruiting On Social Media
This isn’t always appropriate but it can work very well as a recruitment marketing tool.
Ask your team to post your job vacancy on their social media. This widens the recruitment net, and the chances are your team’s friends are like-minded people who may well be beauty therapists, hairdressers or nail technicians themselves.
You could even offer a reward to the team member who finds the successful new recruit.
Make life easy for them by giving them a suggested post text (and save your blushes as you stay more in control of your brand).
8. Review Your Candidates
Clearly you must not look at someone’s social media profiles without them consenting to it, but often job applicants include personal social links in their CVs. In which case, an applicant’s social profile can give you insights into their personality, ambitions, work and attitude. Do these align with your business’s culture and values?
Just be very careful that you don’t let the information wrongly affect your judgement or mean you discriminate against the candidate in any unlawful way.
Recruiting The Best Salon Team Using Social…
Social media has transformed how all businesses recruit by putting the tools to hire the best talent in your hands.
It also enables you to market to passive candidates throughout the year, even when you’re not actively recruiting.
Passive candidates are people who are not actively looking for a new job at the moment, but will consider a career move if the right role with the right business comes up.
Using social media you can market to, and engage with, this pool of candidates and forge relationships that, when you do have a vacancy, can potentially turn into a hire.
Alice Kirby is the founder of specialist beauty, aesthetic and hair marketing agency Lockhart Meyer. If you found this interesting check out her marketing blog here.
