Hiring for Hospitality

As hospitality trainers, we are often called upon to work with new employees in our company’s restaurant and hotels.  It becomes our responsibility to take these folks from “newbie” status and transform them into productive staffers who can make strong connections with our guests and positively contribute to the bottom line of the organization.

In order to achieve this objective, it certainly helps if we are working with the best and brightest candidates possible.  We need to build upon the strengths that already exist in these employees, such as their work ethic, desire to succeed, and willingness to serve others, and take them up to the next level.  If they don’t have the right qualities or the interest in being developed, however, all of our efforts won’t make a bit of difference.

So how can you ensure that your hotel or restaurant managers are hiring employees that want to stick around and grow their skills while at the same time grow your guest counts and profits?  Here are ten suggestions for helping your operations team find the best possible candidates during the recruiting and interviewing process:

• Talk to your operators in the language they understand: dollars and cents.  Turnover of employees has an extremely high cost for any business, and hotels and restaurants are no exception.  After totaling up the negative financial impact on workplace morale, productivity, and guest relations due to losing an employee, plus the amount spent on recruiting, interviewing time, training, uniforms, and administration for a replacement, estimates place the cost of turnover between $5,000 and $7,000 for an hourly employee and upwards of $30,000 for a manager in the hospitality industry.  If operators understand how much damage turnover can inflict to their bottom line, they will try harder the first time to find the right people for open positions.
• Another key point to explain to your operators: according to the Harvard Business Review, 80 percent of employee turnover is caused by bad hiring decisions.  It’s worth the investment to spend some time on this process and not just hire the first person to apply.  Yes, they might be a little short-handed in the short-term for this investment, but spending a few dollars on overtime for the current staff to fill empty shifts now is going to be a lot less costly than quickly hiring the wrong person and starting the process over again in a few weeks or a few months.
• Hiring managers shouldn’t just rely on walk-ins for their candidate pool; they should be using all the tools at their disposal to widen the net as much as possible.  Craigslist and other local online sites can be a terrific source of applicants, as can employee referrals or posting notices at local college and high school job centers.  Other suggestions: check with nearby hotels and restaurants owned by your company or in your franchise system for employees who may need additional hours, create your own job fairs to be held inside your business, or bring recruiting materials with you as you go out into the neighborhood for special events or local marketing opportunities.  The most important thing is that you don’t have to wait for great candidates to come to you, but can instead take control of the situation and seek them out.
• Applications and resumes are oftentimes the first and only shot a candidate will have to make an impression on a prospective employer, so look for people who put a little effort into it.  Information submitted by a candidate should be complete, neatly written or typed, spelled correctly, and follow all of the submission guidelines you set forth in your recruiting materials.  If they cannot bother to spend a few minutes to look their best on paper and try to impress your managers, do you really think they will do their best to try to impress once they have the job?
• Look for stability in a candidate’s previous work.  Those folks who hop from job to job, or who have long gaps between positions, or who move in and out of the hospitality industry, are probably not the best fit for a long-term position at your hotel or restaurant.
• Just like your managers wouldn’t go into a busy shift without having a plan in place, they also shouldn’t go into an interview without a set of questions to ask.  Those in charge of hiring should be reviewing their selected resumes and applications and determining what questions they will ask before the candidate arrives so they can be sure all relevant discussion topics will be covered.  Otherwise, the manager will waste time trying to figure out what to ask during the interview instead of actually listening to the candidate’s responses.
• You’ve probably hired the phrase, “Hire for attitude, train for skill,” but how do you do that?  The most effective method for applying this maxim is to use neutral open-ended statements with candidates such “Please tell me about your previous position” or “Please tell me about your experiences working in a team environment” to really learn about their disposition.  Positive people will give positive answers about their previous workplaces; they’ll talk about the friends they made, or the skills they learned, or the increasing amount of responsibility they were given.  These are the folks your managers should hire.  Negative people, on the other hand, will give negative answers; they will share stories about their bad bosses, lazy co-workers, and rude customers.  They may be the most experienced cook or housekeeper in the world, but if they respond negatively to a neutral question, you don’t want them working for your company.
• Hiring managers should also be asking candidate’s about their values – what’s important to them as an employee, what kind of company do they want to work for, how can a company help him/her achieve career objectives, etc.  It is essential that the employee’s values align with those of the company, or the managers will soon find themselves back in the hiring mode again very soon.
• Watch for Red Flags!  Don’t look past a candidate’s faults just because he/she might have relevant experience and is available the hours you need someone.  You can’t train away someone’s excessive ego or abrasive personality, so why bother hiring them in the first place?
• Finally, hiring managers should not bring someone aboard merely because they are the best of a bad bunch (desperation hiring doesn’t generally turn out well for anyone involved).  If no suitable applicant has come forward, it’s time to call in a regional or district manager for assistance and review your recruiting methods to see if a wider net can be cast next time.