Every business owner in the country already knows about the difficulty of hiring and maintaining a quality staff in the current job market, so let’s get right to it.

It’s always been hard enough to retain your staff members in the tanning industry, and now your team has never had more opportunities to move on to something else. Then, you’re left to battle it out with other businesses of all types who are paying more than ever to try to attract new talent. So, what’s a tanning salon operator with limited resources and options left to do?

If you’re still using the same strategies you were before the pandemic, you’re probably not succeeding at making new hires at all, let alone finding “superstar” employees. At some point, you’re going to have to switch it up and try some more innovative approaches, and the reality is it’s probably going to cost you more money than it used to. But, when you factor in the time and money spent on hiring and training new people, more aggressive compensation plans and more benefits can likely still save you money and will certainly save you a lot of hassle.

Remember, making the wrong hire is worse than not hiring anyone at all. You’ll wind up right where you started quickly, having wasted valuable time and money through the process while your salon’s performance has also suffered. Now, it’s even more important to get it right the first time. Once you’ve managed to attract some good candidates, you need to go beyond the traditional interview process to make sure you make the best decision.

Then, you need to improve retention – or depending on where you currently stand with staff, this could be your first step. If nobody ever quits or needs to be let go, you never have to go back to step one. Obviously, people are going to leave at some point, but the best-case scenario is minimizing the need for new hires as much as possible. Keeping your staff happy enough to stick around is harder than ever, but don’t forget that you need to be satisfied with their performance, too. Everyone wins when an employee is performing well, feeling good about themself and making more money, and much of that is up to them, but it’s also up to you to set them up for success as much as possible with proper training, incentives, and a culture that breeds success.

Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.