This article is dedicated to hospitality industry recruitment. We have included some of the useful tips and best practices of hospitality industry recruitment in this article.
Attracting, hiring and retaining the best hospitality talent is more of an art. It is equally crucial to employer employees for best retention rate.
It is this very art that we aim to elaborate on in this post.
Hospitality Talent Management is even more important in this technology era.
So, let’s get into discussing hospitality industry recruitment while we suggest various action steps to hire and retain the best hospitality industry professionals.
Top Hospitality Recruitment Tips to Recruiters
Now that your hospitality business has a great reputation and amazing hospitality professionals, all professionals from the hospitality industry would be pushing to join the firm.
Listed below are a few tips and hospitality recruitment strategies to help hospitality businesses hire the best hospitality talent.
These are the tips to help you develop a more robust and better hospitality recruitment process.
Use Automation Efficiently for Hospitality Talent Management
A good hospitality recruitment strategy involves a lot of preparation. Data and analytics help in devising a good action plan to hire the best hospitality talent.
Data is used to forecast employee requirement, assess the turnover rate, requisitions and various other things.
However, automation by using technology has now made proper inroads to the recruitment processes across industries.
From screening CVS to training employees and a lot more is being handled using Artificial intelligence.
Hospitality recruiters must use AI efficiently to help them with the recruitment process especially when they are recruiting in bulk.
It is extremely important to have a well rounded and fair recruitment process.
There are a lot of automation tools out there to help hospitality recruiters automate a few of the hiring steps in hospitality recruiting.
From CV screening bots to automated interviews and skill tests. And, there are a lot more automated tools to help out the recruiters in the tedious process.
While few of these steps are useful to remove spam and unrelated applications, too much reliance on automation might weed out better applicants who are not adept in technology.
Too much of automation can be risky in hospitality recruitment. The Hospitality industry is still people-oriented and thus bots can’t reject humans based on random CVs.
Artificial intelligence aims to provide a better understanding of human nature in the future but the travel industry could possibly be one of the last few industries to embrace it completely.
So, as of now sticking to the old school auto mailers, skill tests and basic machine learning filters could be more than handy.
Know the Platforms where most of the hospitality Job seekers are
Most of the Hospitality job seekers are still on Facebook with LinkedIn covering good ground.
WhatsApp groups have also gained in popularity as far as hospitality recruitment is concerned.
A lot is being said about the job boards. Most of the new age recruitment experts suggest that Job boards would soon be out of the recruitment ecosystem.
However, the hospitality industry continues to use job boards because of the decentralised hospitality network.
The diverse pool that hospitality recruiters need to fulfil their vacancies still reside with the job portals.
While the job boards have become less popular, it will continue to be effective for Hospitality recruiters for a few more years at least.
Promote your Organisation’s Brand Effectively
Sounds obvious, isn’t it? But it’s worth mentioning this point again.
It is one of the simplest recruitment hacks for hospitality recruiters. However, most of the recruiters don’t even think about it.
You would say why do you need employer branding when you are recruiting for let’s say one of the top hospitality companies. Yes, you would enjoy the name of the big brand but possibly there are thousands of other hotels which enjoy the same brand reputation.
According to research by LinkedIn, it’s the employer brand that gives you maximum attention as far as the job seekers are concerned.
In order to promote your company’s brand, all hospitality recruiters must highlight the uniqueness of the company, the intangibles that make the brand superior to the competitors.
This helps in an immediate increase in quality and quantity of applications.
There are multiple other ways in which your sales and digital marketing team can help in brand awareness.
That will cut short some of the heavy lifting for the hospitality recruiters.
Use the power of Job description
A lot of hospitality recruiters still undermine the importance of job description.
A clear and concise job description does not only help job seekers to identify best matching opportunities but also help recruiters do a bit of screening.
It is useful to mention pre-requisites within the job description.
It is important to highlight compensation, mission, requirements and other details as mentioned below.
A good job description invites good applications and does a lot of pre-screening.
Thus, a little effort, in the beginning, keeps giving you ample returns in the long run.
The power of job description is unexplored by a lot of hospitality recruiters.
It is one of the most useful recruitment tips for hospitality recruiters for receiving better applications.
