There’s an Easier Way to Accomplish High-touch Hospitality Recruiting
- By Harri Insider Team | May 18, 2021
Hospitality is experiencing a resurgence as restaurant restrictions put into place during the COVID-19 pandemic are lifted. Seeing life start to return to normal is exciting, but the restaurant renaissance creates a conundrum in the industry where job openings greatly exceed the number of candidates willing to apply.
Because candidates can be picky about which hospitality job they choose, they won’t waste their time or energy applying for a company that they don’t feel will value them long-term. Rising concerns over COVID-19 safety, living wages, and work-life balance mean that today’s talent has a lot to consider when choosing roles in a declining hospitality industry.
That’s why the emphasis put on the candidate and employee experience is more important than ever. Hospitality brands must create an engaging, personalized hiring experience that makes candidates feel valued the moment they begin their application. Still, that can prove costly and time-consuming — else they risk losing valuable talent to competitors.
Below we discuss common recruiting problems in hospitality…and how an integrated conversational AI solution is the best way to empower teams to overcome the labor shortage.
Common recruiting problems in hospitality
Whether you have a dedicated HR team or rely on franchisees and managers to handle recruiting for service-level employees, chances are you’ve encountered issues regarding applicant flow, engaging with candidates in a timely manner, and candidate ghosting.
Finding talent
Amidst an industry-wide labor shortage, sourcing candidates is one of hospitality’s top challenges coming out of the pandemic. The lack of applicants is a result of many combined factors: job displacement, career growth opportunities, workplace flexibility (or lack thereof), high unemployment benefits, work, fear for health and safety, child care needs, and much more.
According to research from our 2021 State of Talent Acquisition: Labor Crisis Conditions and Sentiments Report, 50% of hospitality workers are willing to move to retail, 47% to gig economy jobs, and 38% to grocery in the wake of COVID-19.
In short, service-based workers are moving away from the hospitality industry. And when there are so many open jobs out there, candidates can be picky about where they choose to work and how long they wish to remain there.
Incomplete job applications
It doesn’t matter how many applicants you have coming in if those applications aren’t completed. For hospitality in particular, application drop-off is oftentimes the result of complex hiring and application processes.
Generally speaking, applications that take more than 5 minutes to complete are abandoned. If it can’t be completed easily over a mobile device, chances are even higher that you’ll experience drop-off.
Application complexity can also refer to the types of questions being asked and how many questions are being asked during step one in the process. It’s similar to survey fatigue. If candidates have too many questions to fill out, they’ll likely give up midway through the process. And while screening questions are expected to an extent, candidates are easily frustrated when a step one application contains in-depth questions that can be easily answered over a phone call or in-person interview.
High friction equals high drop-off — especially when there are plenty of other opportunities out there.
Candidate ghosting
Perhaps you’ve found a seemingly excellent candidate who checks all the boxes on paper. You reach out to designate a time to interview and there’s radio silence. Or, even worse, you coordinate an interview and they never show up.
A candidate that already feels they’ve built a relationship with their new company prior to their first day will be far less likely to ghost after hiring than one that hasn’t.
Whether someone moved onto a new opportunity, doesn’t feel a connection with the hiring manager, or simply decided your role isn’t what they’re looking for, candidate ghosting is a huge and costly problem for hospitality businesses — especially for those operating in talent deserts.
Slow hiring times
The hiring process isn’t traditionally synonymous with the word fast, but even short delays can be detrimental to the hiring process. Slow time-to-hire can contribute to candidate ghosting, further harming a brand’s talent acquisition efforts.
For someone seeking immediate employment, a one-step interview process will almost always prevail over a three-step process, even if the latter is already in progress. Candidates aren’t pressed for opportunities, so if there’s a lag on how long it takes to complete the hiring process, they’re out the door before they’ve even started.
There’s no silver bullet to sole hospitality’s recruiting problems. It takes a combination of cross-functional initiatives, creativity, and technology.
To focus on the latter, conversational AI is an extremely powerful tool to bolster talent acquisition efforts and streamline recruiting processes. Rather than deploying a chatbot for candidates to interact with, conversational AI creates a dynamic candidate experience and empowers teams to do more with less.
We developed Carri, a conversational ambassador, to humanize every step of the candidate journey. Carri solves hospitality’s core recruiting problems by revolutionizing the hiring process for candidates and managers alike without losing the “human” in “human resources.”
