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Ireland – Room for improvement in hotel recruitment process

28 July 2014

The hospitality sector faces a challenge in recruitment, with 73% of hotels reporting problems in finding qualified entry staff, reports The Sunday Business Post.

According to Jennifer Lee, group HR director of Jurys Inn, companies need to adapt their recruitment process and behaviours to encourage more young people to enter the industry: “Young people are changing and they are very different to previous generations. They are learning, communicating, and interacting in very, very different ways. We have had to review our recruitment and selection processes to try to bear that in mind.”

“They often have that challenge of coming from a background where they have no work experience, and perhaps no qualifications, so how do they get their foot in the door to start on the career ladder? I think that is where hospitality can come in and certainly from Jurys’ perspective we have been very proactive.”

Hotels are a people business, so in Jurys recruitment isn’t about qualifications or even experience, Ms Lee added; it is about attitude: “If you have the right attitude, we can train you to do everything else. That is our core theme in HR, it is about providing opportunities.”

Simple initiatives like removing the interview process from a formal one-to-one environment by meeting the candidate in the restaurant or bar where there is activity going on helps by putting them at ease. Group interviews are also used.

“We find that they will open up a bit more when they are interacting with groups,” Ms Lee said.

The company is also making greater use of Facebook and Twitter. A completely revamped induction programme now includes blended e-learning, and the firm is looking at gamifying customer relations training.

“We have had to adapt our whole HR approach toward the changing expectations of young people and we see that as a very positive thing,” she said.

Last year, a new recruitment process was launched and any manager in the business involved in recruiting was educated about the changing expectations of young people.

She explained: “Young people are looking for different things. They are looking for a dynamic environment, which hospitality certainly offers. They are looking for variety and we offer multi-skilling. Some hotels are very department-focused, but in Jurys Inn you get an opportunity to work in a number of different departments and that appeals to young people and it is something we sell.”

Jurys uses two streams of progression to management – its graduate recruitment programme Grow, and Insights, an internal programme developed in Dublin and rolled out to the UK to provide a pathway to promotion for people who join the business without qualifications.

“The beauty about hospitality is that you can start anywhere. You can start on the shop floor and over half of our general managers have started there and ended up in senior roles. It is a sector that gives huge opportunity for people to travel and to move into areas like sales, revenue management, IT and finance, and we have programmes that can facilitate that,” Ms Lee concluded.

The Irish Hotels Federation is actively lobbying for an apprenticeship model to be introduced to Ireland, with Ms Lee adding that this would be a “great step forward” for the industry.