Swipe Right for Your Next Great Hire

Most salon and spa owners agree that when it comes to recruiting talent, the power has shifted over the past decade. While owners used to have their pick of qualified candidates for each job opening, today’s owners are competing with other salons, spas, and solo opportunities for the attention of the best candidates.

Recent technological advances helping to balance the scales, especially for owners who embrace these developments and transform their recruitment processes accordingly.

“I remember helping our manager sift through paper resumes that came in as a response to our ad in the local paper,” says Rachel D’Angelo, founder of BeautiSoul, a consulting business that helps salon and spa owners make confident technology decisions. “Today online job boards and social media are helping owners reach wider pools of talent, and many maintain career pages on their websites to maintain a constant funnel of resumes and portfolios.”

To help you improve your talent game, SALON TODAY reached out to a variety of industry experts and salon and spa owners who shared solid strategies for leveraging technology to help you improve your recruitment process and land your next great hire.  

Building Your Talent Pipeline

Stefanie Fox, founder of Talent Match and The Leadership Reset, says the biggest problem most owners have when it comes to recruiting is they hire too slowly.

“I don’t know a single owner that ever says to me they’re not actively hiring, but yet when I get into the process with them, they don’t take action to do the steps to build the pipeline that makes hiring easier when they’re desperate,” she says.

Writing Your Brand Story

One of the most important steps in building that pipeline is telling your brand story on social media, because that’s the first place prospects will go to research your business. “Amid the your before-and-after posts and your marketing promotions targeted to clients, you need to tell your story from a team member’s perspective, like who you are, what your culture’s like, how your team spends time together, what the vibe at work is like,” Fox says.

In the world of marketing, there's this huge awareness around personal branding and creator culture, Fox says. “When you use the social media influencer as an example, people don’t just listen to what they're selling, they want to know what that person is eating, where they are shopping, and where they hang out,” Fox says. “Well, personal branding applies to a brick and mortar business, too."

"When someone looks at your salon's social pages they know you do hair, but what else is going on in your business? Do you give back to the community? Does the team maintain a style and aesthetic that matches your brand? Does your team seem to have fun with one another?”--Stef Fox

That doesn't mean you need to reveal your compensation structure or how many paid days off you give employees on social media, but you can start to showcase the experience your team has working within your brand.

After attending one of Fox's Leadership Reset programs, Helen Miller who co-owns Scott Miller in Rochester, New York, with her husband Scott, rewrote their recruitment playbook with their team. Not only did the Millers hire a recruiter for 20 hours a week to help them focus on recruitment year-round for their 15,000 square-foot salon and 2,500 square foot store, but their leadership team really examined the brand story the salon was telling on social media, including Instagram and TikTok.

“We went back and revisited our core values, and started telling our story through the eyes of our different staff members—our stylists, colorists, spa staff, proteges, front desk team and the beauty retail advisors in our store,” Helen says. “We no longer advertise job postings locally. We use Indeed and social media.”

Revealing your brand story on social can be a positive for your client followers, too. Helen says clients frequently ask her experienced stylists and colorists why they haven’t gone to rent a chair somewhere. “They really want to know that their person is being supported,” she says. “We have a wall that lists our Longevity Club; our 10-year, 20-year, 30-year and 40-year anniversaries, and clients frequently comment on it.”

Helen is a self-admitted shopper who loves to curate an experience, and she and Scott give employees celebrating milestone anniversaries personally selected gifts, including designer bags and diamond jewelry.

“For example, one of our employees was celebrating her 3oth anniversary, and she loves to write, so we gave her a Montblanc leather-bound journal and a Montblanc pen," says Helen Miller. "These are usually thoughtful gifts they’d never buy for themselves.”

Posting those moments on social media is an excellent way to shine the spotlight on Scott Miller’s culture.

Scripting Your Social Posts

Fox’s favorite activity to help salon owners curate a list of storytelling post is to take different salon  themes and put them up on a flip chart in a team meeting, with a heart on one side and a sad face on the other. “For example, put Growth up on the chart, and on the heart side, ask your team all the ways they can grow in your salon, and on the side with the sad face, all the ways your business could do better. Then do that for Culture, Education, etc.”

Once the team has made a list of all the things they love, get out one more flip chart, and for each one, ask, "How would we tell that story on social media?"

"Your team watches enough TikToks, you'll have 50 great ideas in 30 minutes, and a playbook to hand off to every staff member who helps the salon create social media posts," Fox says.

Using Social Media to Track Talent

While Fox is the first to advise owners and their team members to maintain a live presence at local cosmetology schools, she says the occasional career fair isn’t enough. “It’s like marketing, right? Think of those ads on Instagram trying to sell you something; you’ll see them three, four, five times before you take action,” she says. “If you show up at a career fair, that’s great, but so did a hundred other salons. But if you show up at the school every month, offering advice or even just asking the students questions, you’ll be more interesting to them, and you’re going to get more leads.”

