QSTH 311

Staffing for Service

JOSEPHUS B. CAYABYAB
Our Lady of Fatima University
QSTH 311
Staffing for Service
HOSPITALITY PRINCIPLE: FIND AND HIRE PEOPLE WHO LOVE TO SERVE

Contents
LEARNING OUTCOMES .................................................................................................................................. 3
THE MANY EMPLOYEES OF THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY ............................................................................. 4
Serving the Guests .................................................................................................................................... 4
Supporting the Service .............................................................................................................................. 4
The Role of the Manager .......................................................................................................................... 4
LOVING TO SERVE ......................................................................................................................................... 5
Two major challenges for hospitality managers. ...................................................................................... 5
THE FIRST STEP: STUDY THE JOB ................................................................................................................... 6
Human Resource Planning ........................................................................................................................ 6
Job Analysis ............................................................................................................................................... 6
The Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities Required for an Assistant Front Desk Manager in a Major
European Hotel ......................................................................................................................................... 7
Study Your Best Performers .................................................................................................................. 7
Develop Talent Profiles ......................................................................................................................... 7
Competency-Based Approaches: Disadvantages.................................................................................. 8
THE SECOND STEP: RECRUIT A POOL OF QUALIFIED CANDIDATES .............................................................. 9
Hiring Internal Candidates ........................................................................................................................ 9
The Known Quantity ............................................................................................................................. 9
Internal Equity....................................................................................................................................... 9
Experience ........................................................................................................................................... 10
Knowing the Culture ........................................................................................................................... 10
Lower Cost .......................................................................................................................................... 10
Internal Search Strategies ....................................................................................................................... 10
Hiring External Candidates...................................................................................................................... 11
New Ideas and Fresh Perspectives...................................................................................................... 11
Difficulties with Internal Candidates....................................................................................................... 11
Specific Skills and Knowledge ............................................................................................................. 11
Diversity .............................................................................................................................................. 12

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 External Search Strategies ...................................................................................................................... 12
Some Sources Used for External Recruitment ...................................................................................... 12
Public Advertising................................................................................................................................ 15
The Internet ........................................................................................................................................ 15
Niches .................................................................................................................................................. 15
Professional Networks and Placement Services ................................................................................. 16
Student Recruiting .............................................................................................................................. 16
Employee Referrals ............................................................................................................................. 16
Employers of Choice ........................................................................................................................... 17
Walk-Ins .............................................................................................................................................. 17
The Competition ................................................................................................................................. 17
Call-Back File ....................................................................................................................................... 17
The Final Applicant Pool.......................................................................................................................... 17
THE THIRD STEP: SELECT THE BEST CANDIDATE ......................................................................................... 18
Screening and Evaluating Applicants ...................................................................................................... 18
The Application Form .......................................................................................................................... 18
The Interview ...................................................................................................................................... 19
Psychological Tests.............................................................................................................................. 19
Assessment Centers ............................................................................................................................ 20
References, Background Checks, and Drug Tests ............................................................................... 20
THE FOURTH STEP: HIRE THE BEST APPLICANT .......................................................................................... 21
THE FIFTH STEP: MAKE THE NEW HIRE FEEL WELCOME ............................................................................ 21
THE SIXTH STEP: TURNOVER—SELECTING .................................................................................................. 22
PEOPLE OUT OF AN ORGANIZATION .......................................................................................................... 22
EMPLOYING THE BEST TO SERVE YOUR GUESTS ........................................................................................ 22

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LEARNING OUTCOMES
The process of recruiting employees who will give excellent guest service.

Internal and external recruitment strategies that organizations use.

Standard approaches and techniques for screening and interviewing job candidates.

Employee skills, traits, and general abilities that have been found to lead to guest service
excellence.

The importance of a strong service orientation for all organizational employees, not just those on
the frontline serving guests.

The importance of a diversified workforce to hospitality organizations.

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THE MANY EMPLOYEES OF THE
HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY
Providing either a tangible or an intangible service product requires many different
employees doing many different jobs. Most obvious are the front-of-house employees who
interact with the guest. They are directly responsible for providing the value and quality of an
exceptional experience because they are the interface between the guests and the company.
Back-of-house employees or what is sometimes called the heart of the house help create the
service experience. They fix the rides, cook the meals, clean the sheets, and so forth so that the
guest’s experience meets or exceeds expectations.
Management also plays a critical role. They hire the employees, train, evaluate, reward,
discipline, celebrate, promote, and oversee all the other tasks that must be done to ensure that
there is someone at the right time and place ready to serve the guest. Beyond these tasks, there
are laws and regulations that must be followed; accounts that must be balanced; financial
statements that must be created; strategies that must be developed and implemented; marketing
and sales that must be done. All these tasks—and the people who perform them—are critical for
a successful business.