Creatively source hospitality talent
When it comes to job ads, hospitality operators need to cast a new far and wide. That includes posting on multiple job sites and giving candidates more than one way to start and complete an application.
How are you currently posting job openings? Are candidates able to initiate a job application the moment they enter your store, then finish it before they leave?
Carri enables candidates to quickly find and apply for jobs within your company online and in person. Print out QR codes that someone can scan to open up a job application or offer a number that can be texted to apply for a job opening. If candidates prefer the digital route, Carri allows them to search for open job opportunities using chat-based communications, whether they’re searching on your career site or general job boards.
So, why is this important? By delivering action-oriented messaging via a candidate’s preferred communications channel, she opens the doors to new job application opportunities that didn’t previously exist. For today’s tech-driven workforce, that can make all the difference between someone deciding to apply for a role within your company versus a competitor.
But an expansive talent acquisition strategy shouldn’t mean more work for your managers. Carri seamlessly integrates with your ATS or talent acquisition platform, allowing managers to push a single job posting out to multiple job boards with the click of a button.
Ensure fast application completion with hiring automation
Removing as much friction from the application process as possible ensures that candidates who do apply for jobs actually complete their applications.
Screening questions are absolutely necessary for any role, but the interview process for a line cook in your Florida location should look different than the interview process for a bartender in your California location. But personalization at that granular level is incredibly time-consuming, and most businesses (understandably) push the same basic screening questions to all applicants.
That might be easier on the back-end, but it’s extremely likely to push candidates away.
Carri streamlines and automates screening processes at scale based on brand, location, and role. Candidates are delivered action-oriented, highly personalized questions that are necessary to determine if they’re a good fit, without making them feel like they need to jump hoops just to complete an application.
Once the application is submitted and screening questions submitted, Carri can automatically schedule an interview with the candidate based on their availability and the availability of the hiring manager. Eliminated back-and-forth means reduced friction and faster time-to-hire.
To take it a step further, Carri integrates all applications into your ATS and automatically updates candidate status based on the answers to screening questions. Managers benefit from a real-time view of all applicants in the pipeline and next steps that need to be taken to ensure timely communications and that no candidates slip through the cracks. Minimal effort yields improved time-to-hire.
This is seen at the basic level, too. If an applicant has applied for a job through Carri, applied for a job at your company, or applied for a job using the same job platform that your posting is listed on, Carri will remember their information for them.
It may sound small, but this has a huge impact on the probability of someone completing a job application.
Candidates applying for service-level jobs expect simple applications. The added steps of inputting basic information add friction, similar to survey fatigue that we mentioned earlier. Carri completely eliminates those “unnecessary” steps and lets candidates dive right into your application.
Set employees up for success on day one
The hospitality industry is no stranger to employee ghosting. You sort through candidates, select the best one, and they don’t show up for their first shift on the job. Not only is this hugely disruptive to labor operations, but it wastes valuable time, money, and candidates during the hiring process.
Carri utilizes several methods to not only discourage ghosting, but help candidates hit the ground running on their first day.
One major reason why employees don’t show up on their first day is because all communications cease after they accept their role. If someone is hired Monday and their first day is Thursday, failing to keep communications opens you up to ghosting. In that short timeframe, candidates can (and often do) find new, seemingly better opportunities.
By automating meaningful messaging sequences, Carri act’s as a real-time resource to keep candidates engaged and interested in your role.
Pre-hire messaging can include anything from:
- Reminders leading up to their first day of work
- Answer questions related to the first day of work (or flag a manager who can answer them)
- Sentiment check-ins after the first day of work
Engagement isn’t exclusive to communications alone; it should encompass new hire documentation as well.
The offer letter, for example, is critical to this process. By signing an offer letter, it puts the employment on paper, making the role feel more official and increasing the odds an employee feels more connected to the role. Every position, from head chef to dishwasher, should receive an offer letter.
Carri does more than automatically send over personalized cover letters, she also helps candidates complete necessary new hire paperwork before their first day on the job. This ensures that team members can begin training for their new role immediately, whereas a day’s work of paperwork runs the risk of losing their interest.
AI-backed hiring will be the new normal
In an industry such as hospitality that is currently saturated with roles and an insufficient number of potential employees, standing out to candidates has never been so important. Still, that can become both an expensive and time-consuming task for managers to keep up with without a tool like conversational AI.
Are you ready to meet Carri? We thought you’d be. Reach out to us to begin your journey towards a more effortless recruitment process today!
