Orange Price Attack owner Richard Lang advertised for a hairdresser for 12 months

Richard Lang has run Orange Price Attack, for more than 16 years and lost his two hairdressers during the COVID pandemic with one leaving to start a family and another moving interstate.

Since then the shop has moved to a premises with a larger salon but he's been unable to get a hairdresser and believes there's a skill shortage.

"It's like winning the lotto trying to find a hairdresser," Mr Lang said.

"We advertised through a lot of the employment places and the hairdressing employment places like hair and beauty places and all the usual suspects, the Facebooks and the Instagrams and all that sort of stuff.

"It's not that you don't get replies that aren't suitable, you just don't get any."

He said the hairdressing made up about 30 to 35 per cent of the business and would be a normal salon doing cuts and colours, foils, perms, keratin straightening and other salon services.

However, Orange Price Attack shut during the COVID lockdowns and then did a shop refit so moved into a pop-up shop.

"With COVID that went from being a few months to six months and because we were in a pop-up shop we couldn't have hairdressers but we kept advertising for hairdressers knowing that we were going back into the shop and hoping that we could get someone organised but you just can't get them," he said.

"I think there's a lot that get out of it all together, just change careers, we've got a lot of home hairdressers in Orange so a lot of them do that.

"It's one of those jobs where everyone is trying to get skilled workers and they are all into IT or out here they are all into the mines and those sorts of things but everybody's got to get a haircut, and hair colours, it's not like it's a certain percent of the population do it, everybody does it.

"It's probably not the highest paid job that you can find but it's certainly not the lowest either and it's one of those jobs that can take you anywhere."

Mr Land said hairdressing wasn't the only industry struggling to find workers and questioned where the workers have gone.

"Even just retail staff it's hard enough to find retail staff now but hairdressers because it's specialised it's even harder," he said.

"I've never seen in my life ads on television for people to work at pubs, never ever, like you couldn't get a pub job most of the time they had that many people, now they are advertising on television for staff.

"It's really weird because Orange is getting bigger and bigger all the time, yet we're losing businesses hand over fist and a lot of them because they can't get staff. In the [Orange City Centre] here, some of the shops don't even open because they can't get staff.

"[Orange] is getting bigger all the time and there's more people here, what are they doing?"

Although the pandemic appears to have made things worse, he said the lack of hairdressers was already a problem years earlier.

"It's slowly getting worse and worse," Mr Lang said.

"Probably 10 years ago it wasn't so hard but over the last probably five-six years there's just been a slow decline.

"Before COVID we didn't have a period where we didn't have a hairdresser, we always had at least one."

He said at that time the salon was much smaller and there were times when there were two hairdressers and an apprentice who were falling over each other.

"Now we've got a bigger salon and it's really nice and we can't get a hairdresser," he said.

"Everyday we've got people coming in, 'can I get my hair done, can I get a haircut, can I get foils?', it's embarrassing to say, 'we haven't got a hairdresser."

The former mechanic also runs the Price Attack in Bathurst where he has hairdressers and two apprentices.

He said he'd like to also hire an apprentice for the Orange salon but can't do it without a hairdresser to supervise them.

"You put on apprentices and you try and breed your own ... but even the girls, the apprentices in Bathurst they will start with maybe a class of 18 but by the time they finish their apprenticeships there might be nine of them left," Mr Lang said.

He said he was willing to offer flexible hours, or part time, to attract parents who can only work school hours or people approaching retirement who no longer want to work full-time.

"If someone wants to work school hours, I am prepared to meet them on that," he said.

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