Serving the Guests

While many people are involved in the delivery of any service experience, it is the
frontline or customer-contact employee, with whom the guest interacts, that has the most direct
influence. This employee—the front desk agent, the restaurant server, the character at a theme
park, the driver of the bus, the flight attendant—is frequently the one that can turn a guest
experience into a wow that is memorable. This can be done in a variety of ways, but one way is
to add something extra and unexpected to the experience.

Supporting the Service

If employees are to deliver excellent service, there must be something excellent to deliver
in the first place. And just as guest-contact employees must have the right abilities and
motivation to interact appropriately and engagingly with guests, so employees in noncontact
positions must have the right abilities and motivation to do their jobs if an excellent service
experience is going to result.

The Role of the Manager

Hospitality is such a labor-intensive industry that there must also be managers to
supervise, coach, and coordinate the many employees doing the different jobs. Supervisors and
managers have a number of important roles, from checking employees’ work to creating work
schedules, supplying necessary equipment and supplies, providing training, and conducting
performance evaluations. Yet managers in service firms are faced with very different issues than
managers in product-producing firms.

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LOVING TO SERVE
While employees in different positions will obviously play different roles and have
different levels of customer contact, ultimately, the hospitality industry comes down to providing
service. Each employee helps deliver that service, either directly or indirectly. When one comes
across employees who deliver exceptional customer service experiences, they really stand out.

Two major challenges for hospitality managers.

Scott Gross: calls these people “service naturals” because they instinctively
give great service when provided the opportunity.

• First, they need to work hard at developing a process that will systematically find, recruit,
and select those 10 percent who are truly committed to providing excellent service.
• Second, they must work even harder to develop an effective process for showing the rest
how to provide the same quality of service that the naturals do naturally. Because
naturally talented people are so rare in the labor pool, the organization must identify what
skills are lacking in the people they do hire and train them in those skills.

Given the challenges of recruiting and hiring good employees in the hospitality industry,
some organizations are tempted to place the service naturals in the guest-contact jobs and hire
the rest for support jobs, which don’t have direct contact with the guest. Since not all jobs in
hospitality organizations require extensive guest contact, putting people not naturally good at
service in these behind-the-scenes jobs might seem like a way out. The truly excellent
organizations, however, recognize the fallacy of this reasoning. They know that all employees
are somehow involved in serving either external, paying guests or internal fellow workers.
Knowing that service effectiveness depends on everyone throughout the organization taking
service responsibility seriously, these outstanding organizations try not to hire anyone unwilling
or unable to provide outstanding service. There are simply very few places to hide employees
who may be outstanding technically but have no service skills.

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THE FIRST STEP: STUDY THE JOB
Human Resource Planning
Selecting the best person for the job should begin by first looking not at the applicants but
at the job. First, you should engage in human resource planning. Human resource planning is the
process of analyzing an organization’s current human resource capabilities and the
organization’s human resource needs that are required to meet organizational objectives. Based
on your organizational strategy, you must determine what knowledge, skills, and abilities
(KSAs) employees must possess to accomplish your goals, what levels of KSAs currently exist
in your organization, and how you expect both your organization and people to develop over
time.
HR planning not only is directed at today’s employee needs but also should be done
with a longer-run perspective. While most recruitment activity is focused on filling jobs that are
currently vacant, some effort should be given to anticipating the long-term employment needs of
the organization. If, for example, you are planning to build a new hotel or expand an existing
one, you must consider whether or not job candidates with the necessary KSAs will be available
for hire when the project is done. If not, plans need to be developed to recruit from distant labor
markets, retrain people in the current labor market, or hire away qualified employees from their
current employers. Each of these strategies has costs and benefits that should be carefully
weighed, but each also offers a planned path to find the employees needed when it is time to hire.