In addition to leveraging Instagram to tell a brand story, Fox advises owners to use it to keep communication in your recruitment funnel active. “I tell owners to build a simple Excel spreadsheet and populate it with the talent leads you like and their Instagram handles, then start following them,” she says. “At a regular time, like every Tuesday morning, go on their feeds and comment on or like a few pictures. It’ll give them a big hit of dopamine you feel they are important enough to follow. If you genuinely like their work, invite them to have coffee with you, come in for a shadow day, or come in to experience your culture with a complimentary blowout. You have to be willing to be the pursuer, because they will not.”

When Helen and her team visit local cosmetology schools, they frequently advise students to start launch a professional Instagram account which is separate from their personal one. “We’ll go in with donuts and cider, give out cards with our social handles, and ask students to give us theirs,” she says. “When we get those back, we start following them. We’ve already had high school juniors in their vocational cosmetology programs apply for positions, and they still have another year before they graduate.”

Borrowing an idea from Coral Pleas, owner of Cutting Loose in Sarasota, Florida, Helen frequently invites students in for a two- to three-hour shadow day so they can see what it’s like to work at Scott Miller, then she gifts them with a coupon for the salon’s store.

When you have an unexpected job opening or are scrambling after a three-person walkout, the first thing you’re going to do is hit your pipeline with an email or a DM that says you’re hiring, Fox says. “Send them a job description, list your benefits, and include a Calendly link asking them to schedule a time to come in,” she recommends.  “If you’ve been building your recruitment funnel for some time, you’ll likely be messaging people who are unhappy in their first job choice and are interested in having a conversation.”

Drafting Your Job Description

When it comes to writing your job listing, Fox again recommends turning to technology. “You can mind dump all the reasons a candidate should come work for you in your ChatGPT or Claude, then ask it to write you a short paragraph that you can put in a job description.”

Helen says they tap AI to help them write their job postings on Indeed, and they average a 40% open rate.

“If a particular Indeed posting is lower than a 40% open rate, Scott will take the description back to ChatGPT and ask it to make it stronger,” Helen Miller says.

Timeliness and responsiveness to communication with prospects is very important. “Look at it like having a customer service inquiry with an airline because you had a flight cancel and you can’t get someone on the phone,” she says. “If you put an ad out there and people respond to it, these people are warm leads. But if they just hear crickets, they’ll move on quickly because they are worried about their next paycheck.”

Helen says her recruiter helps to make sure they respond to prospective candidates within 24 hours. “If they seem like a good fit, we’ll invite them to a virtual interview, where we also look at things like if they show up dressed professionally and on time,” she says.

A Better Virtual Interview System

In most salons and spas, hiring has long followed a familiar pattern—owners and managers review a resume, coordinate calendars with a candidate, schedule an interview, and conduct a live interview for each and every candidate. Not only is this process exhausting, time-consuming, and frustrating (especially when candidates no-show for their interviews), but it slows down the recruiting process.

Due to one-click, easy-apply buttons and AI auto-apply tools on platforms like Indeed, candidates can apply to hundreds of listings in minutes with minimal effort. This can overwhelm salon managers, who report that up to 90% of submissions are a mismatch.

Terry McKim, the founder behind the tip management platform Tippy, recently launched IntroVu, which helps salon and spa owners streamline their recruitment efforts through a one-way interviewing platform where candidates record responses to pre-set interview questions on their own time. 

As the manager of human resources and recruiting at Lords and Ladies Salons & Medspa, Ashley Rivera does a fair bit of recruiting and hiring for the company’s seven locations in Pennsylvania. “We are very competitive and looking for estheticians with specific requirements. As soon as I post a job to Indeed, I’ll get 30 applicants, but many of them aren’t serious or qualified,” she says.

Rivera has been a beta-tester of IntroVu for the past nine months. She sends each applicant an email with a link to the IntroVu platform. Candidates are asked to log into the video platform and respond to five questions through a Zoom-like platform. Each question gives the candidate a countdown so they have a moment to formulate their response, and they have the opportunity to re-record a response if they aren’t happy with the way they responded.

“The whole process takes them about 10 minutes, and we can use questions that IntroVu suggests or create our own,” says Rivera. “We ask questions like, ‘In your opinion, what does it take to be successful in the beauty industry?’ and ‘Tell us a fun fact about yourself.’”

Rivera says that IntroVu helps her weed out candidates who aren’t qualified or who aren’t truly interested, because only serious ones take the initiative to do the online interview.

“I’ll get 30 responses to an Indeed posting, and narrow that down to a handful of candidates to bring in for an interview,” Rivera says.

