STACKING THE ODDS By Lisa Conway, The Zing Project
“I can’t find Staff”, that’s a statement I hear way more than I’d like to. The truth is salon owners are faced with a severe shortage of both qualified and partially qualified team members and it’s a nation-wide challenge. My belief is that this skill shortage is not going away or at least not anytime soon. The little overseas talent we did attract has also dried up, thanks to covid19, so we are all fishing in the same shallow pond. Some facts. The number of students entering in and graduating from full-time colleges has all but dried up, plus most of us complained about their ability anyway. An industry heavily weighted with females in the reproductive years means that as fast as we qualify them, we lose them. A large percentage of them don’t even return from baby number one. The other challenge is that many hairdressers don’t have the drive or business knowledge, so working as a sole operator from a room in the family home is a choice many make when they have kids, as opposed to being an operator of a twelve-chair salon complete with 100
Hair Biz Year 15 Issue 4
a receptionist. Highschool students are encouraged to stay at school, to continue right through to university, even though when you ask “what do you want to do?”, they have no clue. Taking up a trade is out of favour in our current school system and has been for some 15 years. When students stay in school, this lowers the nation’s unemployment stats and that works in the governments favour. University also means everyone has a HEX bill to pay off, another plus for the government. Kids stay in school to have “year 12 to fall back on” like it’s a soft landing, I’d like to ask “what are we falling back from? Last but no means least, Technology is a path that didn’t exist 30 years ago. So, with all this stacked against us and an education system that is failing us as a trade, what can you do?
We must flip our thinking and agree that what used to work doesn’t anymore. You will be looking at playing a big part in the training of your own hairdressers with the next generation. The first step is to stop saying the word Staff. It’s a very harsh word and bleating out the bleeding obvious “ I can’t find staff “ , just doesn’t change a single thing. Think of it like his. You don’t go around saying “I can’t find a lover” why? Because that implies that perhaps nobody wants you, or you are simply not putting your back into it. That’s how I think when I hear “I can’t find staff” ask yourself this, what am I doing to stand out, to attract people to me? Some even go as far as to ask around and gather a pile of evidence that they are not the only one, another poor use of your time. I get that it’s a shit climate, I really do, and I also get that there is more you can be doing to start a chain of team coming up the ranks, in particular your ranks. Forget about what the