Job Analysis
After HR planning, but before you start looking for a new employee, you must take the
time to carefully analyze exactly what sort of job you are going to fill. A careful, thorough job
analysis allows the organization to identify the exact job specifications and required
competencies for each job classification and type. A job analysis will tell you if you need
physically strong people to assist park visitors into a ride, skilled lifeguards to keep people safe
in the water parks, or multilingual people to speak to foreign guests.
While the KSA approach is the most widely used strategy for selection in industrial
organizations, using it in the hospitality organization is more difficult because of service
intangibility and variability in guest expectations. Measuring the strength, height, and manual
dexterity competencies necessary for a manufacturing job is far easier than measuring
friendliness, ability to stay calm under guest criticism, integrity, and willingness to help—all
necessary to provide excellent guest service. For this reason, hospitality organizations must go
beyond KSAs and consider other factors such as employee attitudes. Indeed, many hospitality
organizations find attitude so important that they use this staffing principle: Hire for attitude;
train for skill. From the guest’s perspective, another way of expressing this idea is found in a
commonly heard hospitality saying, “Guests don’t care how much you

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The Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities Required for an Assistant
Front Desk Manager in a Major European Hotel
© Cengage Learning 2012

• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

• Outstanding flexibility: must be able to work under stress and pressure and reflect at all times,
even under difficult conditions, a positive can-do attitude and the best image of the hotel.
• Ability to analyze complex statistical data and make judgments accordingly. Ability to deal
effectively with internal and external customers, some of whom will require high levels of
patience, tact, and diplomacy to diffuse anger, collect accurate information, and resolve
conflicts.
• High school diploma required. Degree with hospitality focus preferred.
• Minimum 2 years previous front desk experience required.
• Experience with reservation information systems required.
• Experience in a luxury property of comparable size preferred.
• Operational and/or sales experience required.
• Must be able to deal correctly with confidential information and must be discreet.
• Must be fluent in French and English and must be able to address any kind of information in an
adequate manner.
• Must be well groomed and maintain impeccable hygiene standards.
• Extensive walking required and ability to stand on feet for a long time.
• Hours may vary based upon organizational needs and operational demands.
• Strong leadership skills.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills in English and French. Dutch is an asset.
• German and/or Spanish is a plus.

Study Your Best Performers

The intangibility of the guest experience and the uniqueness of what each guest expects
from it have led some hospitality organizations to use a secondary strategy for identifying good
candidates: study the organization’s best performers and identify their personal traits, tendencies,
talents, and personality characteristics. Then, find candidates who match this profile.

Develop Talent Profiles

The idea here is to look at an organization’s strong performers and, based on their talents,
develop talent profiles for each major job category. Then, they use these benchmark profiles to
screen new applicants. For example, theme park ticket sellers have traditionally been hired and
rewarded on their ability to handle large sums of money transactions quickly and accurately.
Careful analysis has shown that the best ticket sellers have additional talents.
The use of this approach can even be extended to look at the mix of talents in entire
departments. If an analysis of a particular department shows that the current composition of
people does not include some vital talent for departmental success, the selection process can
ensure that the next person hired will have an ample supply of the missing ingredient.

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 Competency-Based Approaches: Disadvantages
Competency-based approaches to selection have a few drawbacks. Designing them for a
single job or single job category can be quite expensive unless the organization has a lot of
people doing that job.

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THE SECOND STEP: RECRUIT A POOL OF
QUALIFIED CANDIDATES
Whether the company looks inside or outside may depend partially on the level of
positions to be filled. If they are entry level, recruiting will occur mainly from outside. If above
entry level, the company will have to decide whether to promote from within or look outside.

Hiring Internal Candidates

Many companies prefer internal recruitment for several reasons. In fact, the practice of
hiring from within is often seen as a best practice of human resource management. Hiring
internal candidates has a number of advantages, as described below. But it is no panacea, and the
decision to hire from within needs to be considered in light of both its advantages and
disadvantages.

The Known Quantity

The most important advantage of promoting from within is that you have much more
information—and more accurate information—about your current employees than you do about
external candidates. The internal candidate is a known quantity. That person’s performance has
been available for observation and evaluation every day, and the person’s strengths and
weaknesses are generally known. Because some external candidates will interview well and
some poorly, managers doing the hiring can make mistakes. On the other hand, the good and bad
qualities of a person observed every day are evident.

