For Katie Prats, vice president of human resources at Fairbanks, Conn.-based management company Kokua Hospitality, days are packed vetting candidates for open positions at Kokua’s properties around the United States. In fact, in late September, Prats had to squeeze in a magazine interview between phone calls with three general manager candidates. “Our process isn’t necessarily different than typical hiring practices, we just have such a wide breadth of properties and positions to consider,” Prats says. “Finding the right person for each of those openings is imperative to ensuring that our hotels run the way they’re supposed to.”
In today’s over-saturated, web-based job marketplace, finding the right person for a particular position requires much more legwork than simply posting a listing online. With a glut of online job boards at hiring managers’ disposal, a more focused search is necessary, especially given the numbers. Simply Hired has more than 8 million job listings and 30 million monthly users globally. LinkedIn boasts nearly 4 million job postings, while online listing giant craigslist posts more than 1 million new jobs each month. The hotel and hospitality industry even has dedicated online job boards, such as Hcareers, to connect employers and candidates.
According to Prats, every job opening presents its own unique challenges. It could be a lack of qualified talent in a particular market, or that there are candidates but reaching them is beyond a company’s means. “Beyond online job listings, we rely on everything from social service organizations to hospitality schools to word-of-mouth to help us identify and source candidates in different markets,” Prats explains.
While different job openings require their own tailored approach, there seems to be one common obstacle for hiring managers looking to fill open hospitality positions—a lack of industry visibility. Shelly Weir, vice president of domestic sales at the American Hotel & Lodging Educational Institute (AHLEI), says many job seekers are simply not aware of the opportunities available in hospitality. “When many job candidates think of hospitality positions, they think of a short-term job with low wages. Our biggest challenge is raising the perception of hospitality as a viable, long-term career path,” Weir explains.
For many lodging employers, the key to raising awareness is working with educational programs to highlight hospitality career options. In some programs, this can start as early as students’ sophomore year of high school by offering elective classes focused on the lodging industry. Beyond introducing students to hospitality, there is another advantage to partnering with secondary schools. “The employers who are working with schools are effectively shaping their future workforce,” says Dana Pungello, director of communications at the National Academy Foundation (NAF), an organization that transforms the high school learning environment with “academies” that focus on specific industries, including hospitality. “As an industry, we have to be thinking about the future and how we want to shape it, and the best way for established companies to do just that is to invest in students,” she says.
By partnering with organizations like NAF and the AHLEI Hospitality and Tourism and Management Program (HTMP)—another high school-focused hospitality education program—employers can get to know talent before students enter the wider job market, giving them the opportunity to scoop up employees to work with their organization.
Once an employer has done the research, spread the word about a job opening, and decided to hire a certain candidate, he or she must also figure out how to retain that employee. Because minimizing turnover is a major consideration of hiring managers, it is imperative hotels offer their employees an environment in which they can excel and grow their careers. “Employees want to find something that makes them happy and takes them where they want to go professionally,” Prats says, adding that hotels should work with new hires to identify career goals and achieve them, which will further invest employees in the property. Weir adds that hiring managers who are courting qualified candidates for hospitality careers should highlight the fact that the hotel industry is one of the few left in the United States in which someone can start at the bottom and work their way all the way to top. “Just think about how many brand presidents and management company CEOs started out washing dishes,” she says. Prats concurs, “If you put in the work, you will excel. That is something we all must stress when finding people to join our ranks.”
