Report on recruitment in an industry/organisation
The service industry is a key economic driver but known to be a highly labour-intensive and demanding sector (Chan & Kuok, 2011). The competitive business landscapes are forcing companies to become specialized and to provide personalized customer service to create a competitive edge.
Under the hospitality sector, the hotel industries are finding it extremely difficult to recruit competent employee and retain the workforce with the high level of interpersonal skills and technical abilities.
The key purpose of the report is to gain an understanding of the recruitment challenges faced by the hospitality industry and to explore strategies to address the challenges associated with recruiting the workforce (Tan et al., 2011).
The structure of the report includes background information about the recruitment in the hospitality industry followed by challenges in recruiting the workforce for hospitality industry and recommendations are made to deal with recruitment challenges.
Background information about the Recruitment process in Hospitality Industry
In the hospitality industry, the process of recruitment is based on the external sources in which recruiting the applicants from the external sources as this industry demands those people who can work long working hours and having a positive attitude for the work. Therefore, the process of recruitment has taken around one to two months in the hotel industry.
For example, the Hotel Mulia Senayan has design their recruitment process in the form of three categories. In this they recruit the staff on the basis of full time that is permanent employees, contract staff that is temporary and daily worker that consider as a part-time employees.
By following this strategy Hotel Mulia had perform their recruitment in December 2011 and it hired around 2900 employees in which 800 consider as 800, 1200 for contract and 900 for part-time.
The hotel choose the permanent staff for the supervisor level while contract staff are chosen for the staff level and less experiences staff for the daily work management. Thus, this strategy helps the Hotel Mulia to properly utilise their manpower in an effective manner.
In their recruitment planning, hotel Mulai recruitment team also predicts from the selected staff how many staff can retain with the company for a longer period of time so accordingly it conducted the training programs. Besides that, for filling the top management position, Mulia followed formal and systematic steps to recruit the employees in order to recruit the best suited candidate (Nadiri & Tanova, 2010).
In this, it includes the development of job description in which the duties and responsibilities are deign in order to give the idea about the job/ task related work so that individual can get to know about the work. Further, they design the personal specification in which explains the requirements that personal should need to posses and lastly decide the sources of recruitment.
In case of top management they prefer to hire from the universities and through consultancies and for the frontline staff, they prefer to choose the applicants from the employees’ referrals and through advertisements. Thus, in order to perform recruitment activities, there are various problems that challenged the hotel industry in terms of retain and attract the best suited candidate.
For developing the detail understanding of the challenges that is faced by the hotel industry then there is need to firstly discuss the issues that occur with the recruitment process and in detail its will discuss in below part.
Challenges in recruiting the workforce for hospitality industry
This part addresses the challenges that the hospitality industry is facing now-a-days in the recruitment process (Jones et al., 2016). The hospitality industry gives the sign of continuing growth in the near future then this will indicates that there are more opportunities for earning profit is there in upcoming year of hospitality sector.
Therefore with this, the need to serve best to customers and properly adaptation of technology & innovation is required by conducting the proper recruitment strategy for getting the qualified and skilled staff.
At the same time due to the changing needs and expectation of the people, now industry has facing the problem in terms to select that candidate that would stay with the company on a longer term basis.
But, it is observed that now-a-days the employees’ turnover rate are increasing day by day due to increasing requirements of employees makes them unsatisfied with the facilities of the organisation (Blomme et al., 2010). Such practices not allow employee to effectively meet their expectation in the organisations.
This result in increase the employee’s turnover level. In case of hospitality sector, turnover rate is one of the crucial problems as front line staff payroll is low as compare to other sector and in hospitality sector working hours is also generally high that makes employees dissatisfied and decrease their morale.
In the views of Anvari & Seliman (2010), imparting ineffective training can also become a challenge for the hospitality sector. In certain cases, hotels did not provide the properly training and put them directly into the job. This increase the chances of error and inaccuracy in the customer services and at the same time employees also felt that their personal and career growth is developing steadily.
So this results in disappointment and turnover of employees, and it will generate the need to hire the new candidate by making more investment. Such situation is not proving to be beneficial for the company especially in the case of the hospitality sector.
Availability of Professional and Qualified staff
In support of this, (AlBattat & Som (2013) stated that the unavailability of skilled and quality workforces becomes the biggest disadvantage for the hospitality industry. It is estimated that qualified and skilled people prefer more on switching the IT or another sector instead of selecting the hotel for enhancing their career.
This makes the hospitality industry untouched with the professional people. Moreover, Yang (2010) also illustrated that the main cause of the problem in relation to finding the qualified and skilled staff is that supervisory level staff does not receive that much paid and career development that they obtain in another sector. Thus such disadvantage proves to be negative for the industry to retain the qualified workforces.
