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You’ve upgraded your rooms, your resort, and other offerings for guests — but what about your HR technology?
If you’re still using the same applicant tracking system from five years ago, it’s time to reevaluate your current recruiting and hiring practices. In our 2023 Future of Hospitality Hiring Report, we found that 53% of recruiters, hiring managers, and HR leaders in this sector stated that outdated and inefficient HR technology was their team’s greatest challenge going into 2023.
When HR technology isn’t leveraged correctly, the following issues are at play:
- Room for human error due to manual entry
- Inefficient use of HR team’s time
- Potential fines and fees due to incorrectly entered information
The US Chamber of Commerce dug into the current labor shortage, highlighting that the hospitality industry in particular has had difficulties retaining workers. Despite maintaining the highest hiring rate of all industries (between 6.7 – 9%) since November 2020, there hasn’t been enough new hires into the industry that have stayed to offset the initial loss of workers since the pandemic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accommodation employment is still down 217,000 positions from February 2020 levels in spite of the continual upward employment trends.
To sum that up, the hospitality industry as a whole is still significantly behind when it comes to regaining workers lost by the pandemic, so creating a strategy to staff hotels will continue to be a numbers game for recruiters and hiring managers.
How modern HR technology can help the hospitality industry
Updating your HR technology with an applicant tracking system (ATS) built for the hospitality industry does more than you might think. Here are four ways that your resort would improve with the addition of a modern hiring software to your hiring process.
Access to more talent from multiple sources
With a modern HR tool, you have access to more talent by virtue of reducing the effort required to distribute your open roles. Many ATSs integrate directly with leading job boards like Indeed, allowing you to easily share your vacant positions online where talent likes to start their job search.
These platforms also facilitate employee referral programs due to simply making the process easier. Instead of toggling from spreadsheet to spreadsheet to manually keep track of referred candidates, bonus payouts, and timelines, everything you need to implement a recruiting campaign and manage referrals is in one easy-to-use application. Additionally, a great ATS will power your careers site so you have organic access to more talent via the Internet.
Speed up the hiring process with automation
While there will always be a need for a human touch in the HR department, there are steps in the recruiting and hiring process at your resort that you can speed up with automation. With modern HR technology, you can be the first to contact interested candidates simply by acknowledging receipt of their application with an automated email.
Taking advantage of this opportunity to lay out next steps in the process — or invite applicants to take a pre-screening survey — will assist in keeping top talent engaged while increasing the likelihood of converting them to your newest hire. The pre-screen surveys are another way to weed through applications; set up “knock out” questions that will disqualify applicants with wrong answers so your hiring team can focus on quality candidates without wasting time on a phone screening. These seem like small tasks, but in the larger scheme of the hiring process, these minute details help to tremendously speed up the hiring process while allowing personnel to focus on other important tasks.
Optimize outcomes with data
With knowledge comes power — and hoteliers who use modern HR technology to empower their hiring processes are empowered through built-in insights and analytics. These data sets allow owners and operators to make confident hiring and spending decisions backed by data.
Now hiring teams have more insight into what’s working and what’s not at each branch of their brand, so they can focus their hiring efforts and money on what will provide the best ROI. Now, it’s easier than ever to identify bottlenecks in the process, like taking too long to review applications. Typically, organizations should review applications within a day or two at most of submission if they want to hire top interested talent. With modern HR technology, you can see if your locations are following hiring best practices and the results of any modifications you make to your process to optimize it over time.
Centralize candidate communication
Never miss a message from a candidate again with modern hotel HR technology. All of your candidate communications (whether that’s through an email, text message, or call log) can be stored in one location. This is great news for hiring managers, as this will allow for a more transparent process and better overall experience for hospitality candidates — which might go farther than you think when it comes to hiring younger talent. In our 2023 study, Understanding Gen Z in the Workplace, we found that of the survey takers who admitted to dropping out of a hiring process without notifying the interviewer, half did so because they felt a marked lack of transparency and communication from the recruiter.
Takeaways
One of the biggest challenges is largely a constraint of their own doing: the use of dated technology to serve their HR needs. Technology changes minute by minute these days, and if you’re not using an ATS to recruit better hospitality candidates faster, you’re likely going to lose out on the best in the labor market.
To see how you can improve your resort’s hiring process, connect with our team for a personalized 1:1 demo.
