Hiring someone to work in your hospitality business isn’t as simple as completing a satisfactory interview. It would help if you made sure that your potential employees are trustworthy and won’t cause unnecessary drama. Fortunately, there are some things you can do.
1. Conduct Proper Background Checks on All Prospective Hires
An excellent way to ensure that your candidates are honest is to use a service like PreSearchInc.com for simple background checks on employees. You should contact any former employers and ask about their previous conduct. See if they would recommend your aspiring hires for the job and ask them why they would or wouldn’t.
2. Provide Specific Job Descriptions
Vague, boilerplate descriptions won’t attract anyone to a job that requires a lot of specific needs. Instead, you should be as detailed as possible and avoid exclusive language that might discourage anyone from coming in. Make sure that every major and minor aspect of a job is covered, but don’t be too dull in your advertisement. Since you’re selling the job, you want potential hires to show genuine interest in working for your hotel brand.
3. Make Applying Easy
Having your candidates write down the same info on old-fashioned paper applications is an old way of doing things in the hospitality industry. A good way to simplify the hospitality hiring process is to allow people to apply on the spot via a short link or a QR code, which will enable them to apply on their smartphones. This will lead to more potential hires than you’d get through older standards.
4. Properly Assess Your Candidates
Before your interviews, you should create a standard pre-hire assessment using your top employees and former employees as benchmarks. This should cover everything from customer service to communication, professionalism, and teamwork.
Once you’ve set up the threshold for who gets interviewed, the first thing to do is contact those who didn’t make the cut. Explain just why they didn’t make it and encourage them to apply for jobs in the future. It would be best if you also kept their resumes on file, which will give you a ready-made pool of prospective hires for any job.
5. Properly Interview Your Candidates
Now comes the interviews. Not only should you be consistent in asking the same questions to any candidate, but you should also make sure that the process itself stays the same. Try to make your first interview a video interview done over the phone or laptop. This will allow you to gauge a prospect’s personality, which is a significant factor in the hospitality industry.
Ask questions about teamwork and customer service. This way, you can screen out anyone who might not play well with others and keep the most personable people for the second interview. This second interview should focus more on the job itself to see if they’re ready to go or need additional training before being hired.
Doing your homework on prospective hires ensures that your hotel or resort will thrive as people come back season after season thanks to your professional and personable staff. Follow these practices, and you’re more than likely to be a success in the hospitality sector.
