Too many hospitality leaders still don't know what they stand for (or against)
It is increasingly common knowledge that hospitality margins are under pressure and recruitment has never been harder. Many are being tempted to lower hiring standards in order to get candidates through the door and into open roles at affordable labour prices.
I’m not going to use this article to preach that a leader should never lower hiring standards, even in an impossibly tight market. I think that’s naive and unfair. All I hope to achieve today is to get you to think a little more strategically about which of your hiring criteria you’ll let slide in present circumstances and which you resolutely will not.
I care about this topic because Yapster closely monitors engagement and communication patterns across the hospitality sector (see our recent 2022 Social Leadership Report if you missed it) and we can see in stark numbers when sites, regions or entire companies drift into becoming uninspired or misaligned through poor recruitment or absent leadership. Of course, we can also see the magic that happens when groups of aligned people rally around compelling leaders, cultures and missions.
So, how can you lower a hiring bar without destroying your team?
My favourite technique for separating ‘need to have’ from ‘nice to have’ hiring criteria is to ask a leadership team to articulate their ‘anti-values’. Anti-values are behaviours that irritate, offend or undermine in your workplace. Most of us can run off a tight list of anti-values quickly and without much preparation if asked, usually by reflecting back over our careers to date and any mishires made or personalities clashed with.
For example, my personal anti-values are
Lack of curiosity
Selfishness
Making excuses
Dodging hard, right decisions
Sulking
Hopefully yours will be somewhat - perhaps even completely - different, based on legitimate differences in our personalities and business models.
In my world, dealing with a colleague who lacks curiosity is painful because technology should get better with every new release, and employees standing still effectively drag the team backwards. Selfishness (which can be a productive attribute in some sales and professional organisations) is also harmful in subscription technology, because we share one product and support team across all of our customers. We have to win together.
What are your anti-values?
I ask this question of my friends in hospitality leadership fairly often and ‘no regard for standards’ is probably number 1. It cracks me up how particular many great operators are when it comes to standards of service, but I also have huge admiration for the customer experiences you’re able to deliver as a result. Many of my industry friends can rant for hours on smeared cutlery and poorly presented plates.
If this rings true for you, for God’s sake please don’t allow the current market conditions to pressure you into hiring folks with no natural attention to detail! You will make yourself and colleagues who share your values (which is hopefully most!) miserable and team productivity will probably go down rather than up with the new, ill-fitting team mate.
“Rather than yielding on values (tolerating anti-values), I suggest you relax some of your required experience or role attributes where possible and prepare to give more training and mentorship on the job. “
Rather than yielding on values (tolerating anti-values), I suggest you relax some of your required experience or role attributes where possible and prepare to give more training and mentorship on the job. I appreciate that many of you have already done this, but have a problem with candidate volumes (meaning that you don’t have enough candidates with ‘the right stuff’ culturally to begin with, even when you lower experience requirements).
Where talent pipeline is the real problem, it is essential to give more thought to your ‘ideal candidate profile’. This means going through a similar exercise to what marketers do in ideal customer profiling, thinking carefully about who your best candidates typically are and where (and how) you can proactively source more of them.
My favourite recent example of ‘talent pipeline growth hacking’ came from an operator with a number of sites in student towns, where new potential employees move into the same halls and student buy-to-let addresses year after year. Rather than focusing on building up a database of candidates, this operator has developed a database of addresses which new prospective employee students frequently move in and out of. This operator’s recruiters then send mail to those addresses clearly setting out the brand’s values and aspirations, hoping to lure in the right type of people to the top of their talent funnel.
It’s time to get clear on what you stand for (and against) and find ‘your kind of people’ - you can teach them the rest through decent training and communications.