Internal Equity
The second reason for internal hiring is internal equity. Many hospitality organizations
employ people from varied backgrounds and with different levels of training and education.
Many employees, except those in some technical areas and those with unique qualifications and
experience, start at the same entry-level point. Each has an equal opportunity to prove a
commitment to service excellence if they wish to get promoted. At a hotel front desk, you might
find a recent college graduate, an older person who has changed careers, and a person with a
high school or technical school degree—all working side by side and trying to impress the front
desk manager with their merits for promotion. If an outsider gets the vacancy at a higher level,
these hard-working employees will not feel fairly treated. They helped the organization achieve
its success; now they should be recognized for their contributions and allowed to share the
rewards.

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 Experience
Most people, as just mentioned, start in the hospitality industry by taking entry-level jobs.
Companies want their employees to know the business from the ground up. This hiring strategy
is usually uncompetitive and unattractive for college graduates who have not acquired such
experience through co-op or intern programs. While most graduates appreciate the need to take
the entry-level jobs as an opportunity to prove themselves, many are unwilling to accept the
relatively low starting salaries that hospitality organizations offer. This is becoming an even
greater issue for the industry as students graduating from college increasingly start their careers
with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. These students cannot afford low starting salaries even
when they have hope of future promotions and pay raises.

Knowing the Culture

Organizations like to promote internal candidates because much of the training in the
organizational culture has already been done. Internal candidates already know the company’s
beliefs and values and have proven themselves to be comfortable in that culture. The cultural
learning curve for promoted internal candidates is substantially reduced as they already know the
office political structure, the corporate goals, the real way things get done inside the
organization, and what the organization really believes in and rewards.

Lower Cost
Internal recruitment also has the general advantage of reducing costs. There is no need to
pay for advertisements and travel expenses of candidates to be interviewed, and the decision
often requires less time, which saves money. Also, candidates can be considered before a
position is even open, and the company can begin developing them to take on the new
responsibility when it becomes available. This way, when an opening does occur, it takes less
time to fill the position. Additionally, cost savings occur because there are fewer eligible
employees and ultimately fewer applicants for a given position than would be the case had
external candidates also been considered. A well-prepared company can use internal selection
successfully to move good people up through the organization. But if not well prepared, it may
find itself forced to select from a pool of less qualified employees.

Internal Search Strategies

A pool of internal candidates can be created in one of two ways: job postings or a review
of personnel records. Many organizations announce open positions to employees via a company
Intranet, bulletin boards, newsletters, or other means of communication. Sometimes, employees
are informed of openings before they are publicly announced, thus giving internal candidates the
first chance to apply for positions.

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Hiring External Candidates
Not every job can be filled by an internal candidate. For example, the only source of
candidates for entry-level jobs is the external labor market. Nor do organizations always want to
promote only from within. Internal recruitment is limiting. A company’s internal labor pool is
almost always smaller than the total labor pool. In some circumstances, looking outside the
company for new employees has several advantages.

New Ideas and Fresh Perspectives

One problem with hiring internally—which usually involves promotions and transfers—
is that it limits the diversity of experience of the candidate population. When companies hire
only from within for everything except entry-level positions, everyone’s experience comes from
the same organization. Employees may learn very well how business is done in their company,
but they may have no idea of how other companies are doing the same things, and in particular
how others might be handling certain problems in a better way. Some companies have come to
rely on hiring from the benchmark organizations as a way to reduce their own training costs
while obtaining the talent they need to be competitive. This strategy can be expensive as hiring
someone away from an existing external job will generally cost more than developing such a
person internally, but for some specialized or senior positions, the benefits gained may be worth
the cost (and may actually reduce training costs).

Difficulties with Internal Candidates

The company that promotes from within often promotes its best line-level employees into
supervisory or managerial roles, but good line-level employees do not always make good
managers, nor do all of them want to become managers. For example, by promoting the best
front desk agent to front desk supervisor, the company may be losing a great agent with great
customer service skills and acquiring a bad manager with poor leadership abilities. Convincing a
bellman or waitress to become a manager may be difficult as employees in tipped positions
frequently make more money than their supervisors. Unless organizations are willing to develop
employees systematically to take on the greater responsibilities of higher-level positions,
promotion from within might do more harm than good. Similarly, if a culture change is desired,
or if a particular talent is unavailable in the internal labor pool, adhering to the practice of
promoting from within can fail to produce the characteristics required in new leaders.

