No doubt, trying to secure the best team of employees for your hotel is so much more than simply placing a “help wanted” sign in the window. Today’s staff are understandably more exacting, and in turn, they expect almost as much from you as you do from them. Furthermore, with the steadily changing workforce culture unquestionably impacting the way many employees perform their duties, this only serves to further compound the myriad of difficulties you’d face when hiring them.
Because of this, it’s especially important to make sure you follow the right protocols during your next hiring event. Not only do you want to make sure you attract the right kind of candidates, but you also want to make sure that you’re not wasting your resources on a worker who has no intentions of sticking around for a while. The entire process — from posting the initial recruitment advertisement to completing the training — can be incredibly costly, and nobody wants to see their new hires slowly fade away.
If you’re looking to hire new staff to your hotel, but you’re weary of struggling with finding the ideal candidates and securing long-term retention, then it may be ideal to change how you approach the process. In order to help you not only find the best talent for your hotel, but to also keep them, there are also a few important things for you to keep in mind. By following these guidelines, you can help ensure your next wave of hiring meets exactly your precise criteria — and they also stick around, too!
Troubleshoot immediate issues
Now is the time to be brutally honest with yourself: is your hotel the type of place you’d want to work at, too? Understandably, many hotel owners and managers do sincerely believe that their particular hotel is one of the top establishments in the city, regardless of its prestige or nightly rate. However, if you’re struggling to draw the right staff to your hotel, or they’re not remaining in your employ for long, it might mean that there’s something amiss with your hotel. In this case, a careful audit might be overdue.
Define clear expectations
Before you even start to let potential candidates know that you’re about to host a hiring event, it’s imperative to make sure you set clear expectations for these new applicants. This isn’t just for their sakes, either, but also for yours. For each role that you need filled, you will want to make sure to carefully outline all associated responsibilities and duties for it. This way, you can ensure that those who apply know they meet the qualifications, and you won’t have to worry about overextending the select staff you do decide to hire.
Facilitate their applications
The fact is, whether we want to admit it or not, we are currently in an employee’s market. Staff are in a position that they can justify being choosy about where they decide to work, and if they find the application process to be too tedious or lengthy, they might not even bother to apply in the first place. To avoid inadvertently minimizing your potential employee pool, you will want to be careful to make sure the application process is as easy as possible. In turn, you can be confident you’re casting a wide net.
Streamline the interview process
Once you have a sufficient number of applicants, your next step is to begin the actual interviews with them. However, you’ll want to make sure to standardize it as much as possible to help ensure it goes smoothly and you don’t inadvertently inject any biases into the process. Making sure you have enough pre-selected questions to ask, for instance, and eliminating all candidates who had less-than-stellar resumes can make sure that you’re not wasting any time in filling the available roles.
Perform a background check
One of the most important parts of the hiring process is performing a background check on the top candidates. As tempting as it is to want to trust the applicants and take their employment history at face value, a simple and quick background check can reveal any discrepancies in their resumes and applications. It’s important to note that the background check isn’t just for you and your hotel’s safety, either. It can also afford you the much-needed peace of mind you need about your ultimate hiring decisions, too.
Focus on training and onboarding
Finally, once you do sift through your candidates and narrow down the applicants to the select few you wish you hire, you will want to be extremely diligent in their onboarding and training. It’s no secret that this step is one of the more costly aspects of the entire process, as you’d be investing a significant amount of resources into bringing them up to speed. In addition, this is a great opportunity to make your new hires feel welcome and as though they are part of a team, therefore ensuring their long-term loyalty.
Indeed, finding the best talent for your hotel can definitely be a rigorous and stressful process. However, by following these guidelines and being mindful of how you select your new hires from your pool of applicants, you can be confident that you will have a solid, happy, and well-trained staff working with you for a long time. And once you see your hotel is thriving with your carefully-vetted team of capable employees, you’ll soon realize that doing the extra legwork was more than worth it!
