Ask a Coach: I Can’t Find Quality Hires
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What is Andrea’s main hiring challenge for her nail salon?
How do you find qualified people to work for you and actually get them to stick around? Well, that's the challenge salon owner Andrea is facing. Now today Entree Leadership's head coach John Felkins is walking Andrea through what she can do to attract the right people, reduce turnover, and build a healthier, more sustainable team. Let's get to it. Okay, we've got
Andrea from Boone, North Carolina. Andrea, how are you? So good,
John. How are you?
Fantastic. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your business and what your question is?
Absolutely. So I own a boutique nail salon in St. Louis, Missouri. I have owned it for the past two years. We've done about four hundred thousand dollars in revenue last year and we are now currently up to about twelve employees.
How does John suggest treating recruiting as a marketing problem?
Uh so yeah, it's been really fun.
Awesome. And what's your question today?
My question for you is Is there something I can do to attract qualified people to our salon and help them stay over time? And if uh if you want, John, I can give you a little bit of context of some of the challenges we faced.
Yeah, go ahead.
Absolutely. So when we first took over, there wasn't really a good recruiting pipeline in place. Once I like once I took over, I started going to nail schools, you know, doing face-to-faces with people, attending career fairs. We did a little bit on social media. Um, but what we found was we quickly realized we had two big problems. First of all, we weren't always attracting the kind of people that were going to resonate with how we do business. Um just in terms of just doing natural nails, but really in terms of you know character, um having people that were gonna, you know, say they were gonna show up and actually show up.
What steps can improve candidate quality using core values and interviews?
We also quickly realized um that we uh that they're just we weren't attracting as many people as we needed either. And so we've had an issue with retention and we've had an issue finding enough of the right people.
Mm-hmm. Well, let me just say right off the bat, hiring is tough. That's that's you know, w we face it too. Uh we get thousands and thousands of applicants every year. You know, we're this big business. But I want you to hear me say there's no magic wand. Uh I absolutely will give you some of our best practices, but this is a hard subject. So let me get that out of the way, Andrea.
Yes.
But but here's the thing. You have to look at it like a marketing issue. You you've got to get so many eyeballs on the listings. You got to convert so many people to an actual interview.
How can expanding hiring channels increase the quantity of applicants?
And then in the interview, you've got to get them to take the next step. And so when I hear your problem about getting the right people and enough people, we kind of attack that two different ways. I understand you've had some people that didn't exactly fit the mold, right? Right. But that's more the quality issue than it is the quantity issue. So let's talk about the quality issue. You've got to be super upfront about your values and what you're looking for. And let me say That first touch point with those people needs to be quick. Don't invest a lot of your time because you've got to sift through a lot of people fast to get to the ones that you want. But make sure you're very upfront or out are you doing the hiring yourself or do you have a recruiter that's helping you or
So I do what I I do the recruiting myself and then what I do is I give my um team leads in the salon. They're the ones that will actually do a skills test and then we have a pretty extensive interview list where we have we've kind of started asking some more pointed questions to really, like you said, kind of sift through people a little bit more.
Would you say on the sifting through people, is that after the skills test?
We will typically do the sit down interview first and then we will do a skills test afterwards 'cause if there's you know, if there's if there's clearly an issue where, you know, they've they've had a bunch of jobs that they've left or there's j they're not gonna be a fit for us, we wanna know that, you know, pretty soon.
Yeah, absolutely.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Andrea’s main hiring challenge for her nail salon?
0:05–0:53
2
How does John suggest treating recruiting as a marketing problem?
0:53–1:49
3
What steps can improve candidate quality using core values and interviews?
1:49–2:38
4
How can expanding hiring channels increase the quantity of applicants?
2:38–4:41
5
What role does a dedicated salon director play in culture and retention?
4:41–6:14
6
How can mission‑focused communication keep employees engaged long‑term?
6:14–7:44
7
What strategies help prevent burnout while scaling the team?
7:44–9:42
8
How does building a purpose‑driven workplace attract top talent?
9:42–25:35
Speakers
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