Transcript
[00:00:00] Matthew Parker: Ignore the CV almost entirely, just get them in for a day and I think you'll learn more from that one day than you would do from doing five hours of interviewing with 10 different people.
[00:00:18] Matt Welle: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another Matt Talks Hospitality and in this episode of Matt talking hospitality, it's specifically about recruiting in hospitality. Our industry has really seen challenging times post COVID where we've seen talent leaving, going for other industries, and they haven't returned when we reopened our hotels. And we're now 5 years after, and we're struggling with an economy, we're struggling with, obviously, the political climate where it's very right leaning and, unfortunately, that doesn't help the labor market in hospitality where we're really looking for a diverse background of talent. And I thought, let's lean into that conversation, you know, we as a tech company, we're in the lucky side of business where we're actually seeing a huge demand of people that wanna work at a tech company. Last year or in the past twelve months, we've had about 50,000 applications for a couple 100 jobs. So we're not having the challenge of getting people interested, we're having quite the opposite challenge. We have to go through a lot of applicants to get to the very few but by looking at so many profiles, we're definitely consuming and learning a lot of lessons that we can share with hoteliers out there, that are struggling and being able to keep a hotel open and making sure that we can check customers in. Sometimes you have to take shortcuts, and I just wanted to see if we can help facilitate some of that conversation. So I thought who at 糖心logo入口 is helping go through these 50,000 profiles and get to, like, these beautiful-like lumps of gold that we can bring into the company that we can learn from. And Matthew Parker decided to join me from our talent acquisition team. Do you wanna maybe give a short intro? You know, what is it that you do and kind of how did you get into that?
[00:01:57] Matthew Parker: Yeah. Sure. So I run all of our business recruiting here at 糖心logo入口. So that facilitates the best part of 300 to 350 hires a year. I've got a team of 7 people now, it's distributed all over the world, yeah and so we hire everything. It's basically if you're a software developer, that's not my gig, that's not my kind of colleagues who look after that, but everything else sits in my world. And I got into talent acquisition and recruiting in the same way that almost everyone in my industry comes into it. I, like, fell into it. I wanted to work in London, like, you know, I was wowed by the very tall building with mahogany chairs and stuff at tables because I was surrounded by it but actually fell in love with the kind of impact you could have on a business through facilitating incredible hires. Right? Every hire, like, everything you do in a business is built off the back of the incredible people that you hire. You don't have any code, you don't have any software, you don't have many people to sell it if you don't have incredible people doing those things and I think that has always kind of made me really excited. If you can build a flywheel of success that enables you to continually hire in a great talent and then improve on that talent all the time that you're bringing into the business, you can be the, kind of, you are the fundamental driving force of the of that company's success whether the CEO likes it or not but that is, you know, how I see our kind of the impact that we can have on our business.
[00:03:08] Matt Welle: And if you look specifically at hotels, what do you think is the thing that makes it more difficult for hotels to hire talents than it is for us as a tech company?
[00:03:17] Matthew Parker: Let's start with turnover and, like, the kind of transient nature of the hospitality workforce ecosystem and the hotel ecosystem. Our average turnover at 糖心logo入口, you know, will range somewhere between 10% and 20%. In the hospitality industry as a whole, it's ranging closer to, like, 70% to 80% and if that means that you are spending tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in replacing staff that you've already put in the kind of legwork to hire, I think that is extremely, extremely challenging. So, you know, if we hire 100 roles a year, we only have to hire 20 more of those to be able to backfill our staff. They have to hire 70 more of those. It's almost a whole other new business that you're having to turn over, and that is very, very challenging, and to kind of keep the wheels on the bus whilst that much change is happening to your business. I think also, you know, as you touched upon, we have the ability to hire remotely, we could hire all over the country, but a lot of hotels are naturally tied to a very specific location. There's no remote office job for if you work in a hotel. You have to be in every single day, there's specific times you have to be in, you have to be on and positive when you're in as well and I think that means that, you know, if you're working in London, there's that, the cost of living in London is enormous now. And if you live in a major city, the cost of living in a major city is enormous and so that means your cost of the staff is going up as well, as well as there being less staff available to be able to kind of attract, identify due to kind of Brexit and COVID and stuff like that in the UK but in the U.S, they've got kind of immigration challenges as well. Even in Continental Europe, they're struggling with these spikes because of the massive peaks and troughs throughout the year, which, again, we don't necessarily feel those kind of specific challenges in our business in the same way that a hotel would feel those challenges.