In the research of (Kusluvan, et al., (2010), it is identified that increasing competition is one of the issues that challenge the hospitality sector as hotel industry is moving quickly towards the growth and new entrant in this industry brings the innovation in their services and serving product quality to the customer that allow the customer to increase the switching easily.
To provide the high-quality services and product, there is need to hire the skilled workforces for sustaining in this competitive environment (Nadiri, & Tanova, 2010). The skilled and qualified workforces can only be achieved by providing the proper training program where they can enhance their skills.
At the same time, companies also need to generate the opportunity for the employees so that they can also uplift their career. Thus, such exercise can help the industry to retain and attract the large and competent workforces against their key competitors and able to serve well.
In the findings of (Blomme, et al., 2010), it is found that managing the speed and time of the recruitment process is quite difficult to handle as the recruitment includes the number of steps.
Especially in a case of hotel industry where recruitment team follows the number of steps regarding the development of job description and specification after analysis the job requirements then screening the applicants for the interview and afterward various test is conducted for the selection of candidates and finally hiring decision has been taking.
Thus such steps take a longer time of management in regards to recruitment planning, and it also incurs huge investment of management. So in that case recruitment team in hotels industry face the problem of balancing the time and speed of hiring (Kim, & Brymer, 2011).
As the modern economy includes the different types of the job market in which there is the limited pool of talent available and that top talent are also hired within the limited days that reduces the chances of achieving the talented and qualified employees.
This indicates that if the business tries to cut down the speed of the recruitment by trim the steps of recruitment, then this also does not provide high benefit as an organisation does not get the talent employees (Kapoor & Solomon, 2011). In case if recruitment team invest hard and does find any value then it also proves to be the loss for the company (AlBattat & Som, 2013). Thus recruitments team face an issue in making balance in maintaining time with the quality.
In the views of Boella & Goss-Turner (2013), the availability of limited resources also becomes a problem for the hospitality industry to pooling the talent workforces. As in the hotel industry, management spends less on the recruitment and selection process as compare to other industry. (Kusluvan, et al., (2010) observed that management of the hotel is more spending on the customer’s services and production process instead of investing high in recruitment and payroll of the employees.
So with the limited resources, it becomes difficult for the recruitment staff to perform their functions properly and able to hire the talent staff. Thus, limited availability of resources can also be the issue that challenges the hospitality industry.
Due to less growth opportunity is there in the hospitality industry, the selected candidates and existing employees feel dissatisfied regarding their career enhancement, and this will result in the decrease in their morale. At the same time, low morale employee has poor performances, and this reflects in their services offerings to customers (Nadiri, & Tanova, 2010).
The main cause of low morale in the hospitality sector is poor training infrastructure, unskilled staff, and few rewards system. So in that case to uplift, the morale of the staff is the difficult task for the HRM team.
In the hospitality industry, the development of the job specification is the crucial task as the candidate only attracts on the basis of job specifications (Yang, 2010). Candidates in the job specification always look for an opportunity where they can develop themselves in future. But in case the if job specification does not prepare in a systematic manner then the organization is failing in pooling the talent and qualified employees
From the basis of above findings, it can be recommended that hotel industry to make more growth in the field of recruiting and hiring the talent workforces require to conduct the proper training program for the staff in order to attract potential applicants and retain the existing employees (Jang, & George 2012).
Likewise, hotel industry should conduct the training and development activities for the front line staff in order to develop necessary skills in them so that they can also get the career enhancement.
Besides that in order to pool the qualified/ talent workforces for the supervisory position, there is required to revise payroll and compensation schemes for the candidates so that organization can able to attract the qualified and experienced workforces.
It is recommended that to give the string competition to the competitors in the market, hospitality industry should need to conduct the formal training and development for securing the staff and pooling the talent workforces (O’Neill et al., 2011). Thus, this practice also helps in giving the tough competition to the competitors in terms of gaining the high market advantage.
Moreover, in case of balancing the speed and quality, It is also recommended that industry should need to trim the long recruitment process and tries to incorporate only those test and interview that can help in the measure the real capability of the candidate regarding performing any job (Zopiatis et al., 2014).
In order to overcome from the limited resources, it is suggested that recruitment team should need to present the budget plan to the management that they need to perform the selection activities (Boella & Goss-Turner, 2013).
This practice helps the team to properly conduct of recruitment and selection process and able to attract the qualified workforces. Thus, such recommendation can help the hospitality industry in terms of reducing the issues in the recruitment process.
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