Daniel Ponce is the owner of Hair Society Salon and Color Bar in Round Rock, Texas, and he heard about IntroVu when he heard McKim being interviewed by Kati Whitledge in her Beyond the Technique podcast and just recently signed up.

“It’s great for separating serious candidates from resume spam,” he says. “We posted a job and had 30 people apply through Indeed, and 15 of those took the next step by doing the IntroVu interview. By watching the IntroVu interviews, we were able to narrow that down to three, which saved myself and my manager a significant amount of time. ”

Ponce says the videos tell you more about the candidate than you can see on a resume. “You see how they present themselves, and the videos can better show you who they really are.”

Ponce also likes the question asking the candidate to share a fun fact about themselves because it reveals a person’s personality, but he also asks things like, How do you feel about your pay being tied to hitting goals?,  What does being reliable mean to you?, and Tell us how you work in a team environment.

On his hiring page on his website and in Instagram posts, Ponce also recorded a video that introduces himself, tells candidates about the salon, and what they are looking for in a new hire. The hiring page includes a link to IntroVu, and interested stylists can submit a video even when the salon isn’t actively recruiting. “If it’s a good video and they are a good match, that can open a door to an opportunity,” he says.

Building a Recruitment Community

As the professional beauty industry started embracing technology to reach younger generations of talent who lived with their phones in hand, Jen and Matt Martinelli started building an industry-specific, Linked In-like platform focused on connecting beauty pros searching for their dream jobs with salon and spa owners looking for their dream employee.

Formerly known as Canvas Me, Beautista now is much more than just a job board. “Beautista is one of the few technology platforms where school owners, students, beauty professionals, owners, manufacturers, and suite owners congregate, and we mean something different to each audience,” says Matt.

Beauty professionals tap into Beautista to create professional portfolios, connect and collaborate with fellow artists, access professional online classes from top brands to expand their knowledge and skills, and find and apply for job opportunities. Today the site counts a community of nearly 173,000 professionals.

Salon and spa owners tap into Beautista to build their own talent funnels. The process starts when an owner jumps on a coaching call with the Beautista team to record an authentic intro video that reveals the salon’s values and culture. The team then builds a branded story-driven career page for the salon and launches targeted local ads, helpiung to handle every DM, text, and follow-up so prospects don’t fall through the cracks. Within weeks, Beautista promises to deliver four-plus licensed, portfolio-backed applicants whom owners can invite in for a live demo.

Through the applicants’ portfolios, owners can better assess candidates. They can see examples of their work, connect through to their social pages, track the professional classes they’ve taken, and strike up a rapport with them through the platform.

 Beautista overcomes many of the recruitment headaches owners share. “The biggest challenges we hear from salon owners are that they aren’t getting qualified applicants from platforms like Indeed, that applicants don’t show up for interviews, and that owners end up hiring the wrong people who end up leaving,” Matt says.

He admits when he and Jen first launched the platform, it did act more like an industry-specific job board. “We evolved by becoming a marketing agency for salon businesses,” he says. “With roots in professional beauty, we really understand what professionals and owners are looking for. The ads we create on Beautista can target lookalike audiences on Meta, so salons can target a specific radius around their salon. Our teams keep up on the latest trends and algorithms, so they can develop campaigns that deliver results.”

Beautista also gives owners a system through which they can easily track applicants so everyone involved in recruitment can easily see where specific applicants are in the process.  

Steve Earnshaw opened a unique salon concept in Roseville, California, shortly before the pandemic. Designed to look like nightclub, Hair Guitar offers clients excellent services while experiencing an immersive front row musical experience. Video monitors around the salon play music video while technology built into the back of the styling chairs allow them to feel the base and beat of the music, and guests can even make suggestions to the playlist.

Earnshaw struggled to build his team coming out of COVID. “Going through Indeed and other job sites, hasn’t been fruitful—it’s been a great deal of swinging and missing,” he says. “I’ve spent a significant amount of money trying to draw experienced professionals with followings, and have interviewed more than 100 people—it’s been exhausting. Over the six years, I’ve made job offers to 25 people but only hired about 12. A dozen or so ghosted me after I made the offers, and the rest backed out within a few days of their start date.”

Earnshaw just finished his fourth week with a Beautista campaign, and has hired two promising professionals in the past two weeks. “Beautista helped us develop a storyboard that really captured the essence of who we are, and it attracted a number of stylists who had either owned a salon at one point or who rented a suite and were looking for a communal work experience,” he says. “it added a supersonic capacity to our recruiting efforts.”

The whole experience has Earnshaw envisioning a brighter future. “We’re on track to turn a profit for the first time this year, and now adding these two new employees to our team of five has me envisioning creating a managerial role in the salon.