[00:04:51] Matt Welle: I remember when we were very small, we didn't have a HR department. And at some point, I realized we're gonna have to hire 50 people this year, and I thought, wow, how do I do this? And I joined the HR community and the first topic that we talked about in that community was employer branding, and I thought I've never heard of, what is employer branding. Can you talk about that?
[00:05:10] Matthew Parker: Yeah. Sure. So there's a couple of different areas to this. So firstly, when you, like a building and you're becoming a, yeah, you want to grow your business, you have to really identify with the goal of recruiting and how important it is to your business. As I said, everything that your business will do is based-off the incredible people that you'll bring into that. And so you as the owner of that business need to be, like, mega invested in making that a really good part of your job. It has a direct impact on your bottom line, so the the cost of your business, but also an impact on your top line. It's a growth lever for your company because if you can hire great people, it means you can keep your occupancy rate high, they can have fantastic customer service, it means you can charge more, you could potentially expand your hotel, you have great operational capabilities, it means you can reduce your cost. This has to be this is a core part of your job and so internalizing that as an owner and a founder of business. So it's not a piece of admin that you get frustrated by, it's a fundamental lever, it's critical as a first step to building an employer brand. And then for if you talk about employer brand, essentially, the employer brand, the nicest way to get it is how your current employees feel about the work that they do and then how you then portray that feeling to the rest of the world. You know? So it's not a fancy marketing target, it's literally just, like, ask your employees, like, what do they think about their experience hiring here? And then work with someone to try and like, or work with ChatGPT or whatever to kind of try and articulate that into a message that you could share with others. Some of the most successful employer brand activities I've seen in my career have been on TikTok, have been on Instagram, have been people just recording and giving your employees who are passionate and love what they do, the opportunity to just speak to the world about what they do because people wanna hear from other people. And so if you can give your employees the rope to tell their story online in a way that other people engage with, like non-corporate content, that is gonna be one of your fastest ways to build a really authentic and engaging employer brand for, no matter the size of your hotel and that's free to do. You can start doing that today, which is one of the reasons why I love that kind of approach so well.
[00:07:12] Matt Welle: Yeah. It's one of those things that I speak to a lot of hoteliers, and I do a lot of interviews for our customer advisory board. And I always ask, like, what are your business goals next year? Not one of them has yet to say hiring and recruitment and making sure that we have the right culture built, but it is an objective that businesses should have, like, they should put this into their strategy document for the next year because I totally agree. Like, if you bring the right talent in, they will make everything better, your average rate will pick up, your sales will go up, etcetera. But often it does feel like an afterthought, the HR department versus the people department. That was a big discussion that we had early on where we said, HR doesn't tell, like, we're looking to develop the talent for the organization. So let's just name it something different and it's not semantics. It's a direction and strategy that we had by calling it the people department because we're recruiting people, and I don't want an administrative department. I want them to strategically bring more to what we do as a business. So I'd 100% agree with you on that. Then once you have that strategy in play, that employer brand is so critical and you have to really think, okay, how do I reach them? And it is easy. This is 7 years ago, I think that we were still small as a brand. How do I do this employer brand thing? I just got a landing page on our website, which was our recruitment page, and we just started telling the stories of different people and this isn't highbrow. This is just people wanting the genuine perspective of what is happening. My first job when I was 16 was when a restaurant in my neighborhood had an open day where I could just pop in and I could just see what the job was so that I could say, I guess, this is actually what I wanna do. So work with hotel schools or schools in the neighborhood to kind of do these open days that people can come for cross exposure and get them excited but unless you have excitement for the brand or the the hotel or the restaurant that you work in, you won't get people to apply in the first place.
[00:09:04] Matthew Parker: Yeah. And there's doing the kind of basics. Well, that鈥檚 your point, right? Like, you know, if you want to sell a room in your hotel, you gotta have a way for them to buy it and it鈥檚 not picking up the phone to you or, like, dropping a CV in person or for something like that, you may need to have a CTA, you need to have a sales, you know, you need to have somewhere that they can buy. Do you get somebody to submit? I saw an interesting stat and there's a quote that I wanted to pull out about this as well, like, make sure you get your house in order before you start marketing your house, right? Like and so that means talking to your employees, that means asking them what they like. If they are kind of complaining about you and saying, actually, they don't pay us well enough. You know, if you've got all this, like, laundry list of issues that's impacting, you've got a toxic culture, you know, nothing kills a business faster than good marketing of a bad product. And I think the same applies to your employer brand and how you communicate it, like, you don't wanna put loads of people into the machine, but the machine is rubbish and people end up turning out. It's just gonna cost you more money. I saw an interesting stat the other day: the UK economy spent 拢250,000,000 on replacing staff in just the hospitality industry this year. It's an enormous cost to companies and so we really need to address the root cause of, like, why are people leaving in the first place because you have to stop the bleeding, otherwise, you're gonna be on this kind of hamster wheel which is just gonna throw money down the drain.