Specific Skills and Knowledge

While hiring from within can be a means to motivate and retain lower-level staff
interested in a promotion, external candidates may be desirable when a needed ability or
combination of abilities in a specific job is unavailable among existing employees. Although
most hospitality leaders can tell many stories of general managers who worked their way up
from entry-level positions, many aspects of running a hospitality business may require particular
knowledge and training that a firm may not always be able to provide internally.

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 Diversity
Another concern with promotion from within is that it can limit diversity at higher
organizational levels. If a company hires only from within, its diversity in higher-level positions
is limited by the employee demographics already present. For example, if women are slightly
more likely to leave a company than men, it becomes increasingly unlikely that women will
achieve the highest levels when the company hires only from within. Hiring from outside the
firm allows a company to enhance its diversity by seeking candidates from different applicant
pools.

External Search Strategies

For large hospitality organizations in cities and towns, where the tourism and hospitality
industries dominate, these strategies are especially important to provide the tremendous number
of people that the hospitality industry needs. The smart hospitality companies go where the
growth is; thus, growth plus replacement needs add up to a big recruitment job. Seasonal
fluctuations in demand for hospitality services only compound the problem by requiring
intensive recruitment and selection drives to prepare for an expected seasonal rush. Even in
tighter economic times or in situations with limited seasonal variation, the high turnover in the
hospitality industry makes recruitment a constant challenge, and controlling costs becomes even
more important. In the end, regardless of the specific economic or business situation, a major
challenge for all hospitality organizations is how to both create and maintain a qualified external
labor pool in a cost-effective way. The key point, however, is that every job will be seen as a
great opportunity by some group of people, and the external search strategy should begin by
considering who those people are and where to find them.

Some Sources Used for External Recruitment

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 Public Advertising
Although there is much discussion of how the Internet is replacing print media, help
wanted advertisements are still a very common method for advertising job openings. Almost all
newspapers still print help-wanted ads in the traditional way in which they have been printed for
decades.
In addition to the advertising in newspapers, magazines, and weeklies targeting potential
employees, aggressive recruiters use more creative means to reach people who may not read the
help-wanted ads, may not be thinking about changing jobs, or may not even be thinking about
working. Just as marketers segment their markets to find likely candidates for their products and
services, recruitment managers increasingly segment their markets to reach and attract job
candidates.

The Internet
The widespread use and accessibility of the Internet has turned Internet recruiting into a
multibillion-dollar industry. Companies can use Internet job sites, like Monster, to advertise their
positions. Job seekers examine what is available and look for additional information on jobs that
interest them. This method can help attract a large number of possible applicants, and applicants
can consider a large number of possible jobs. The problem with this approach, however, is that
hiring companies cannot always tell which applicants are really interested in a given job and
which ones are not really serious, so a large amount of useless information may be generated.
The Internet also helps to fit employees to jobs and companies they want. Unlike some
web sites that only post job openings—like a modern help-wanted section—some others ask job
seekers questions to assess their fitness for positions or about what they are looking for in a new
position. For example, you might be asked if you had managerial responsibility in a previous job,
or whether you prefer to work for a large or small company. A job site can then use the
information it collects to try to create a fit between the qualifications and preferences of
applicants and the characteristics of jobs and companies.

Niches
Targeting specific segments of the labor market to identify potential employees is another
recruiting strategy. Some organizations target high schools, minorities, associations of disabled
people, homeless people, or senior citizens. They structure the job opportunities and marketing to
appeal to the needs and limitations of that particular segment of the employment pool. For
example, many hospitality organizations find that some of their best employees are older, retired
people, so they target that group. Retired seniors are often lonely, bored, looking for something
to do that will bring them into positive contact with other people, or, realizing that they retired
too early, need a job to supplement their Social Security. Many guest-contact jobs can provide
this opportunity for them. Organizations that originally recruited older people because of labor
shortages have often found to their pleasant surprise that their older employees not only have
better attendance records than younger employees but they bring an enthusiasm for and
experience in helping and interacting with guests that makes them great customer-focused
employees.

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 Professional Networks and Placement Services
Successful hospitality managers join professional organizations to find both good
employees and good ideas about how to find good employees. The amount of movement back
and forth across hospitality organizations causes these professional networks to be strong and
informative. Some organizations seek to represent an entire industry, a segment within the
industry, specific professions, or even particular networks of individuals. While jobs can be
found in many ways, networking is still one of the most effective to find out about potential jobs
and potential employees, network, and enable the personal face-to-face connection that can make
a potential employee stand out in a large pool of applicants and ultimately set up and serve as an
initial interview.

