Five qualities of a great salon manager

If you want your salon manager to come straight in and do the job you expect them to do, you will need someone who has previous experience of managing salons.

Having years of experience is a great indicator that a candidate will be able to come into the salon and know how to run the operational side of the business.

You should make sure that your candidate has successful experience in salon management, as years of experience alone doesn’t necessarily reflect competency for the role. A top-quality salon manager may also come with a fairly high salary demand, so you might need to weigh up the benefits vs the cost.

Even though you are employing someone to run your business, manage staff and perform plenty of administrative tasks, you should expect your salon manager to muck in on some of the dirty work from time to time to help out.

Providing treatments to customers, offering drinks and cleaning shouldn’t be beneath your salon manager, as their behaviour is an example to the rest of your team. Find out about a candidates work ethic by contacting former employers during the recruitment process.

Many aspects of a salon have the potential to cause conflict, whether this is issues between staff or a customer complaint. A good manager will know how to de-escalate these kinds of conflicts that can happen in a salon.

You will be able to see how a candidate will be able to deal with conflicts during the interview process. Present them with a hypothetical conflict and take note of how they respond. This will allow you to see what they know about conflict resolution, that they will hopefully be able to bring into your business.

If you are going to be giving responsibility to someone to run the business that you have built, you need to know that you can trust them to carry on making your business a success.

Being trustworthy doesn’t just mean that they won’t steal from the business. You may want to check that your candidate is as competent as they claim on their application. You can do this by checking their LinkedIn profiles to check for skills, endorsements and recommendations from industry peers.

It can be hard to judge someone’s character from an interview, but you will be able to check if a person is trustworthy by getting in touch with a former employer for a reference.

Whilst you are trusting your salon manager to run the business as you have always done, you also want them to be confident enough to try new things.

If your salon manager has experienced success in previous businesses with treatments that you haven’t considered, or marketing strategies that you haven’t implemented, allow them to start these things in your business. It could make a huge difference!