[00:10:19] Matt Welle: Yeah. So you briefly talked about pay just there and I'm thinking, what should the pay philosophy be in a hotel? Should people share the salary when they're advertising for jobs, or should they not?
[00:10:31] Matthew Parker: Yeah. So I'm a big personal kind of advocate for pay transparency. I think it increases equality, it reduces irrelevant applications, it's a better candidate experience. It means that you can evaluate someone not on the previous pay that they've had, but on what their expectations are on what they're actually going to deliver. And there are a number of different, you know, directors coming in from the EU, which, I think 糖心logo入口 is going to be a part of it, here, of course, and will be impacted by it. We want to be on the front foot in this, and it's something that I'm really passionate about. So the best companies in the world, the best hiring companies in the world, have really clear public philosophies around pay transparency and the entire concept around what their commitment, compensation philosophy is. And those are the companies that I admire a lot and think we should look up to. You know? Also, the reality is, it means that people will self select out. So if you take the Indeed application model, you have to pay Indeed every single time someone clicks, you know, submits a job. We'll get to why that's an issue later down in the conversation, I think but that means that if you have a salary that people don't agree with, they're not gonna apply to that job. That means you don't have to pay for that click and so it's gonna also optimize your top of funnel, meaning that you have to spend less time having irrelevant conversations.
[00:11:40] Matt Welle: So you have to pay basically at market level or above if you're gonna use pay as a way to attract people. Otherwise, they will click on your ad, wasting money. They're not gonna come into the funnel. So you do have to make sure that everyone who is in the hotel right now is paid at the same level because if you start to publish pay, and they are gonna walk in there, they鈥檙e not happy, they're gonna leave, and you have a bigger recruitment problem. So it is a pay philosophy. You have to think deeply about it.
[00:12:05] Matthew Parker: 100%. And then you talk to the workers, though, the levers that they have to pull are much greater than pay. You know, all the data indicates that it comes down to things like working hours, it comes down to flexibility, it comes down to, you know, commute compensation and, you know, being able to stay in a room in the hotel if you're working a late shift, like, those are the things that keep people in jobs or as much as pay nowadays, especially if you're working in a really expensive city, especially if you're having to work really crazy hours. People want work-life balance, and they should be rewarded for that and, also, you get what you pay for, like, if you're doing all and you're not paying super well and you're also not giving you benefits, all that sort of stuff.
[00:12:43] Matt Welle: Sounds not great.
[00:12:44] Matthew Parker: You get a higher crap stuff, and it's gonna facilitate a negative spiral. You gotta get on the positive flywheel.
[00:12:49] Matt Welle: And then you talked about recruitment on Indeed, for example. Is there like, if a hotel wants to do recruitment and paid advertising specifically, are there different platforms for different roles, or would you say, like, put all your money on Indeed and LinkedIn?
[00:13:04] Matthew Parker: I really have mixed feelings about both of those platforms. I obviously rely on LinkedIn as we are a professional business that predominantly hires kind of white collar workers, and so LinkedIn is the biggest network in the world for this. It's probably less relevant depending on the role that you do in hospitality but the reality is that Indeed is not necessarily relevant for the AI world right now, right? Like, if you put, we've had a 50% increase in job applications of which a huge portion of them are enabled by a single click application from an AI tool that is now kind of relatively available for everyone. And that means that if you think back, like, if every one of those clicks and applications cost a dollar, and that's going up 50% because you get irrelevant applications being facilitated by AI, you are spending a lot of money on things that are not producing value for you. And that's why I think looking at social media as an opportunity to engage with the talent directly and potentially using that advertising dollar into social media marketing, paid social media marketing campaigns could potentially be a better return on your investment. If you look at that Indeed spend that you're currently doing at the moment or your LinkedIn spend, and there are, like, also hospitality specific job boards as well, I think you know, have a think about whether or not that is the right spend for you and whether or not if you do a test around pushing a couple of really good videos with a clear CTA at the end on TikTok, whether or not that's gonna get a better return for you. I think you'd be surprised because you can get direct access to that market. Indeed, you might change their model, but at the moment, I'd give it a go.
