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[1]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

5-20. Given the hotel’s required personnel skills, what
recruiting sources would you have suggested it use, and
why?

5-21. What would a Hotel Paris help wanted ad look
like?

5-22. 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?