Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Hospitality Industry Hiring With Video Interviews

You know hiring top-notch people for your hospitality jobs is essential. So why are you still missing out on so many great candidates? More importantly, once you have these great candidates, why are you losing them to employee turnover?

Keeping your top talent, whether it’s in hospitality management or resort jobs, is a big challenge for the hospitality industry. Even if you manage to find the best people for your hotel jobs or management positions, it’s likely you’ll soon be seeing these carefully selected candidates walk out the door.

Why? The top performers in the hospitality industry have easily transferable skills they can use at a variety of hotels, resorts, and other hospitality jobs. This is great for hiring talented job seekers to fill your positions, but not so great when this talent is looking to greener pastures.

So what are your hospitality staffing solutions? The video interview can be a great tool for connecting with top talent and finding better fitting candidates. But before we cover how the video interview is helping the hospitality industry find and retain the best people, let’s look at some numbers reflecting the field’s current challenges:

The Current State of the Hospitality Industry and the Problem of Employee Turnover

Before we look into hospitality staffing solutions, let’s first dive into the problems facing the industry. Here are some facts and figures about hospitality jobs and employee turnover:

  • Despite the down economy, hospitality jobs are going strong. After an understandable dip in 2009, the industry has since added 983,000 leisure and hospitality jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  • However, more jobs has resulted in higher employee turnover. According to the American Hotel and Motel Association, the average employee turnover in the U.S. ranges from 60 percent to a downright crazy 300 percent.
  • For management staff the turnover is still high at about 25 percent, while you’ll say goodbye to half of your non-management staff with a turnover rate of 50 percent.

How Can The Video Interview Help?

So how can you use the video interview to hire the best people and improve your employee retention in the hospitality industry?

Look for Corporate Culture Fit:

When using the video interview, make sure to focus on candidates who will fit into your existing corporate culture with ease. It goes without saying, but those who fit into your corporate culture will make the best employees. These people will enjoy the workplace the most and be excited to come into work every day. This satisfaction with the corporate culture and passion for the job will bleed into everything they do.

Using the video interview, you can get a glimpse into a prospective candidate’s personality faster than in the traditional process. Instead of using a phone screen and wasting time talking to a candidate all wrong for the job, you can use a one-way virtual interview to view a candidate’s video answers to your written questions. This way, if the person is all wrong for the job or the hospitality industry in general, you can just move along without wasting anyone’s time.

Looking for corporate culture fit in the interview process won’t just improve your employee retention, it can also improve your corporate culture. Happy employees will make your company a better place to work and attract other happy workers. Like a ripple in a pond, one great hiring decision could make a big impact on your organization.

Focus on Customer Satisfaction:

As a professional in the hospitality industry, customer satisfaction will become a big part of your new hire’s day-to-day life — which is why you should focus on making customer satisfaction a priority. Customer satisfaction isn’t just important to your organization’s bottom line; it’s also important to your employee retention.

Unhappy customers will be the purview of your hospitality staff. Customers with bad experiences are likely to have equally bad attitudes, making the work environment of your top performers less than ideal. If you don’t focus on customer satisfaction, you could end up losing money from unhappy customers and from high levels of employee turnover.

Focusing internally on the customer experience is smart, but you’ll also need to focus on hiring smart employees who know the importance of your best customers. Use the video interview to get a feel earlier in the process for your candidate’s people skills. Throw out some behavioral interview questions and see how they would react in hypothetical situations. This will let you know if a job seeker is ready to join your organization and work as a brand ambassador for your company.

Hiring and retaining the right talent for your positions certainly isn’t easy. Thanks to the video interview, you can connect with great hospitality industry professionals more personally and hire only those most likely to stick around.

How can video interviewing benefit you?

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