The global spa and beauty industry is growing rapidly and projected to reach $190 billion by 2024. But given this growth, the industry is facing challenges staffing up with quality employees. The beauty industry, which not only consists of salons and spas, but also barber shops, waxing franchises and massage franchises, among other businesses, is struggling to fill more than 30,000 vacant positions.
With a steady stream of open roles, your beauty business risks spending too much money on hiring in an effort to staff up quickly, and the overall customer experience taking a hit. If you’re looking to attract top talent while saving money on hiring, take the following tips into consideration.
Build a Strong Employment Brand
The beauty industry recognizes the significant talent shortage across businesses. In fact, the International SPA Association (ISPA), the Beauty Changes Lives Foundation and 10 partner organizations recently launched the “Get Your Dream Job” campaign, with the goal of getting job seekers excited about the opportunities a beauty career has to offer – including flexibility, stability and career growth.
With the “Get Your Dream Job” campaign is a joint effort among many key players in the beauty industry, your beauty business can also sell local applicants on the key benefits of joining your team, through a strong employment brand. Your employment brand should include details on the workplace culture, career progression, and benefits in both your job descriptions and on your career site to help job seekers see the opportunity working for your hotel offers. Benefits can include healthcare, paid vacation time, family leave, a transportation stipend, discounted fitness memberships, budget for professional development, and more.
The most engaged job seekers visit company career sites to research the true opportunity a role has to offer before applying. With a compelling employment brand and career site, you can attract top talent to join your team.
Save Money on Applicant Sourcing
Many businesses across industries make the mistake of buying costly, one-off job board postings to fill roles quickly as soon as they open up. But these one-off postings can lead to a high quantity, yet low quality of applicants and, as a result, wasted money.
By instead partnering with a hiring technology partner, you can diversify your job board spend and automatically reach hundreds of the best local and national recruitment channels. These channels include local classified ads, social networks, specialty and mass media job boards. You can also select different sources depending on the position your beauty business recruiting for rather than using the same strategy each time you have an open role.
Once you diversify your sourcing strategy, it’s important to understand which sourcing channels are driving the most quality candidates – and eventual hires – and which channels aren’t driving results for your beauty business. And when you have a grasp into the performance of different applicant sources, you can eliminate applicant sourcing channels that aren’t driving results and reduce sourcing costs without sacrificing overall quality of hires.
Follow a Consistent Hiring Process
Hireology research found that many businesses wait up to 10 days to initially review an application once it’s submitted. And during this waiting period, you risk losing prospective job applicants to a competitor with a quicker hiring process. By following a standardized, proven hiring process you can respond to candidates quickly, reduce your total time to hire and increase productivity.
A standardized hiring process should include prescreen surveys, which are automatically sent to applicants, helping your team save time instead of reviewing each applicant individually. Once the prescreen surveys are automatically scored, only qualified candidates will move on to the candidate stage of the hiring process, helping you significantly decrease candidate review time. Other steps that can help your beauty business speed up the hiring process include interview guides, integrated assessments, and automated background and reference checks.
The beauty industry has room for improvement when it comes to hiring top talent. And if your business follows the steps outlined above, you can save money on hiring while increasing profitability. The money saved can be allocated to another key area of your beauty business – such as opening more locations or investing in organic products, a growing trends across the industry.
Are you interested in learning more about attracting quality, engaged employees at your beauty business? Read our resource, “The Hireology Employment Brand Playbook.”