Social Media holds the key to Success for Hospitality Recruiters
Social Media has evolved over the years and while these platforms are struggling to tackle fake news, various platforms have helped professionals create useful connections.
LinkedIn has become a professional social networking platform that is helping job seekers and employers alike.
Networking effectively is one of the highly beneficial recruitment hacks for hospitality recruiters.
Social media gives all the recruiters a convenient medium to create and then manage huge networks which they can leverage for sourcing candidates in real-time.
Use Referrals as a tool in hospitality industry recruitment
Every recruiter knows about this hack but most of them don’t care to use it effectively.
Exploring the referral network can have a multiplier effect.
Using referral is even more beneficial in the hospitality industry due to its decentralised but a well-knit hospitality community.
One of the important hospitality recruitment tips is to create a robust referral mechanism which rewards those who provide referrals and if required also provides privacy to the referrer.
If your organisation doesn’t have an employee referral programme as yet, it’s a good time to start one.
Social media referrals are equally useful when looking to recruit candidates in the hospitality industry.
The key to success on social media is to help others find a lead and one can expect favours in return.
Create a few Viral Videos to attract the right applicants
This is one of the creative hospitality recruitment tips that is still not popular within the hospitality industry.
Creating viral videos must be a part of the hospitality recruitment strategy now given the importance of videos on all social media channels.
These videos can be about the job culture, orientation, a day in the life of the employee or something more generic.
This increases the visibility of the employer and confidence of applicants.
Shorten the Hospitality Recruitment Cycle
One of the most crucial hospitality recruitment tips is to set up a timeline for an end to end recruitment.
The hospitality recruitment cycle can be cumbersome at times with multiple steps between receiving an application to the final hiring. The whole process has to be shortened as this would benefit both job seekers and recruiters.
The lifecycle of Hospitality recruitment involves the below steps predominantly:
- Preparing (includes job posts)
- Sourcing
- Screening
- Selecting
- Hiring / Onboarding
It is important to cut time spent on Screening and selecting which at times get too lengthy for hospitality companies.
Every day of time saves here means task cut out for the recruiters and happier employees.
Normally the job recruitment process in the hospitality industry would fall somewhere between 30-90 days.
It is important to stay connected with the candidates during this process.
Effective feedback and quick recruiting cycle are key needs of the Hospitality Jobseekers of today.
Artificial intelligence can be of some support. As discussed in the previous point, ideally a good mix of human and technology can do wonders to the efficiency of the hospitality recruitment process.
The below image by Jobvite elaborates on how an efficient recruitment process can have a good mix of AI and human intelligence.
The Subtle Art of Recruiting the best hospitality job applicants include understanding the pain points of the industry.
The art of hospitality recruitment would also include understanding the key gaps between the expectations of recruiters and that of job seekers.
The art of hospitality recruitment is about being compassionate to job applicants and treating them as internal customers.
The interview process in the hospitality industry can include anything between 1-7 rounds.
It is always good to respect the time of job applicants.
Candidates should be supplied with the agenda, duty description and other information well before the interview.
And most importantly, it is important to keep it simple.
Simplifying the whole process would do wonders for the whole hospitality talent search.
Conclusion
The Hospitality industry in the age of automation still needs a huge human force to run it effectively. Recruitment can thus be challenging in this industry.
In this post, we tried to make life little easier for the hospitality recruiters by listing a few tips to counter recruitment challenges for the hospitality industry.
In this article, we have also provided you with the best hiring hacks for the hospitality industry that every recruiter should have in his/her arsenal.
Hospitality industry is all about service. When most of the other industries are forcing automation to most of their work processes, the hospitality industry still needs more human.
Thus, it gets even more important to be compassionate to the workforce.
Skill development, purpose and workplace environment would hold the key to retention of best hospitality talent in the future.
Hope these tips would help hospitality employers make better hospitality recruitment strategy.
Also, the industry that suffers due to a huge turnover rate must ensure a few welcome changes in the overall recruitment strategy.
An employee-first approach can help. A few hotel chains have already started treating employees as internal customers in real terms.
Happy employees mean happier customers and maximum profits. A win-win for all.
