Hospitality HR - Guest Blogger Anthony Siklich

Hiring staff in hospitality can be challenging often because the age of prospective staff makes it difficult to tell whether they’re going to be successful in the role. Really, it’s not even their age but rather the lack of opportunity they’ve had to demonstrate what they’re great at. Lots of applicants to Griffin Alliance will have gone straight from matric to uni and won’t have an abundance of work experience to talk about in an interview. Because behavioural interviewing attempts to gauge how well someone will do in a future job on the basis of their past jobs, this can cause problems.

 

But that is the inherent difficulty in hiring in hospitality. Often, the people drawn into it are in periods of transition in their lives and my experience has been no different – university and TAFE can be bubbles in life between adolescence and adult maturity.

In the case of Kowalski Studios, an electronics start-up of which I am a part, we had great trouble in hiring an industrial designer. We were specifically looking for someone in uni because we knew we couldn’t afford to hire a full-time professional. But of the applicants we had, none of them had really ever worked as an industrial designer and it seemed as though we couldn’t know how well they would do in the job. To try and tackle this, we instead focused the interview around the applicants’ uni degree. For example, we needed to get a handle on whether the applicant could work in an entrepreneurial and team-based environment. To do this, first we asked the applicant what major group assignments he had completed at uni and then used basic behavioural interviewing questions to see if he was a team-player – what were the high points in the assignment? What challenges were there? How did you handle those challenges? What was the result of the assignment? Getting the name of the course coordinator was necessary, here, so  as to ensure that the answers were truthful.

 

For Griffin Alliance and in the case of deciding whether to bring new DJs on board, the technical ability of a person coming on board is important but ultimately secondary to the larger concern of whether they have the same values as Griffin does. The value of past work experience is that it lets an employer check whether the applicant will fit into the culture of the new workplace. If you’re finding applicants do not have that wealth of past experience you need, try looking outside of areas you would normally consider and gauge how much of a match the applicant is for your workplace.

If the job you’re hiring for isn’t too technical, then remember that an incorrect hire will often cost five times their salary – their skills in the job is a saving on training, but will cost you in the long term with respect to their productivity and ultimately firing them and hiring a replacement. It may be better sometimes to look for the few gems an applicant has to display their work ethic and then train them to do the job. Even in a transient industry, staff retention remains vitally important.