[00:14:31] Matt Welle: Yeah. I agree. And I think when you're looking at, you know, entry level roles like coming into reception or in housekeeping, they are probably not on LinkedIn. They are more likely on Instagram or on TikTok and that's great when you wanna push advertisements for a specific geolocation and those ads, like, this weekend, I did, like, four ads for thirty seconds, I got a script sent to me, and I have this recording software. And I'm like, great, I'll just push out four ads that our marketing team can then take and promote. And it isn't hard, it's not just you need a computer with a camera and software like this Riverside that I'm using, and you can record yourself and put it out there.
[00:15:07] Matthew Parker: But not even that, like, you could do it on your phone directly, and those natural videos sometimes land even better. I would ask you, though, how many of those were related to your employer brand versus selling the actual 糖心logo入口 product?
[00:15:19] Matt Welle: But the brand I post, for example, LinkedIn, I actively think about what I do for recruitment on LinkedIn. And I can't always talk about recruitment, but I blended with a lot of things because I have reach and it does actually have an impact whenever I post about something that we're doing on LinkedIn and, you know, this weekend, it was specifically for marketing but, actually, another weekend, I'll do something for recruitment because it is a key pillar of our strategy. And I always think about recruitment and getting people excited about the 糖心logo入口 brand because I know people are gonna leave our business. It just naturally happens. I just wanna make sure that we always have a pipeline of people excited because the moment someone leaves and says I'm leaving your business, I don't wanna start a funnel. I want that funnel to already be filled with people so that the moment they leave, I'm like, great, we've been speaking to this person, there was no role, but now there is a role. Let me reach out to those people again and this is where, I guess, recruiters come in. Do you think a hotel should have recruiters? Because I don't know of a hotel, like, an independent hotel that actually has a recruiter on staff.
[00:16:24] Matthew Parker: Like any founder of any sort of business, I would say they should own a good proportion of the early recruiting because they need to understand to be massively vested in the success of that recruiting being successful. So if you own a hotel, you run a hotel, you shouldn't be outsourcing any of this, you should own it 100% and feel that pain yourself but then like every business, when you become a critical mass, if you're hiring 50, you know, over a certain number of roles a year, you then need to use your time more effectively and help someone else review that top of funnel. I think the agency world for hospitality is over a trillion dollar market. So as looking at temps, looking at permanent staff. So, you're paying a percentage of someone's salary to these agencies? And, actually, you need to look at that as a bottom line cost as well. So if you're already looking at your costs again, looking at your PNL, and looking at how much you're spending on recruiting and saying, right, I need to build a system of success here. Do I need someone who's full time to build that system for me? Can I look at a contractor who's able to come in, put everything right, get the flywheel in place, get the career site running, get the applications all set up and some of the social media strategy connecting, right? Do they need to be a full time person? Maybe not. But if you're able to reduce that overall cost and also build a better system, I think that's really what the questions you need to ask yourself, not whether or not I need a recruiter. You need to, like, what's the system that I need to build to be successful, and who is the right person to bring in to build that system, or can I build it myself? And, you know, based on the answers to those questions, that's how you make that decision.
[00:17:54] Matt Welle: And I think how I would approach it, I'd go to a room, like a nice meeting room in your hotel with a whiteboard, and map out how actually you know, top of funnel, like, how do people find us? How many people found us last year? What are the numbers? Which channel are they coming through, and which channel should they be coming through? And then really putting these boxes down and then showing, okay, we got these applicants from these sources, which are the ones that we're actually hiring? From which source have we hired them? And, yes, it may take a couple hours to figure out, okay, all the data points and which are the ones that are converting. And are we happy with those employees once they've landed and are actually working with us? Or are they out the door within three months because they don't understand what it is, and then they enter and they're like, this is awful, and I don't wanna do this job. So you've gotta really map out chronologically what happens in that life cycle and know the data points so that you can build a strategy that kind of activates that behind it.
