Salons are experts at creating amazing guest experiences.

I imagine that inside your salon, the leadership team is regularly assessing how well they are doing at retaining new and existing clients. If you are anything like me you pay a ton of attention to different experiences you have as a consumer that really “wow” you and then you race back to your business and add in new ideas to delight your salon clients. When you work in the service industry you’re wired to wow people. 

In this new era of recruiting and hiring differently, we are fortunate as salon leaders to turn a skill we already have into a competitive advantage. You know how to impress your guests, now you need to think about how to impress your talent. The very talent that you hope becomes part of your team long term. 

At Talent Match we support salons with their entire team-building experience.

That starts with how you attract and interview talent and leads to how you hire and onboard talent. Today I want to invite you to fast forward to the part of your process that is the onboarding and do a little self-analysis. 

How long is your onboarding process? 

• A day?
• A week?
• A month? 

Is it a day, week, or month of crammed-in information sharing and connection building, or do you layer it out into digestible chunks? 

In my experience, most salons onboardings are run more like a sprint and they should be run like a marathon, slow and steady. Think about how important the experience is for them to get to know your brand, have your expectations made clear, get their questions answered, and meet the team in a meaningful way. None of these elements can be skipped if you want to create a sense of comfort and confidence in the person you’ve just hired.

New jobs are intimidating as it is, but the way we bring people in can create an even bigger intimidation factor. 

When you cram in 

• Schedule expectations
• Meeting new people (and trying to remember names!)
• Tax documents
• Onboarding paperwork
• Education dates
• Learning

And more… you run the risk of the majority of the information never being retained.

Instead, you might consider how you build out the share of information over time. What do they need to know on the first day? The first week? The first month? The first 6 months? 

Even better yet, have you ever considered how to create an impression before they even enter the business on that first day?

What if the day before they started they received a beautiful package in the mail of products you love, some salon swag, a note, a gift card for a coffee…? How do you imagine they would feel? Probably like they are so excited that they were offered a job by your salon! The exact feelings we want them to have. Proud, excited, and special. 

Why is this more important in beauty than in any other industry? Because our clients are connected to our team and when we lose a team member we lose clients.

You’ll find yourself (maybe you already have) in a never-ending rebuild every few years when you lose staff and revenue tanks if you don’t get a better handle on the experiences you want to create for your team. Ever read the John Steinbeck quote on hairdressers? Check it out in this email and you’ll know this is true. 

We have to stop putting all of our attention on wowing our guests and start prioritizing wowing our employees.