The Importance Of Recruiting Proper Employees Tourism Essay
1. Introduction:
In today’s competitive hotel and resort industry in china, the delivery of consistent quality service is imperative to success. As we all know, the hotel service starts with employees. They represent the human side of the brand; they are also the personality and face of a hotel. It is often these employees who create the most compelling points of differentiation between one hotel and another. Every hotel want to recruit the proper and excellent employee, so the hotel management must anticipate changes in the hospitability industry environment to ensure that people who are recruited have the unique skills, know-how, values required by the hotel’s strategic business objectives and proper for the position. Efforts to recruit proper employees have evolved to meet the growing demands of the industry and expectations of guests. We can also find that many hotel companies have begun treating employee recruitment with the same level of importance they would a consumer branding campaign, portraying emotion-based messages to potential employees the way an image marketing campaign might be used to generate interest among potential guests. Instead of the traditional recruitment effort, hotels and resorts are using different kinds of ways to recruit proper employees, such as colorful full-page ads in lifestyle magazines, witty dialogue in radio advertising and dramatic visuals on outdoor billboards to attract the “best of the best.” This is no doubt a large investment, but when a hotel is looking to find the highest quality people to bring their brand to life and deliver its promise on a daily basis, the investment is nothing short of critical. It is evident that if the quality of services rendered is ensured, the benefits that the hotel enterprises reap will be substantial, first and foremost, in terms of customer satisfaction and consequently in terms of an increase in customers, financial gains, prestige and reputation.
2. Importance of recruiting proper employees
More and more hotels attach importance to recruit proper employees, because that recruitment is a form of economic competition, one hotel competes with each other to identify, attract and employee qualified human resources. investment in HR practices impacts on the processes of creating customer value; through the attraction, selection and retention of high quality employees, providing appropriate skills.( AgustA±?n Quintana-De?niz, 2007)It means that recruitment is a key marketing tool for hotel seeking competitive edge.The way in which the recruitment process is handled affects the hotel’s image as an employer, in turn, its ability to attract qualified people, so the HR department in hotel must ensure that applicants do not receive misleading or inaccurate information. Failure in this task can create unrealistic expectations among candidates. In turn, this may produce job dissatisfaction, lower commitment and high turnover. Recruitment begins identifying HR requirements and ends with receiving applications. It involves determining where qualified applicants can be found and choosing a specific means of attracting potential employees to the hotel, it immediately precedes the selection process and involves attracting qualified and interested candidates from either inside or outside who have the capacity to generate a sustainable competitive advantage for the hotel and to be effective, recruitment must satisfy the needs of the candidate as well as the needs of the hotel. ‘You have to tell candidates what you have to offer as well as finding out what they can offer you’ The point here, however, is that recruitment and selection practices should reflect actual expected occupational standards and overall management philosophies. It also indicates the current use of recruitment practices in Chinese hotels. More use of appropriate applicant testing schemes, site tours and probationary periods may yield considerable benefits to potential employers. Innovative sources and recruitment practices will ensure value-added recruits who are already oriented to the demands and opportunities of a career within the hotel industry.
3. Recruiting problems in Chinese hotel
It is a common knowledge that hospitality front-line employees frequently encounter demanding and difficult customers. Although it is not a pleasant experience,
Hospitality service agents are often required to be polite and smile in front of the customers. (Hyun Jeong Kim, 2008) As a long time in China, many people consider that hospitality work is perceived as a servile, it means that in people’s eyes hospitality work is dirty, low skilled, low paid and therefore as capable of attracting only the young, women or the marginal in society , but now many people change their attitude among the hospitality work, especially the staff where work in some international 5-star hotel particularly may carry with it a high status, because the 5-star hotel need high-quality staff that willing to help people and project genuine smiles, they also should have professional hospitality skill and good communication skill. The fact is that more and more 5-star hotels need high-quality employees to join them, but the proper employees are very limited. If a hotel can not recruit proper employees for different department, it will impact the quality of services and raising the turnover rate, because the employee who is not proper for their job will be stress at work. In general, work-related stress has been shown to result in declines in the quality of employee job performance (Gilboa et al., 2008) that is costly for organizations because it contributes to expensive voluntary turnover, (Villanueva and Djurkovic, 2009). Recent research has found that employee stress in the hospitality industry is important because it can result in work- ers becoming exhausted and cynical (Kim, 2008) which can have negative effects on service delivery. It is no doubt that is not good for hotel operating and competing with other hotels.
4. Preparing for recruiting proper employees
If a hotel wants to recruit proper employee, they must do some good preparing for recruitment. The development of a proactive strategy and approach needs to be supported and backed by the organizations key decision makers and should be highlighted in company documents such as the mission statement or company values declaration.(Stefan Groschl,2007) Strategic recruitment does this by linking recruiting activities to the organization’s business objectives and culture. Proper planning also helps hotel operators draft strategies to cope with the ever-changing HR demand, to improve training and to enhance the quality of human resources (Noe, 2008) Before the recruitment, HR department must communicate with line managers carefully and clearly, because line managers play an important part in recruitment process, the line managers know their departments very clearly and roundly, they can identify recruitment need, so they should help HR ensure what kinds of staffs are proper. After that determining number and type of jobs to be filled and match HR supply with job opening. The job analysis is also very important part; the HR people must analyze the attractive and unattractive features of the job first, the HR also should collect job information include job description (such as job title, duties and circumstances responsibilities, relationships, know-how, accountability, authority, special) and job specification(such as experience, qualifications, skills, abilities knowledge, personal qualities, special requirements) .More clearly and carefully prepare for recruiting , more effectively the recruitment results will appear. Preparing also can help HR determine which recruitment method they will choose.
5. Choosing a right recruitment method for hotel
After preparing for recruitment, HR must choose a recruitment method. Regardless of whether recruitment is done internally or externally, effective planning and strategizing are essential to the success of the process. The hotel needs to know that it has the right employees with the right skills in the right places at the right time.
5.1 Internal recruitment
If a hotel decides to hire permanent employees, the first critical question it needs to address is whether to recruit internally or externally. Recruiting from the current employee pool can benefit the hotel in a numbers of ways. The hotel already has performance dada on employees. The qualifications of internal candidates are already well known to the employer. The chance has been afforded to observe the applicant’s working performance, skills and capabilities, ability to get along with others and fit with the hotel. In addition, employees feel that the hotel is trying to provide them with promotional and development opportunities in reward for their performance and loyalty. Nevertheless, management’s perceptions of an employee are likely to be more accurate, thus providing a better prediction of success than information gained about external candidates. Human resources department constitute an enormous investment for most hotels and it makes economic sense to try to improve the return on this investment by making full use of the abilities of existing employees. Finally, current employees know the hotel, its culture, politics and customers and have already established relationships with partners and thus require less orientation and training. Consequently, they need far less formal or informal socialization time than those hired form the outside. Internal recruitment is often much faster and far less expensive than going outside of the hotel for applicants
Although internal recruiting has advantages, this approach also has some disadvantages. Internal recruitment can become very political and competitive, particularly when coworkers apply for the same position. Dysfunctional conflict may result and collegiality and interpersonal relationships can be strained, they may be promoted beyond their level of competence. In addition that, those employees not selected for the position can suffer from diminished morale and performance, particularly when they feel equally or better qualified than the candidate selected. The hotel can become inbred through excessive internal recruitment. Continuing to promote from within can encourage maintaining the status quo. A hotel need to improve organizational processes should usually recruit from outside. Finally, excessive internal recruitment can cause inefficiency by creating multiple vacancies. As this promotion chain continues down the hierarchy, an initial vacancy could spur promotions for a large number of people. Nearly all employees require a certain period of time to learn a new job. Even when an employee has worked in the hotel for several years, a new position requires adjusting to new responsibilities and redefining interpersonal relationships with coworkers. Internal recruiting can exacerbate this effect by creating a large number of employees having new positions. Until these employees gain the level of competence that their predecessors had and sufficiently redefine their working relationships, inefficiency will result. In this method of internal recruiting, supervisors could choose an individual whose work capabilities are well known to them. The other way most commonly used approach to internal recruitment is job posting.