Student Recruiting
An important strategy for finding the many people that the hospitality industry needs is
student recruiting. A number of programs develop pools of potential employees among young
people who are either still in school or have recently graduated. Being young, full of energy,
recently educated on state-of-the-art methods, and enthusiastic, students are often ideal
hospitality employees. In addition, they come to the job with the anticipation of learning and
growing and are, therefore, quite comfortable with structured work requirements and extensive
training. The most common recruiting strategy is the traditional campus visit by a company
recruiter. The institution’s placement office schedules eligible students to meet with the recruiter
and provides an interview space on campus. The recruiter may interview graduating senior
applicants for full-time jobs and undergraduates for summer internships. A variation on this idea
is the job fair, where many employers come to the campus on the same day and set up booths
where they can meet with potential employees.

Employee Referrals
Another large and successful source of employees for many hospitality organizations is
referrals by current employees. A great way to get the kind of new employees you want is to ask
your star employees to find them. Your good employees know what your organization is like,
perform well in it, obviously like working for you, and can therefore be your best recruiters and
spokespersons in the labor market. A bonus of this strategy is that existing employees who bring
in their friends feel responsible for them and their performance. They exert positive peer pressure
and encourage the new employees they sponsored to do well, which acts to the organization’s
benefit. Some organizations pay a bonus to their existing employees if they bring in a job
candidate who is hired and stays through a probationary period. The reward might be monetary,
or it could be something else that has value to employees, such as a free weekend trip to a nice
resort area, dinner at a special place, or some other inducement.

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 Employers of Choice
A company’s reputation can also aid in recruitment. Publications like Fortune magazine,
Fortune Small Business, and HR Magazine list companies that they evaluate to be Employers of
Choice. These employers are characterized as being good places to work, where the organization
makes efforts to create and maintain a humane and respectful workplace. As described by the
Society for Human Resource Management, “They’re the kinds of places at which we all want to
work. Where talent and teamwork are highly esteemed; where everyone is encouraged to reach
their potential and given opportunities for advancement; where employers respect and care about
their workers, and workers, in turn, care about the company and its customers.”

Walk-Ins
Some hospitality organizations rely extensively on walk-ins. Students in hospitality
management programs tell similar tales of a great experience in a hotel, restaurant, or other
hospitality organization that excited them about the industry. As a result of that experience, they
found out what they wanted to do when they grew up.

The Competition
Scott Gross adds another strategy: Seek out excellent employees in similar service jobs
elsewhere. Again, unlike the manufacturing sector, where a potential employer is not going to be
able to walk in and watch the best workers on a competitor’s factory assembly line, watching
customer-contact employees do their jobs in the hospitality industry is easy.

Call-Back File
Usually, there are more applicants than positions. Companies can call unsuccessful
applicants back several months later to see if they are still interested. Even applicants who
dropped out because they found other jobs might now be interested if the positions they took
didn’t turn out to be what they hoped for. They were once interested and might be again.

The Final Applicant Pool

No matter how the set of applicants is acquired—through internal selection, via a job
posting system, using the Internet, or through public advertising—the selection decision will
come down to two factors. First, how choosy can the company be in the selection process; and
second, how well can the employee’s performance be predicted.
Being choosy means having enough applicants apply for a position so that you can select
the better ones and not hire others. Obviously, to make a decision, you need at least two
applicants for a given position.
But being picky is not enough. You also need to be able to predict who will be better
employees. Companies must be able to collect information on each applicant that can be used to
identify good performers—and ideally the best performers. This process of gathering information
on applicants constitutes the third step in the selection process.

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THE THIRD STEP: SELECT THE BEST
CANDIDATE
With a pool of applicants assembled, the next step is to determine who will be hired into
the company. The selection process sounds disarmingly simple: figure out what an ideal
candidate looks like, collect information on potential candidates, and then select the person who
best matches the ideal. The people hired should be able to offer the quality of service that guests
expect and that makes hospitality experiences memorable. They should be able to handle the
stress of providing service, especially when a service failure occurs. They must handle failure
smoothly and successfully enough to satisfy the guest. Finally, they must act in such a way that
each and every guest feels specially treated, safe, and secure. Anyone who has had both good
and bad service experiences knows that companies perform the selection function with varying
degrees of success.

