Streamlining hiring processes in hospitality: A deep dive

Posted by

Carolyne Burns

From slashing job advertising costs to reducing time-to-hire, Signature Hospitality Group has made the most of Expr3ss! to overhaul its hiring processes and streamline operations.

Signature Hospitality Group operates 50 venues employing more than 2000 people across Australia and New Zealand, including the Sporting Globe Bar, TGI Fridays and Varsity.

With a skills shortage across the country, Signature Hospitality Group can't afford to make mistakes when hiring. It needs employees who not only have the right skills and qualifications, but also the right attitude and temperament.

The importance of soft skills

Part of the challenge is that resumes fail to convey critical soft skills such as temperament, attitudes and communication skills. Such skills are particularly important when it comes to working with people, especially in areas like hospitality.

Another challenge is that when skimming through resumes, to see who makes it through to the interview stage, people can be influenced by unconscious bias.

This means that great candidates can be inadvertently cast aside because they seemingly don't fit the mould. With the industry's labour shortage, Signature Hospitality Group can't afford to overlook hidden gems who might actually be a perfect fit.

Placing less emphasis on resumes

The solution to hiring great people is to place less emphasis on resumes and focus more on establishing the right set of screening questions, to quickly determine whether applicants have both the right skills and the right attitude for the job.

Using Expr3ss! short surveys, Signature Hospitality Group quickly and cost-effectively pinpoints job applicants with the right skills, attitudes, temperament and cultural fit.

The idea isn't to take humans out of the decision-making process, people still have the final say over who gets hired. The idea is to ensure that every applicant is given a fair go and judged on their merits, while ensuring the process runs quickly and smoothly.

Signature Hospitality Group also takes advantage of Expr3ss! Checklist Surveys, Work Rights Checks, Notifications System, Online Referencing, Interview Q&A Notes System, Interview Calendar and free exports to other systems. All of these help further streamline the hiring process.

Along with reducing the time wasted on inappropriate candidates and speeding up time-to-hire, the benefits of the Expr3ss! platform for Signature Hospitality Group include improved staff retention, raised productivity, enhanced employee engagement and increased employee satisfaction.

Of course, hiring the best people needs to start with attracting the best applicants. This is where Signature Hospitality Group has invested in building its employee value position and employer branding, to show potential applicants that Signature Hospitality Group's venues are a great place to work.

Getting this message across includes a combination of job descriptions, images, videos, staff testimonials and other materials to showcase Signature Hospitality Group as an employer of choice.

Just as Signature Hospitality Group can't glance at resumes to get real insights into a person, it realises jobseekers can't glance at a simple job ad and get real insights into what it's like to work for Signature Hospitality Group. Employer branding helps the business make a great first impression on potential applicants.

When it comes to Expr3ss!, one key benefit for Signature Hospitality Group is that the Expr3ss! platform is not a walled garden. When placing job advertisements, Signature Hospitality Group is not locked into spending a lot of money by only placing paid ads.

Expr3ss! can be integrated into a wide range of platforms, including free job boards and even Signature Hospitality Group's own website. Signature Hospitality Group can also create QR codes which anyone can easily scan with their phone to quickly apply for a job.

The results are impressive

For starters, Signature Hospitality Group managed to appoint 86 per cent of applicants from free advertising sources, including its own website. This saw advertising savings of more than $110,000 in the first year alone.

Along with this, Signature Hospitality Group reduced its time-to-hire to an average of only 21.5 days. With that there's an immediate productivity boost, as the sooner a new employee comes onboard, the less time the rest of the team spends understaffed.

Ensuring it hires the right people also means those people are more likely to stick around, which again reduces the impact on the team of training new staff and getting them up to speed. Ensuring that the workplace isn't a revolving door of constantly new faces helps improve workplace culture and employee morale.

Thanks to Expr3ss!, Signature Hospitality Group has an amazing 95 per cent staff retention rate, which is simply unheard of in the hospitality sector.

Hospitality groups struggling with the challenges of today can't afford to be hamstrung by archaic hiring practices of the past. Thanks to Expr3ss!, Signature Hospitality Group has the right people and right hiring processes in place to meet the challenges that lie ahead.