With over 4,000 salons and 35,000 stylists, Great Clips is the largest haircare brand in the world. As a 100% franchised system, each salon owner is responsible for hiring their own staff. As the franchisor, Great Clips, Inc. manages recruitment marketing across the system and provides resources and education to franchisees to help them be successful in recruiting. As the unemployment rate has dropped over the past few years, it has become increasingly hard to fill stylist positions from the finite pool of licensed stylists. We turned our focus to increasing the number of contacts/leads that are delivered to the franchisees for recruiting. But, we had two problems. We didn’t have an employer brand (not content), and even if we did, we had no one to communicate it to (we had a talent community of stylists, but no data in order to segment the messaging).

We focused on the first problem, the employer brand. We started by finding out what our employer brand was by asking stylists. Based on what they told us, we created four pillars and based the brand on that. We did a photo shoot designed at creating a feel that resonated with stylists and then started developing content that matched the pillars. We released the brand with in-salon signage/print, on social media (new Facebook Careers page), and on a new career site. We then implemented a new CRM for our Talent Community and started building new data so that we could segment messaging. We launched email campaigns and media engagement with Modern Salon, an industry leading partner. Finally, we started educating franchisees on the next steps for their new leads/contacts, focusing on relationship building.

After multiple years of seeing a steady decline of applicants, Great Clips salon owners saw a 42% increase in online salon applications in 2016. We continue to build recruitment marketing to drive engagement.

You will learn:

• How to use recruitment marketing to drive engagement.
• How to build data to drive segment marketing.
• How to work with franchisees to develop contact and how to effectively relationship build.