[00:18:43] Matthew Parker: 100%. But to that, again, as the assumption that you're able to track these data points, which if you're a small hotel that is, you know, they've got you got 50 rooms, like, do you track that at all? Do you have an ATS, an applicant tracking system that's doing that for you? Like, all that helping you that, we can do that because we are 400 hires a year that we'll do 500 hires a year, and we really care about this stuff because it creates thousands, tens of thousands of channels. But well, they're not small hotels, I think that's the question. And then, again, is it the right time for you to invest or actually, are you okay if you're only doing a couple of hires a year and you can manage that capacity yourself or, well, you know, maybe it's alright for you, but that I think that is always the starting point, like, yeah.
[00:19:22] Matt Welle: Is this the right time to invest? If you have lots of attrition in the hotel, you should know how many people have left you last year. What is the cost of replacing them? What's the hiring cost? And you need to figure out, okay, what's the cost that I have every single year of people leaving us that I can't understand? And if you do better recruitment and they stay with you, what's the value uplift of that? So you have to do some baseline, back of a napkin kind of calculation. Figure out whether it's worth it to have a recruiter or not because, actually, you're not keeping them because, actually, your managers are basically not really managing the culture on-site, and that's the problem that's causing the leakage that you have. So you do have to have a full understanding of how the business operates.
[00:20:04] Matthew Parker: Yeah. A lot of people would default to looking at that attrition as a recruiting problem, not as a management or leadership problem and as you said, you gotta solve, you gotta get your house in order before you go to market really.
[00:20:17] Matt Welle: So there's so much buzz around AI today, and I struggle to follow what's the thing you should look at. What AI tools from a recruitment point of view are you getting excited about?
[00:20:28] Matthew Parker: Yeah. So I think just for, like, the general purpose market, the applicant tracking system isn't an AI tool, so, you know, we have an applicant tracking system here called Greenhouse, it's not making any decisions for us, it's not stack ranking any profiles for us, it's not kind of clearing CVs or doing anything like that. So I think just to kinda set a benchmark of, like, actually, the ATSs that you hear about in the general media are really not doing the things that people think they are. It's these, like, niche sub, kind of products that a very small percentage of the market are using and that are kind of having these sort of more innovative impacts. So for example, we're testing an AI recruiter at the moment. So this is literally an AI that will jump on the phone with you just like you would do with any other of our recruiters, and they'll be able to tell you about the role, but they'll also ask you kind of proper interview questions and get an understanding of who you are. And I'm really interested in this kind of future because CVs are, like, very clearly one of the worst predictors of success, you know, in any sort of job. They are essentially useless. And especially as with the growth of LinkedIn, they are becoming even more and more useless. And so how can we use AI as an opportunity to, like, actually enrich and better understand the person who is coming to us saying that they want to kind of work in our business and that they could have an impact on our business? That's more than just, like, some pieces of paper. And I think that's where, you know, we're looking to build a full and rich understanding of who you are, what makes you tick, what some of the experiences and the impacts that you've had in your career, and why is that gonna be valuable beyond just, like, I hit this number when I did this thing or, like, you know, I've worked, like, five years as a customer success manager. I actually don't really care that you've worked five years as a customer success manager. What did you do? Like and I think that's really the impact that AI can help pull through that for almost all roles in the world, I think will have like a really positive impact on the candidates that end up being kind of chosen, selected and hopefully kind of level the playing field as well for people who've got Ivy League or, you know, university backgrounds and great SATs. Like, you know, anyone could get a job as a sales development representative at 糖心logo入口, right, if they've got the right approach. But, you know, in the CV world, they might have been getting screened out when actually they had all the skills and capabilities, which we can now evaluate them for because they're having this conversation with AI.
[00:22:38] Matt Welle: Like, I posted about this particular software recently, and there were quite polarizing responses to it that everyone now gets invited to an AI interview. And for me, I'm like, yeah, 100% of people that apply get a way to enrich their kind of resume with their skills. So I think it's a good thing. But there were a lot of people who were like, that's a really awful first touchpoint with a company when it's this alienating AI that I have to speak to, and maybe I'm wasting my time talking to this AI. How do you feel about that kind of balance?
