The New Girl Starts on Monday…
Now What?
BY MERIT GEST
SCENARIO 1: Things are going well and your spa is very busy. You are in a catch 22—too
busy to take the time to add more staff but too busy to keep up the pace without more help.
Your plan is to find someone with experience who can jump in and start working, someone who
doesn’t need training.
SCENARIO 2: Only one of the last five people you hired is still with you 30 days later. Three
of them would have been great and you were sorry they left so quickly. They were busy right
away, so what went wrong?
SOUND FAMILIAR?
n the first scenario, the spa
is limited in their pool of
candidates by those who
can come in and “hit the
ground running.” Most
likely, because the spa is so busy, you
won’t have time to train them and
the new hires will be left on their own
to do things the way they’ve learned
elsewhere, which may be quite a
different process from your own.
The danger, of course, is that clients
have inconsistent experiences at the
spa and may not return. You stand
to lose not only the investment in
hiring that person, but also repeat
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business from clientele.
In the second scenario, a potential
top performer that leaves too soon
creates more costs in terms of time
and effort you’ll have to put back into
the hiring process, not to mention the
potential negative press that spreads
like wildfire across social media,
making it tougher for you to hire the
next person.
These two different scenarios share
a common solution…deliberate
onboarding, which addresses the
following questions:
l
How do you ramp up top performers
fast?
l
l
l
How do you weed out nonperformers
fast?
How do you create an environment
where people want to give their all
and stay forever?
How do you protect the investment
of time, money and effort that
you’ve already poured into the
hiring process?
Deliberate onboarding is the process
of mapping out the expectations you
have of new hires and creating specific
training experiences to help them
succeed. Here are the four steps: