Improving Performance at Hotel Paris

Part 2: The Recruitment Process

The Hotel Paris’s competitive strategy is “to use superior guest service to differentiate the Hotel
Paris properties, and to thereby increase the length of stay and return rate of guests, and thus
boost revenues and profitability.” HR manager Lisa Cruz must now formulate functional policies
and activities that support this competitive strategy and boost performance, by eliciting the
required employee behaviors and competencies. As a longtime HR professional, Lisa Cruz was
well aware of the importance of effective employee recruitment. If the Hotel Paris didn’t get
enough applicants, it could not be selective about who to hire. And, if it could not be selective
about who to hire, it wasn’t likely that the hotels would enjoy the customer-oriented employee
behaviors that the company’s strategy relied on. She was therefore disappointed to discover that
the Hotel Paris was paying virtually no attention to the job of recruiting prospective employees.
Individual hotel managers slapped together help wanted ads when they had positions to fill, and
no one in the chain had any measurable idea of how many recruits these ads were producing or
which recruiting approaches worked the best (or worked at all). Lisa knew that it was time to
step back and get control of the Hotel Paris’s recruitment function. As they reviewed the details
of the Hotel Paris’s current recruitment practices, Lisa Cruz and the firm’s CFO became
increasingly concerned. What they found, basically, was that the recruitment function was totally
unmanaged. The previous HR director had simply allowed the responsibility for recruiting to
remain with each separate hotel, and the hotel managers, not being HR professionals, usually just
took the path of least resistance when a job became available by placing help wanted ads in their
local papers. There was no sense of direction from the Hotel Paris’s headquarters regarding what
sorts of applicants the company preferred, what media and alternative sources of recruits its
managers should use, no online recruiting, and, of course, no measurement at all of effectiveness
of the recruitment process. The company totally ignored recruitment-source metrics that other
firms used effectively, such as number of qualified applicants per position, percentage of jobs
filled from within, the offer-to-acceptance ratio, acceptance by recruiting source, turnover by
recruiting source, and selection test results by recruiting source. This despite the fact, as the CFO
put it, “that high-performance companies consistently score much higher than low-performing
firms on HR practices such as number of qualified applicants per position, and percentage of jobs
filled from within.” It was safe to say that achieving the Hotel Paris’s strategic aims depended
largely on the quality of the people that it attracted to, and then selected for, employment at the
firm. “What we want are employees who will put our guests first, who will use initiative to see
that our guests are satisfied, and who will work tirelessly to provide our guests with services that
exceed their expectations,” said the CFO. Lisa and the CFO both knew this process had to start
with better recruiting. The CFO gave her the green light to design a new recruitment process.
Lisa and her team had the firm’s IT department create a central recruiting link for the Hotel
Paris’s Web site, with geographical links that each local hotel could use to publicize its openings.
The HR team created a series of standard ads the managers could use for each job title. These
standard ads emphasized the company’s service-oriented values, and basically said (without
actually saying it) that if you were not people
oriented you should not apply. They emphasized what it was like to work for the Hotel Paris, and
the excellent benefits (which the HR team was about to get started on) the firm provided. It
created a new intranet-based job posting system and encouraged employees to use it to apply for
open positions. For several jobs, including housekeeping crew and front-desk clerk, applicants
must now first pass a short prescreening test to apply. The HR team analyzed the performance
(for instance, in terms of applicants/source and applicants hired/source) of the various local
newspapers and recruiting firms the hotels had used in the past, and chose the best to be the
approved recruiting sources in their local areas. After 6 months with these and other recruitment
function changes, the number of applicants was up on average 40%. Lisa and her team were now
set to institute new screening procedures that would help them select the high-commitment,
service-oriented, motivated employees they were looking for.

Questions

Given the hotel’s required personnel skills, what recruiting sources would you have suggested it
use, and why?

Based on what you know and on what you learned here in Chapter 5 of Dessler Human Resource
Management, how would you suggest Hotel Paris measure the effectiveness of its recruiting
efforts?