Internal recruitment not only has its advantages but also disadvantages. It is probably best utilized when the hotel pursues a strategy related to stability, faces few major threats from its external environment, and is concerned with maintaining the status quo relative to its operating system. When time or money is limited, internal recruitment can be beneficial, as well.
5.2 External recruitment
A hotel’s human resources department can use various approaches to locate and attract external candidates, often looking to more than one source. To choose an approach, the HR manager must know which recruitment channel is likely to be most successful in targeting a particular labor group. An electrician, a computer specialist and a general manager will each have their own preferred recruitment channels.
Not surprisingly, the advantages of external recruitment are consistent with the disadvantages of internal recruitment. External recruitment facilitates change and tends to be more useful for hotels with volatile external environments. External recruitment can allow expanding its knowledge base beyond that of its existing employees and bringing in new ideas and viewpoints; external recruits are not bound by existing ways of thinking or doing things. Outside employees are not members of existing cliques. They can bring a fresh approach to problems that have plagued the hotel. At the senior level, candidates are often recruited for their history of bringing about high-level change in other hotels.
External recruiting, however, can be expensive and time-consuming. Employees from outside the hotels will often need a longer socialization period to know the hotel’s cultures, services, coworkers and customers, they adjustment and orientation takes longer. External recruits are also unknown entities in that hotel has no experience working with them. Although an applicant may have outstanding skills, training or experience in and may have past success in another hotel, those factors do not guarantee similar success with a new hotel or an ability to fit with a new hotel’s culture. Finally, external recruiting can have detrimental effects on the morale of those employees who have applied for the job internally, but have not been selected. A variety of methods can be used to recruit candidates externally, such as employee referrals, applicant-initiated recruitment, help-wanted advertisements, public employment agencies, private employment agencies, executive search firms, campus recruiting and online recruiting. Furthermore, Web-based recruiting is not limited to external applicants but can also be used to attract current employees. For instance, job openings can be posted on an organization’s intranet in order to announce opportunities for current employees to move into an e-service position.( Karen,2008)The choice of an external recruitment method depends on the circumstances surrounding the recruitment situation.
6. Interviewing
Choosing a right recruiting method is not enough to recruit proper employees for a hotel; it also needs a comprehensive and impersonal interviewing. It is no doubt that interviewing is a vital selection tool to ensure the candidate whether is proper for the position. Interviewers should include HR professionals, the manager of viable candidates and upper-level manager. Interviewing applicants involves making subjective assessments of each applicant’s qualifications for a job. It is easy to find that more and more group interviewing are used now, group interviewing allows different interviewers to contrast and compare their interpretations of the same interview information. Consequently, this type interviewing often helps overcome many of errors that individual interviewers might make, it also can save time for the hotel and applicant, but they often involve creating a less personal atmosphere for applicants. Sometimes group interviewing may make it more difficult for interviewers to get a sense of the applicant’s interpersonal style.
In more recent years, however, a growing interest among strategy researchers has emphasized the importance of behavioral explanations to strategy development. ( Baker M. Ayoun, 2008)If you work in a five-star hotel, good behavior is very important for your career. The hotel management also pays more attention to that, so in recent years, behavioral interviewing has become increasingly popular, which involve determining whether an applicant’s anticipated behavior in a variety of situations scenarios posed in interview question with experienced applicants as well as with those who have limited professional hospitality working experience, because that interviewers will ask some situations that the candidates will face on their jobs in the future. Thus, new templates of organizing for the hotel industry seemed to evolve over time.(PaiviKarhunen,2008)Before the behavioral interviewing, the interviewers must determine the most important behavioral characteristics required for given a job, it is very important for choosing proper employees form the candidates, because these can be identified by examining the key traits displayed by high performing incumbents. The hotel management can use this interviewing to looks for the candidates’ problem-solving ability, interpersonal communication style, decision making ability and problem analysis ability. If interviews are structured, the interviewers should pay attention that all candidates are asked the same questions and are given the same chance to respond and explain their views, it becomes easier to compare applicant responses to identical questions. If interviews are unstructured, the questions can be flexible. The hotel can choose the style of interviews depends on what kinds of people you will recruit, if you interview a job that require creativity ability, such as marketing job, the interviewers may choose less structured or unstructured interviews. On the other hand, attitude, self-efficacy and subjective norm were related to behavioral intention of adopting IT (Terry Lam, 2007 )
It is meaningful for asking candidates to describe their behaviors or actions they have taken in specific situations, it can help HR and line managers to estimate and ensure whether he or she is proper employee for this department in hotel. It also can assist the hotel in determining the fit between the applicants and hotel’s culture and processes. The interviewers should also pay attention that Candidates are just as
interested in making the right decision as the client; they want as much information as possible, they want to feel welcomed when they interview, and they want to know they will be properly supported if they accept the position(Karen K. Kirby,2008)
7. Testing
If a hotel wants to ensure whether the employee is proper for his position, testing is very important part .The needs of the hotel and job structure include specific responsibilities, interpersonal relationships with others and so forth will determine whether any or all of the following should be assessed: technical skills, interpersonal skills, personality traits, problem-solving abilities or any other job-related performance indicators. The key variable that should influence testing is job requirements. Any testing that is not specifically job-related could be legally challenged, particularly if adverse impact can be shown.
