COVID-19 cases are down. Summer is here. And people are looking to hit the road after more than a year in isolation. That means you’re experiencing more bookings than ever, which is great news for the hospitality industry given how hard many of you were hit by the events of 2020. But is your hotel staffed up to the levels required to keep up with this increase in demand? If not, you risk failing to meet customer expectations and losing out on revenue to your competitors down the street.
Even if you know you need to hire, you might be struggling to find people to fill your open roles. Despite the unemployment rate lingering at roughly twice the pre-pandemic number, there’s an imbalance between the number of open jobs and the number of folks actively looking for work. This is due to a mix of complex factors — health and safety concerns, lack of childcare, a steadily decline in the number of working-age Americans, and more.
So how can you attract top talent in a really tough job market as consumer demand for travel and hospitality heats up? Some businesses are choosing to offer higher wages and other incentives like signing bonuses. If this is something you can do, great. But there are also some small, but incredibly impactful tweaks you can make to your hiring strategy that can go a long way in helping your organization stand out in the eyes of job seekers today.
Here are five tips to get you started:
Dust off your job descriptions
Folks have plenty of options for work today, so they won’t spend time applying to a role if they aren’t sure it’s the right fit for them. Make sure your job descriptions clearly list the skills and experiences required for the role and highlight what makes you unique as an employer. And make them SEO friendly so that they rank high in Google searches. That means writing between 300 and 800 words, using important keywords for your industry, and keeping the job titles themselves between one and three words.
Diversify your sources
If you’re relying on job boards alone to get the word out about your open roles, it’s time to think bigger. Job boards can be a great source of candidates but they’re incredibly crowded and can quickly get expensive. Think about less expensive, but highly effective sources like social media, Google, and employee referrals. And make sure you’re tracking the effectiveness of each source in order to optimize your investments. Spend the most time and resources on the channels that drive the most hires — not just the highest volume of applicants.
Update your career site
The world has changed and what job seekers are looking for in their careers has changed too. Your career site is a really great opportunity to convince job seekers today that you can offer what they want. As a business that requires face-to-face customer interaction, that of course needs to include any health and safety precautions you have in place. But you also need to be sure you’re promoting other priorities job seekers have in a post-pandemic world — including benefits, scheduling flexibility, career progression opportunities, and a supportive culture.
Embrace candidate texting
One challenge that hospitality businesses face when it comes to hiring is simply getting folks to show up to interviews. Chances are your messages are getting lost in a sea of emails or folks just lose interest in you because they’ve applied to dozens of other jobs too. Cut through the clutter and get in front of applicants where they spend the most time by texting them. Hireology customers that are using our text messaging feature have found that they’re able to fill open roles up to eight days faster.
Consolidate your tools to save time
One of the most important things you can do to bring top talent on board is to simply move faster. But this is tough to do if all the tools you’re using to hire — from your applicant tracking system to the channels you use to communicate with candidates — require different logins and don’t share the same data. You waste time that you don’t have jumping from system to system and you lose key candidate information along the way too. But when everything you need to attract, hire, and onboard new employees exists in a single platform, it’s a lot easier to move fast without error.
At Hireology, we’re constantly enhancing our product to help businesses in the hotels and hospitality industry hire great folks faster. Our platform organizes and tracks all of your applicants, automatically sends pre-screen surveys, seamlessly runs background checks, helps you onboard new hires quickly, and more — all from one centralized location.
Recently, we’ve added features designed specifically to help you break through the noise during a really tough time for hiring, such as a Jobs on Facebook integration, the Hireology mobile app, and automated offer letters. Learn more about how Hireology can help you by signing up for a demo today.
