The Hospitality Industry is on a Boom.
The economy is healthy, and a number of people are choosing to spend their extra money on leisure. This means restaurants, hotels, casinos, event centers, and other hospitality businesses have to expand their workforce to keep in touch with ever increasing demand. However, recruiting the right employees for customer service jobs is a daunting task.
3 Major Challenges in Hospitality Recruitment
1. Finding the Right Candidate
According to research, the hospitality industry still needs 993,000 workers by 2022. “The Caterer” research claims that an overwhelming majority of hospitality employers find recruiting harder than before with a staggering 82% of respondents saying it was harder than at any time in the past to recruit a suitable candidate.
2. Attracting the Best Candidates
Working in the hospitality industry is very often stereotyped as low-wage or entry-level with a little opportunity for career advancement. In a few cultures, restaurants or hotel jobs are considered as poorly paid positions associated with slavery. This is another challenge a recruiter has to face in attracting desired candidates to the hospitality industry. Hospitality needs to revamp its image in order to attract the right talent.
3. High Turnover Rate
The rate of turnover in the hospitality industry is 2 to 3 times higher than the rate of all other industries. The average employee turnover estimates from 60 to 300 percent, according to research conducted by “American Hotel and Motel Association”.
Hospitality employees leave an organization for different reasons, but two common ones are the quality of the selection system and quality of leadership. This means that the hiring processes must ensure that the hired candidate would fit in well in the company’s culture, as well as be well-suited for hospitality as a profession.
Effective Tips to Recruit the Right Hospitality Professionals Faster
- Build your Talent Brand
- Apply modern-day sourcing methods
- Use integrated recruitment marketing strategies
- Improve the assessment cycles of hospitality candidates
Recruiting the best fit for hospitality businesses can be a daunting task. However, using modern recruiting methods and strategies can help you fasten the recruitment process and help you find the right professionals for the hospitality industry.
Here are the best recruitment strategies that will help you recruit hospitality professionals effectively:
1. Build your Talent Brand
Talent branding is the first step of attracting and engaging high-performing talent. Often called your employer brand, it is the term that corresponds to your reputation as an employer. It is essential to build a strong talent brand strategy to attract the right candidates. Besides attracting job candidates, the talent brand is important to retain employees.
2. Highlight your Employee Value Proposition
The employee value proposition of a company is everything it offers to its employees in exchange for their work. It also includes career advancement opportunities, benefits, great company culture, etc., apart from compensation offered by the company. Highlight your value proposition in such a way to differentiate your company from other competitors and attract the best talent. The hospitality industry must redefine its value proposition for young talent seeking a rewarding lifetime career having unlimited potential.
3. Write a Clear Job Description
Writing a good clear description mentioning the job roles and responsibilities is the next step in a successful recruiting process. Separate yourself from the competition using the elements of your Talent Brand and EVP to clearly highlight the benefits of your culture and career opportunities.
4. Create Job Advertisements
Define your candidate persona for your ideal candidate for a certain position. This will make the hiring process much easier. Make use of your candidate persona and job descriptions to create a job post that will stand out. Shift your focus from your company and your needs to your potential candidates in order to write a great job advertisement. You must capture their attention and influence them to apply for the job.
5. Create a Great Career Site to Attract Candidates
Creating a great career site will help you stand out from other organizations seeking job candidates. Use your company’s career site showcasing your companies working culture, perks, and benefits, career opportunities and highlight your company’s vision.
6. Make Applying Easy for the Candidate
If your candidates have to fill out long forms or your career sites are not mobile-friendly, you might lose the potential candidates. Make the applying process for job positions easy for them.
7. Make use of Employee Referrals
A study by Nisbets claims that more than a third of hospitality employees find jobs through word of mouth. Employee referrals can be the most effective recruitment method you can ever utilize to recruit professionals in hospitality.
8. Post on Social Media
Social media is the second most effective method to recruit hospitality professionals. It is fast, affordable and effective to attract professionals in the hospitality industry. Promote your employer brand on social media and show your candidates what perks they will get in case they opt to work for your organization.
9. Test your Candidates
You should create an effective selection process to recruit the most capable and enthusiastic hospitality candidate. Hospitality professionals must have the right type of personality and skills to fit into their job roles. Find out the soft skills that are often times more important that the education or work experience. Then hire to those qualities.
A full-fledged integrated recruitment marketing strategy can help drive the right candidates to your organization. Find out more about how we can help.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“Jody Ordioni is the author of “The Talent Brand.” In her role as Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix, she leads the firm in creating brand-aligned talent communications that connect employees to cultures, companies, and business goals. She engages with HR professionals and corporate teams on how to build and promote talent brands, and implement best-practice talent acquisition and engagement strategies across all media and platforms. She has been named a "recruitment thought leader to follow" and her mission is to integrate marketing, human resources, internal communications, and social media to foster a seamless brand experience through the employee lifecycle.”