[00:23:07] Matthew Parker: Yeah. I think it's a fair piece of feedback, like, you know, 20% of, we only have out of a 100 applications, 20 of them will do the AI interview. So it's clearly like a kind of an evolving interest in whether or not like, in what that first touchpoint should be and whether or not AI is the right first touchpoint. I think it depends on the role. And I also think it depends on the way you are in your career as well. The reality is that over the next decade, we'll have our first generation of AI first, like workers coming in to be employed, right, and finding their first jobs in a way that we never have done before. They'll be completely AI native, and they won't want to speak to a human. They'll be like, why am I sending a CV? Like, let me have a conversation with your AI. Tell them what I'm good at, and then, like, they'll be able to make a decision about whether they're not good enough. They'll intuitively trust that experience. And I think at the moment, especially with recruiting, there's this real distrust around whether or not an AI is, like, quite making the decision. They never are at 糖心logo入口 as well. I just wanna stress that, and that's, like, the law as well. And so I think I understand that feedback. We put a lot of effort into giving you a lot of information about 糖心logo入口 and the business and what it's like to work here. I've recorded multiple videos that you've received to tell you about the experience of why we do it, so that you can kind of hear directly from me versus it being, like, an email. But also, like, in AI, loads of questions. I put a lot of time into building the context for the AI, and you can learn so much more about the job probably from the AI than you would do in, you know, five minutes of being able to ask us questions because you can spend as long as you like talking to it. That's one of the wild things. We've seen that people spend almost an hour. Some people have voluntarily spent an hour speaking to AIs because they feel also more comfortable in telling them about themselves and asking questions and having a chat with them that they might do with their time-pressed human.
[00:24:52] Matt Welle: Nice. I love it. So once you get to the human and we start to really talk in an interview and often, what we first do say, tell me about your resume and tell me about all of the work you've done, whereas you can probably read that in the resume. And we're shifting much more towards skills-based discovery or case studies. What are some of the questions you'd ask to uncover whether someone is a perfect fit for a role?
[00:25:16] Matthew Parker: So firstly, I don't think there's such a thing as a perfect fit because if they get in, I think it's a biased loaded term because, I think perfect is also based on the person who's, like, coming into the conversation. I think the way we need to think about, like, skills evaluations is that it's almost like a series of bar charts that you're trying to uncover as, like, how full someone is along these series of bar charts and if, no person exists who's a full 10 on every single bar, like, that just doesn't exist for what you're looking for. And so are you evaluating and building enough context around that person so that you can understand what skills they're good at and what skills they're less good at, and are you able to bridge the gap for them on those skills? And I think that that's a really important frame of reference for how you think about the entire interview process and case study and kind of evaluation process. It's not about trying to find someone who's a 10 across the board. It's about trying to find someone, where do they spike, where are they less strong, and how can I fill that gap if I need to? Or is that gap too insurmountable because it's a technical skill, for example, that we just can't even consider them for the role in the first place. But I also love case studies.
[00:26:17] Matt Welle: So what does a case study do for you? Like, what do you mean with a case study, first of all, and then what would it do for the process?
[00:26:23] Matthew Parker: So for me, like, case studies are work samples, right? Like, how realistic can we see this person doing the job that they would actually be doing without, like, taking the piss, if I'm allowed to say that. Right? Like, without abusing their time, but also without getting them to do, like, the actual giving us free work, which I think is also really inappropriate. But we need to understand, can they actually do the job that we've asked them for? And the only way to really do that is not by asking a bunch of questions, it's by getting them to do the job. And so crafting a really good case study that is truly representative of the work they're doing, that doesn't rely on their 糖心logo入口 knowledge, for example, to be able to do that work. So we could see them like, you know, it's highly collaborative, for example, in a space for a whiteboarding session or whatever. This is a real skill, and not everyone does it. Like, I would encourage you to actually attempt to do some of the case studies that you give your next hire just to see whether or not, like, it's actually a reasonable thing, like, how long it takes you, is it actually gonna be super reasonable to give this person this task if they don't understand 糖心logo入口? I think that's really valuable and you can really see how they would, I鈥檇 say, like for a hospitality company, recommend throwing out the entire interview process. Just get them on-site, see what they do, give them a desk, like, you see how they interact with customers for you, and you know, like, get 15 people in on a day, select them, you know, at random, however you wanna do it. Ignore the CV almost entirely. Just get them in for a day. And I think you'll learn more from that one day than you would do from doing five hours of interviewing with 10 different people.