Screening and Evaluating Applicants

Once you know what you want in a candidate, you must collect information on your
applicants to make the best hiring decision. Many tools are available to help collect this
information efficiently so as to make accurate hiring decisions. There is, of course, a trade-off.
The more information that is collected, the better the potential decision can be; however,
collecting more information takes both time and money. Companies must therefore carefully
consider how they evaluate applicants in order to make efficient and effective hiring decisions.

The Application Form

Application forms are the first screen an employer should use in deciding whom to hire.
A typical application form will include the applicant’s employment history, education level, and
conviction record if any. The form should be designed such that responses provide enough
information to permit reasonable decisions about whom to keep in the pool and whom to drop.
Obviously, a major trade-off is involved here. The recruitment strategy should be designed to
bring in as many legitimate candidates as possible but also screen out unsuitable candidates. The
advertising should state what qualifications, work experience, or training are minimum
requirements for employment. The application form serves as a preliminary check on whether or
not the candidates do in fact have the appropriate occupational qualifications. Job requirements
should be clearly stated, so that they do not inadvertently amount to discriminatory hiring
practices or eliminate candidates who could perform superbly in the role.

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 The Interview
If the applicant passes the initial screen, the organization will most likely schedule an
interview to determine if the information on the application checks out. That is, they will seek to
determine if the applicant seems to fit the organization, see if the candidate is really committed
to service excellence, and tell the candidate what the job is actually like. The interview is the
most common method used by employers to help select employees. Research, however, has also
shown it is often the least accurate.
Structured Interviews
Unstructured Interviews
Work Competencies
Doing the Job as Designed
Commitment to Service

Psychological Tests
Psychologists have developed a variety of tests to distinguish one person from another
along different dimensions. Tests of mental ability measure logical reasoning, intelligence,
conceptual foresight, ability to spot semantic relationships, spatial organization, memory span,
and a number of other cognitive factors. Some measures of personality traits and behavioral
predispositions have also been developed and validated for use in the selection process. For
example, service orientation is associated with gregarious and outgoing personalities who make a
conscientious effort to help others. Psychological tests have also been used to assess applicant
integrity, such as how likely they are to engage in theft or risky behaviors at work
Personality Traits
Managers often talk about hiring the right type of person for a job, or someone
with the right disposition. So, it should be no surprise that some employers try to assess
the personalities of applicants in order to make better hiring decisions.

Research indicates that personality can be reliably measured and

summarized along five dimensions:
1. Extroversion. The degree to which someone is talkative, sociable, active, aggressive,
and excitable.
2. Agreeableness. The degree to which someone is trusting, amiable, generous, tolerant,
honest, cooperative, and flexible.
3. Conscientiousness. The degree to which someone is dependable and organized,
conforms to the needs of the job, and perseveres on tasks.
4. Emotional stability. The degree to which someone is secure, calm, independent, and
autonomous.
5. Openness to experience. The degree to which someone is intellectual, philosophical,
insightful, creative, artistic, and curious.

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 Of these five, conscientiousness is generally considered to be the most valid
predictor of job performance. Common sense suggests that people who are more
organized, thorough, and dependable are likely to be better-performing employees.
Emotional stability has also been shown to be associated with job performance.
Since the quality and value of hospitality experiences exist only in the minds and
memories of guests, hospitality employees are often uncertain about whether they are
delivering the experience as guests expect them to.

Cognitive Ability
While many managers think personality is the best predictor of job performance,
in fact, decades of research has shown that cognitive ability may be the best. This finding
has been replicated across a wide variety of settings and occupational groups. Research
has shown that general mental ability (GMA) can account for up to one third of the
variance in performance ratings for complex, managerial jobs, and up to 16 percent of the
variance in performance for less complex, semiskilled positions.

Integrity Tests
Integrity tests predict the predisposition of job applicants to engage in theft, drug
taking, and dishonest or otherwise disruptive work behaviors.

Assessment Centers
An assessment center is a battery of tests that are used to measure the KSAs of a
group of individuals. This can be used either for the purpose of selecting individuals for
higher level positions or as a tool to help develop the participants’ careers. Assessment
centers often include interviews, psychological testing, and a variety of exercises
involving administrative tasks, group exercises, cases analyses, and managerial exercises.
While assessment centers can come in many forms, they typically measure seven key sets
of KSAs: organizing and planning, problem solving, drive, influencing others,
consideration and awareness of others, stress tolerance, and communication.

