Hospitality Recruitment Strategy: How To Plan For The Future

If your recruitment strategy lacks direction and focus, sourcing and appointing chefs and other key staff can be time-consuming and expensive. Even in the most successful hotels and restaurants, a degree of staff turnover is unavoidable. However, you’re unlikely to appoint the best candidates if you only pursue a reactive approach to recruitment.

Reactive recruitment means searching for a replacement after a colleague resigns. More often than not, you’re left sifting through the chaff rather than the wheat because the most talented candidates have already been snapped up elsewhere.

The most forward-thinking hospitality businesses seek new recruits before posts even become vacant, avoiding the rush, and securing a higher calibre of applicants. A recruitment plan is often at the heart of their strategy.

What Is A Recruitment Plan?

All well-run businesses, irrespective of their size, have a solid recruitment plan in place. If you understand how quickly your business is growing, you’ll be able to forecast when you’ll need to hire and what prerequisites the successful candidate will need to display.

Hopefully, you’ll retain your staff for as long as possible but, when vacancies do arise, you’ll be well-prepared to quickly appoint the highest calibre of staff instead of making poorly informed, expensive decisions.

A recruitment plan for hotels and restaurants could include:

• Recruitment aims
• Headcount planning
• Ideal candidate profiles
• Employee value proposition
• Recruitment marketing strategy
• Selection process
• Onboarding process
• Tools and technology
• Recruitment budget

How To Create A Recruitment Plan

By planning for your future recruitment needs properly, you can become more proactive in recruitment, securing the best applicants for upcoming vacancies and reducing your overall costs.

When creating your hospitality recruitment plan, make sure you carry out these steps:

1. Define your high level goals; for example, improving diversity, streamlining the recruitment process, or improving retention.
2. Forecast your recruitment needs for the next 12 months so that you can attract the right talent to your brand.
3. Decide what types of candidates you wish to attract so that you understand how new recruits will jigsaw into your organisation – and use this information to design ideal candidate profiles.
4. Revise your employee value proposition so that you’re clear why high calibre candidates would choose to work for you, and not your rivals.
5. Design your sourcing strategy to ensure you have access to the best candidates via multiple recruitment channels.
6. Design your selection process so that it’s fair, engaging, and streamlined.
7. Create an effective onboarding programme so that successful applicants have the greatest chance of success as a new member of your team.
8. Identify HR tech that can support your recruitment such as marketing platforms, applicant tracking software, and onboarding solutions.
9. Budget for your recruitment needs, providing for the cost of sourcing, selecting, and onboarding.

Ready To Create Your Recruitment Plan?

As one of the leading hospitality recruitment agencies, SpaYse Recruitment can help you to appoint the best people for your business, so get in touch for more information about our services.

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