TRANSLATING STRATEGY INTO HR POLICIES & PRACTICES CASE

THE HOTEL PARIS CASE

The New Recruitment Process

The Hotel Paris 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 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 firms CFO became increasingly concerned. What they found, basically, was that the recruitment function was unmanaged, totally. The previous HR director had simply allowed the responsibility for recruiting to remain with each separate hotel, and the hotel managers, not being human resources professionals, usually took the path of least resistance when a job became available, such as 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 no measurement at all of recruitment process effectiveness. The company 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.

It was safe to say that achieving the Hotel Paris s strategic aims depended 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.

Questions

1. Given the hotels stated employee preferences, what recruiting sources would you suggest they use, and why?

2. What would a Hotel Paris help wanted ad look like?

3. How would you suggest they measure the effectiveness of their recruiting efforts?