Hiring for Hotels Jobs: What You Need to Know

Hiring for hotels jobs: what you need to know

Hiring for open positions at hotels poses a daunting challenge. The hotel industry is demanding, requiring interactions with the public, typically at an hourly wage as opposed to a salary with benefits. Add in the fact that the industry has a high turnover rate and the challenge of hiring for hotel jobs seems even more insurmountable. 

Harri’s tech solutions are here to help. Implement the right approach including the latest technology and you’ll select the right candidates on the first try,  improve your retention rate and capture that much more market share.

Challenges When Hiring for Hotels

Customer service is the name of the game. However, it is no secret that people have become more isolated, screen-addicted, and introspective in recent decades. Add in the effect of the pandemic, and it seems a lot of young people haven’t had the chance to develop soft skills such as interpersonal skills. Pinpointing genuinely people-oriented contributors for your hotel has never been more difficult.

Zero in on candidates who are cordial, respectful, and eager to improve the human condition, and your quality of service and retention rate will both improve.

Hiring for the hotel industry is also challenging in that wages, benefits, and other perks for new hires are often less than those available to employees in other industries. The pay and benefits package often sends new hires to other industries or competing businesses in the same sector, even if the financial compensation is only slightly greater at those new posts.

Thinking about the unique benefits and perks that you can offer as a hotel – discounted rooms, offers for friends and family, allowing employees to take home furnishings or items that are no longer in use for guests – can mitigate the level of pay and make your offering more attractive.

Importance of Finding the Right Candidate

Let’s face facts: not everyone is cut out for the hospitality industry, let alone the demanding work of a hotel. The bottom line is that vetting and deliberation are necessary to pinpoint the right candidates for your open hotel jobs.

Be patient, interview upward of a dozen candidates or more for each open position and you’ll succeed in whittling down the field to those with the optimal skills, experience, and personality traits. Select a candidate who falls short in even one of these three categories and they will likely underwhelm or venture to other potentially greener pastures. Choose a candidate who meets your criteria in only one of these three categories and they might not make it past the initial training period.

Hotel employees with polished customer service skills, an altruistic mindset, and industry experience tend to thrive in these demanding roles. Prioritize candidates with soft skills that translate to mutually beneficial interpersonal interactions and you’ll find your customer and employee retention rates increase in unison. 

Harri’s Talent Attraction features make it easier to attract well-qualified candidates. Our technology facilitates the optimal pairing of hotels and employees. 

Aside from connecting hotel businesses with candidates who earn their keep, our tech tools also help hospitality industry businesses adhere to compliance regulations including those pertaining to hotel hiring. Let our Talent Attraction tools do the work for you and you’ll find hiring difference-makers in full compliance with the law and industry regulations is surprisingly easy.

Best Practices for Conducting Employee Interviews

Candidate interviews are fundamental to finding the right new additions to your team. Though there is the potential for candidates to tell half-truths or even some bald-faced lies during interviews, a sequence of rapid-fire questions provides invaluable insights into candidates’ critical thinking skills, communication skills, and experience. 

Conducting a productive interview does more than help hotel owners and managers learn about potential hires. The best interviews sell the business to the candidates seeking employment. Prepare accordingly by writing down questions tailored to each candidate’s application, resume, and cover letter, take notes when the candidate responds and you’ll succeed in pinpointing the best talent for your open hotel jobs. 

The interview process is made that much easier with Harri’s Screening & Interview Management tools for hotels and other hospitality businesses. Our modern applicant tracking technology for hotels sets the stage to conduct candidate management in a mobile-friendly manner. This is your opportunity to seamlessly communicate with applicants, coordinating interviews with minimal effort and streamlining the applicant management process. 

We make it easy for hotels to recruit with efficiency through:

  • Integrating background checks
  • Assessing video interviews
  • Consolidating candidate information into one single place

Our tech tools are in-depth to the point that they make it easy for hotel managers and owners to organize and filter applicants for open positions through easily accessible profile notes, groups, and tags. It is now possible to accept/reject candidates in mere seconds with our rapid screening tools. 

Harri’s Screening & Interview Management tools are even advanced to the point that they simplify interview scheduling by empowering candidates to select availability through convenient self-select forms.

Retaining Top Candidates

Finding the best candidates for your open hotel jobs is only half the battle. The other half is retaining those candidates for years. Recognize the unfortunate truth of the hotel industry’s high turnover rate, be proactive in your attempts to retain the top candidates, and you’ll maintain a competitive edge.Crunch the numbers on the costs of hotel hiring and training new employees and you’ll find the process is prohibitively expensive. 

Each of the following consumes your team’s valuable time:

  • Reviewing applications
  • Reading cover letters
  • Analyzing resumes
  • Conducting interviews
  • Onboarding and training

Harri’s solutions for hotel hiring minimize the amount of time and money invested in each of these hiring-related processes. Make a concerted effort to find the right employees when interviewing, reward them for their hard work and your retention rate will gradually improve. 

A high hotel employee retention rate is essential for team unity. Steady turnover of employees creates disunity that compromises the collective, sabotaging employee morale and making work less enjoyable for all. 

An added bonus is the fact that heightening your retention rate also prevents your hardworking contributors from fleeing to other hotels, ultimately making your business that much more competitive.

Simplifying the Onboarding Experience

Put yourself in the position of a new hire at your hotel. You are inundated with information, your head is spinning, you are attempting to remember the names and roles of coworkers and the job’s learning curve is stressing you out. 

The subtleties of the onboarding process during this delicate transition phase have the potential to make or break your new hires as well as your organization as a whole. Go to great lengths to facilitate a smooth onboarding process and you’ll improve the morale of new hires while simultaneously boosting your retention rate. 

Harri’s Simplified Onboarding for new hires makes the onboarding experience mutually beneficial for new hires and hotel managers/supervisors. This seemingly futuristic system delivers a straightforward process for hotel industry new hires. Such clarity and cogency are key for a smooth onboarding transition period. 

Ease your new hires into their roles with our onboarding system and they’ll have a clear understanding of expectations, duties, and the nuanced requirements of their unique roles. Moreover, our Simplified Onboarding system decreases administrative overhead. The reduction in administrative overhead expenses minimizes the capital invested in human resources personnel, saving your business that much more money on salaried positions. 

Run the numbers on what it costs to upgrade your onboarding process, compare that cost to the financial burden of maintaining a fully-staffed human resources department complete with full-time salaried employees who receive benefits and you’ll find our tech tools save you a considerable amount of money in the long run. The icing on the cake is that our tools for human resources streamline the hotel hiring and onboarding processes for optimal efficiency.

Put Your People First with Harri

The time has come to maximize the temporal and cost efficiency of your hotel’s hiring process. Even if your employee retention rate is comparably high, your business will greatly benefit from our tech tools. Implement Harri’s technology at your hotel and you’ll minimize the time and effort invested in attempting to find the best employees, onboard those new hires with unparalleled efficiency, and keep them in the fold for the long haul.

Do you own or manage a hotel or other hospitality industry business? If you work in such a capacity or make decisions on behalf of a hotel, we invite you to Request a Demo of Harri’s tech tools for hiring, onboarding, and employee management today.

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