References, Background Checks, and Drug Tests

It is also a fairly common practice to check a candidate’s references. This may
involve soliciting letters of recommendation, calling former employers, or requesting
from candidates names of individuals who can attest to their character. Since most people
are sensible enough to provide references from individuals who will write nice things
about them, reference checks don’t usually provide much useful information.
Nonetheless, it is generally worthwhile to follow up on these references. If a given
reference doesn’t have good things to say, or worse, if the name given in the reference is
fake, it clearly indicates a potential problem. Although many candidates can provide
glowing references that may not really predict much, the skilled manager will still look
for specific examples in the references that can attest to the KSAs and competencies
needed for the job.

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THE FOURTH STEP: HIRE THE BEST
APPLICANT
After all the information has been collected on potential applicants, selecting the right
people from the applicants becomes the next critical step, in ensuring that the company gets the
employees who will provide the level of service that the organization expects. While finding and
hiring the right people is challenging for all organizations, it is especially difficult for the
hospitality industry. Although many jobs require definable skills that can be identified,
measured, and tested, the hospitality industry has the extra challenge of ensuring that the guest-
contact employees they hire not only have the competency to perform the task skills but also
have the interpersonal skills necessary to interact successfully with the guests and the creative
skills to fix the inevitable service failures. The difference between a good and a great guest
experience is so often the indefinable extra that the employee adds to the experience. Finding,
hiring, training, and rewarding the employee who happily and naturally gives that extra effort is
one of the biggest challenges for hospitality organizations.

THE FIFTH STEP: MAKE THE NEW HIRE

FEEL WELCOME
Once the job offer is made and the selected applicant hired, the staffing process may
seem to be complete. Indeed, many companies think and act this way too. However, the staffing
process is not done until the organization has “on-boarded” the new employee. On-boarding
should be designed to ensure that the new hire feels genuinely welcomed. After all, the
organization spent a lot of time and money finding the right person to hire and convincing that
applicant to accept the job offer. Now the organization should find ways to tell its new
employees how welcome they are. The way the employees feel welcomed on their first day of
employment may well set the tone for the rest of their career with that company.
On-boarding is the process of getting the new employee started in both a new company
and a new job. Some of it is just common sense: people, especially the new supervisor, should be
ready to greet the new person, the necessary paperwork should be complete, the office—if there
is one for the position—should be ready with a computer, telephone, and other equipment and
supplies. Many companies have formal orientation programs, and everything should be set up for
the new employee to participate in one. While this process may all seem logical, surprisingly,
many companies do not thoughtfully prepare for the arrival of new employees, and the result can
be unpleasant. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and the best companies don’t
miss that chance.

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THE SIXTH STEP: TURNOVER—SELECTING
PEOPLE OUT OF AN ORGANIZATION
Although you must expend significant time, money, and effort to hire people into your
company, turnover is an inevitable part of business, and particularly in the hospitality industry.
While selection is usually considered as the process of choosing employees from a pool of
applicants, turnover can also be seen as selection of a sort. While those acquired are selected into
the company, those leaving the company are essentially “selected out” of the company’s
workforce. While many companies give a lot of attention to the process of selecting people into
the company, the process of turnover is often less strategically managed.
The hospitality industry is known for having high turnover. This can be voluntary, where
employees choose to leave, or involuntary, where the choice is made for them by the
organization. Hospitality jobs often involve working in unpleasant conditions (such as hot
kitchens) or during undesirable hours (holidays, nights, weekends). The hospitality industry also
often pays less than other industries and attracts turnover-prone applicants who see it as a short-
term job commitment or an industry where their career aspirations cannot be met. High turnover
is the result.

EMPLOYING THE BEST TO SERVE YOUR

GUESTS
To provide excellent service, the organization needs employees with the right knowledge,
skills, abilities, and attitudes. To get the right people, the company needs to know what to look
for, where to look to recruit talented workers, and the right ways to collect the information on job
applicants. Successful staffing depends on a clear understanding of what the jobs require and of
the personal characteristics that lead to success in these positions.
The best hospitality companies use a consistent and rigorous method to find, select, and
hire the best talent. They also know that staffing does not just stop once an applicant is hired.
Selection can continue as positions open up within the company, and internal candidates may
make the best hires for these positions. Also, sometimes employees need to be "selected out" of
the company, and this turnover process should be monitored and maintained with as much care
and thought as the processes that bring people into the company.

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