The timing of testing can depend on hotels, traditionally, testing has been conducted after the interviewing and screening process due to the expense of testing and time required scoring and evaluating test results. However, some hotels are now testing earlier in the selection process because costs involved with interviewing often exceed the costs of testing. Clearly, it makes sense for an employer to use more cost-effective screening earlier in the selection process.
Perhaps the most useful types of tests are work sample and trainability. Work sample is similar as on-job testing, it involve giving the applicant a representative sample of work that would be part of the job and asking the individual to complete it. These tests are useful when the management needs employees who will be able to perform job responsibilities from the first day of employment. Trainability tests measure an applicant’s aptitude and ability to understand critical components of the job that the company may be willing to teach once the employee is hired. They are useful when the management needs some familiarity with the nature of the work but seeks to train the new employee in the hotel’s way to do right things.
8. Summary
After the explain in this article, you can find out how important to recruit the proper employees for 5-star hotels, only have the high-quality staff, the assessment and expectations of hotel will keep on the high level and compete with other hotels. So before the recruitment, HR people should communicate with line managers comprehensively to identify recruitment needs. HR also need do some other preparing such as job description and job specification. After preparing for recruiting well, HR should choose the recruitment method depends on the situation, no matter choosing internal recruitment or external recruitment, the HR needs to ensure that it has the right employees with the right skills in the right places at the right time. If hotel wants to recruit proper employees, only well preparing and choosing right recruitment method is not enough, it also need a comprehensive interviewing and testing. Management should pay attention to using behavioral interviewing, because those interviewers will ask some situations that the candidates will face on their jobs in the future, the interviewers will determine whether the candidates have the most important behavioral characteristics required for given a job. Management also can use some testing to identify whether the applicant is proper for the position. 9. Conclusion
As the hotel industry is labor intensive, its products and services rely to a great degree on people, which amount to a huge proportion of overall costs. (Lin Lin, Jeou-ShyanHorng, Yi-ChenChen, Chang-YenTsai, 2010) It is also widely accepted that the quality of services offered by Hotel personnel and the resulting customer satisfaction are key to the survival and success of Hotel units. In addition, it is very important that the assessment and expectations of hotel directors regarding the quality of services extended to their customers as well as the hotel personnel available be considered and understood in order to ensure that these expectations are met at the desired level. Especially in China, hospitality industry is developing faster and faster, more and more foreigners come to china to visit or have a business trip, so Chinese hospitality industry need lots of high-quality staffs, but in fact, the hospitality professionals are very limited, so hotel management should pay attention to recruit proper employees that with the right skills in the right places at the right time, so HR should do some well preparing for recruitment and choose the right recruitment method. While HR and management are interviewing and testing, they should focuses on candidates behavioral interviewing to identify whether they have the most important behavioral characteristics required for given a job. All in all, hotel should try their best to ensure the employees they recruit are proper for their job, and work as the professionals. Therefore, enhancing the quality of employees is a must in the hospitality industry (Collins, 2007)
