Hairdressers on frontline of Australia’s worker shortage as job ads fail to deliver

Hairdressers are on the frontline of Australia’s new worker shortage, but a new report from Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) suggests online job advertisements are failing to meet the persistent vacancies in salons across the country.

Tough economic conditions are continuing to slow the volume of new job listings online, according to JSA’s latest internet job ad vacancy report, released Wednesday.

But even in that post-pandemic downturn, the hairdressing sector is an outlier.

Hairdressing job ads rose 256% in the six months to November 2020, but new ad volumes have plummeted since, meaning online job listings have increased just 2.4% in five years.

By comparison, overall job vacancies in all occupations grew 49.1% over the same period.

At face value, the job ad data would suggest a strong supply of hairdressing talent has met the post-lockdown demand for staff and negated the need for new job ads.

JSA’s own data suggests the opposite is true.

Every state and territory is reporting a shortage of hairdressers, according to the 2023 JSA priority occupation list.

The number of employed hairdressers has also failed to match population growth.

Around 62,500 hairdressers were employed in Australia in August 2023, a figure “relatively unchanged” since 2018, despite the population growing by some 1.4 million people over the last five years.

The report suggests “the ineffectiveness of typical advertising methods may go some way to explaining this trend”, leaving hairdressers to find alternative methods of recruiting staff.

Sandy Chong, industry luminary and CEO of the Australian Hairdressing Council, said traditional online job ad platforms are not meeting the needs of many small hairdressing businesses.

“Small businesses have spent thousands of dollars on these platforms and have just not got a return,” Chong told SmartCompany on Thursday.

The industry is turning to social media platforms like TikTok to advertise their vacancies instead, she said.

“It’s more creative, and I think that it’s easier to find the audience by putting literally a few dollars behind the ad compared to $1,000 for a traditional online job listing,” she said.

“At a board level, in discussion with our team, we have gone ‘These platforms are simply not working for our industry.'”

Some two-thirds of surveyed industry participants used social media ads or word-of-mouth to find employees, the report said.

Separately, a growing number of hairdressers are choosing to work under self-employment, limiting some of the need for online job ads.

Hairdressing apprentice pipeline a lingering concern

Beyond concerns that traditional job ad platforms are too pricey for small businesses like salons to use effectively, the report notes that many salons are struggling to find staff who are both qualified and experienced.

“In 2022-23, fewer than half of surveyed hairdresser vacancies were filled (44.8%) and most applicants were considered unsuitable (84.7%),” the report said.

“Around two-thirds of qualified applicants were considered unsuitable” through a lack of experience, or poor performance during the interview process.

Many of those job vacancies cannot be filled by skilled migrants because the new temporary skilled migration income threshold is too high for many small businesses to pay, Chong said.

The long-term solution involves expanding the pipeline of trainees and apprentices.

The report shares some optimism for the sector’s future, showing the number of hairdressing apprentice commencements has risen by 19% over the past five years, with completions rising 8.3%.

“However, the rate of withdrawal from hairdresser apprenticeships signals an area with potential to expand the supply of qualified and experienced early career hairdressers,” it states.

Chong said existing hairdressing apprenticeships offer a “very dated training package that doesn’t accommodate the flexibility that’s needed for different business models”.

The Fair Work Ombudsman’s hairdressing apprentice initiative has also identified “pay rates, weekend, public holiday and overtime pay, break and leave entitlements, and unpaid work as the common workplace issues” affecting early-career workers.