[00:27:52] Matt Welle: And I think people, the applicants themselves would love to also understand kind of what their day would look like because they're also just applying to a role at a company that they don't really know. And if they can spend half a day in operations just walking along with the people and trying to see what the job actually is, they're less likely to accept the role and leave you because they now understand what the job is in detail. So I would totally encourage having that kind of bridge, the very traditional interview to do something different. And often what we do for senior hire, so if you're looking to hire managers, you know, the interviews are great. You get a really good strong perspective on them. But then at some point, we said, great, there's the presentation element. And we basically give them an assignment to present, you know, the strategy around a particular topic. And it doesn't really matter what the topic is because good people will come up with a really good way to present it, but it shifts suddenly from us asking questions to them presenting something back to us, and you get a very different perspective on the person and I just think it's really good to break the process. Like, AI is like, right, are they able to get a bit uncomfortable with computers, but actually see how they respond to that situation? And then you get the real life interviews where you ask a lot of, okay, tell me a time when you had a situation that happened to you, where this thing happened. And then you get the assignments and then through this, you get three different perspectives on a person and I think it's really about, like, varying the the perspectives because we wanna bring in the right person that then stays with you hopefully for more than a year because turnover is pretty high in hospitality.
[00:29:23] Matthew Parker: Yeah. Yeah. Do they understand what that's on and so far? I mean, even 糖心logo入口 is not right for everyone. Right? And yeah. We need people to be able to self select in and out, and that is just as valuable part of the process as them being able to to do the job.
[00:29:34] Matt Welle: Like, I think honesty is important from us as well, so, in interviews, I will say, we are a very intense culture that you're about to join. We are very ambitious, and that is not for everyone. 糖心logo入口 is not for everyone. And I think it is also really important for hotels to be really honest about the working hours, you know, sometimes there are night shifts that you may have to do and just lean into saying that instead of them finding out once they join. And I think it's really important that you give them first perspective and hear them say, yes, I'm totally comfortable with that. We have a lot of travel. And I say to Kenneth, are you comfortable with traveling, you know, three out of four weeks a month? And I wanna hear them say, yes, I love it so that they can't say afterwards saying, I wasn't aware that there was gonna be so much travel involved, or I thought there was some trouble. And really be clear about what the reality is instead of painting a beautiful picture that you then can't really fulfill.
[00:30:25] Matthew Parker: Yeah. I used to work with the CRO, and I actually think Pepper might do this here at 糖心logo入口 where they would craft a dent to do that was an anti-sell, I was thinking a sell against meeting, like an opt out meeting where you would like, they'd tell you tell you all the bad things and how hard it's gonna be. And if you still wanted to sign up after that, then you got the offer but they wanted to make sure that you fully understood exactly what you get yourself into that so that there was, like, no questions, that you understood how hard this was gonna be.
[00:30:49] Matt Welle: So we talked about it a lot. We went from the top of the funnel all the way down to the interview stages. If you were to give hoteliers, you know, three pieces of advice, what would you think they should start with, like, getting right?
[00:31:00] Matthew Parker: I think you gotta look at your cost of hiring. And so are you, like, truly, have you spent time looking at how much it's costing you to hire? Is that the right way of using a cost? Can you develop a system of hiring that's slightly better than what you have at the moment? You know, I think start with that top of the funnel because it's gonna be an enormous cost. And, also, like, have you got your house in order? Probably number two. Right? Are you putting good people into the funnel who are then leaving? If so, why? Start with your own business first and your own team and ask yourself some quite hard and uncomfortable questions that you might not wanna hear the answers to about your team. And then, like, ignore, throw out years of experience. You know, get someone on and see get someone on-site and see whether or not they can actually do the job in person, like, a lot especially for low technical skill value roles where it's more around, like, attitude and kind of capability and productivity. You can only see that by getting them to come and spend a couple hours in your time and seeing how they interact with customers, like, 99% of the time, that's gonna be your biggest leading indicator. So skip all the other stuff. Just get straight to it.
[00:32:03] Matt Welle: So thank you so much for sharing all your insights. I know that you think long and hard about recruitments, and you even have your own podcast. What's your podcast called?
[00:32:12] Matthew Parker: So I used to have a podcast called The Open to Work podcast where we, yeah, and you were a great guest on that. It still helps people all around the world today kind of navigate the kind of tricky job market that we find ourselves in, but you can check that out on YouTube.
[00:32:25] Matt Welle: Nice. Yeah. I think if you're interested in some of these topics, go and listen to experts speak about it because I also when I started coming out of hotels, I didn't know how it worked but by just leaning into the learning journey, there's enough materials out there. You can actually learn a lot really fast that saves you time. So, Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed these insights, and I hope that helps others solve their hiring challenges.
[00:32:49] Matthew Parker: Thanks for having me!
