As hospitality schools race to keep up with hotel companies establishing brand beachheads that emphasize locality, technology and personality, they are coming up against a challenge: how to prepare students for a career when it’s impossible to predict the future.
Add to that hotels increasingly willing to hire outside the industry and younger workers seeking a fast-track career at a socially responsible company that offers professional opportunities while respecting their desire for a flexible personal life.
The situation is crystallized – but not created – by millennials.
“I don’t think people in prior generations looking for jobs were quite as focused on the moral compass of the company,” says Niki Leondakis, CEO of hotels and resorts at Two Roads Hospitality. “But it’s manifesting itself through millennials because we have a young industry in hospitality.”
Because of that, Two Roads is communicating its own values more proactively, she says. “We are very clear about what kind of culture we are creating so we attract people who are aligned with that culture. We talk about our values and the higher purpose of the company with a lot of clarity as a recruitment tool because it’s attractive to the workforce to hear that a company stands for more than the bottom line.” Two Roads worked to articulate that culture in the months after the merger of Destination Hotels’ and Commune Hotels & Resorts’ five boutique brands early this year.
That culture is being communicated to recruiters, but not left there. “We have a philosophy that everyone is a recruiter, so when you see someone who has a service attitude, we can train them on how to check people in or clean rooms or feed guests, but we can’t train personality,” Leondakis says. “We do hire a lot of people outside of hospitality. We like being able to take people who are great human beings and train them how to do the job.”
Beyond soft skills
Many hotel brands are emphasizing a sense of place and a relationship to the community to differentiate from the competition. But personal connections between hotel employees and hotel guests are still key.
“Everything is standardized to a point where (guests) might think, OK, I’m in Chicago but I can be in Miami, I can be somewhere else, so what is going to make it different is actually the people,” says Sonia Tatar, CEO of Les Roches Worldwide and its school of hotel management in Bluche, Switzerland. “That’s when we talk about the heart of the business.” The school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees and has partner schools in the U.S., Spain, Jordan and China.
“The focus is now shifting toward the soft skills, the savoir-être, that allows (graduates) to adapt to new jobs,” adds Fabien Fresnel, chief academic officer at the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland. Technology, social media and hotels’ complex ownership and management profile have created a new array of sophisticated jobs within hotel operations. Many also require increasingly sophisticated intangibles such as empathy and real-time problem-solving skills, he says. To teach those within a four-year window, Lausanne has added flexible electives.
“You still need to train for skills,” points out Nicolas Graf, Les Roches’ chief academic officer. “But what we think makes a difference is the mindset.” Trustworthy associates have good judgment, Graf says. “What we are trying to do is to develop that mindset.”
“We also talk about ‘intrapreneurship,’” Tatar says. “Some might go out and build a new business, create a new concept, business model, whatever, that is going to revolutionize the hotel industry. But others go within hotels themselves and … they can bring in new business models. It’s about renewal or innovation internally as well.”
Creating options
Students who are quicker to adapt also have more options – and they are taking them. At Les Roches, a third of alumni have started their own businesses. “When you are trying to develop your students to take ownership, a lot of them say, in fact, I don’t need a boss. I can be my own boss,” Graf says. Fifty percent of Lausanne graduates head into hospitality-related jobs, Fresnel says. The other half works on, for instance, real estate transactions or analysis, or outside the business. Lausanne has nine certified schools around the world.
Some step off the 10- to 15-year climb that it takes up the operational ladder to become a GM. “They are going into finance because they want to see a career path and an objective, not 10 positions in a dozen hotels,” Fresnel says. Students are less patient and have a shorter attention span. “It doesn’t mean they are stupid, it means they are changing. They can adapt to a situation rapidly.”
One trade-off: a much more natural and flexible relationship with new technology, and the ability to adapt technology to the more experiential priorities of younger generations. One Les Roches student developed an app that helped offer choices of wine for a meal according to the food being served and type of crowd being entertained, the reason for the gathering and the budget. “You’re not just getting the wine, you are building the whole experience,” Tatar says.
Emotional intelligence
If more hotel companies are looking beyond hospitality students to fill jobs, the approach to finding like-minded employees must change as well.
It partly requires being willing to ask different questions during the interview process. “To get to the root of what motivates this person, what is their inspiration, what is the source of their inspiration, do they find joy in serving others,” Leondakis says. “In the interview process, you do have to ferret that out. You have to get into asking questions that give you a sense of how that person thinks about the world.” That could involve situational role playing or asking for examples of how the interviewee handled a problem or challenge.
“What you want is them to tell you stories,” she says. “If you’re really listening, you can detect the source of their inspiration and what motivates them. If being of service doesn’t motivate them, you’re going to hear it in the tone or the judgment in their voice or pick up on other cues when they tell stories about their past.” She likes taking potential hires out for a meal to see how they interact with staff. “If someone doesn’t make eye contact with the server or gets seated by a hostess and doesn’t say thank you,” she says, that’s a clue that they won’t show respect to the very people they’d be required to work with day to day.
That attitude starts at the top. “A lot of it starts with hiring the right leaders,” Leondakis says. “Hiring leadership that understands and actually lives by the notion of servant leadership.”
Outcome, not behavior
Michael Levie, chief operations office of CitizenM, agrees – mostly.
“Top-down management doesn’t change by talking about empowerment,” Levie says. “An empowered organization’s culture can only survive if lived from the top. Hotel companies and hoteliers are mostly driven by experience. Changing this fundamental will require major friction” – Levie’s word for employees’ willingness to give management a reality check on what works, and what doesn’t, concerning based on their direct contact with the guest.
“Here is a traditional risk view versus a contemporary outcome view: Most organizations train for script and measure against compliance,” Levie says. “What they forget is that hospitality is about human interaction between people. The compliance can be 100% and the experience can be s**t. We hire for attitude and look solely at guest satisfaction.” CitizenM owns, operates and develops hotels and has eight branded hotels in Europe and the U.S.
Levie, who came from a big-company background with stints at Sonesta Hotels and NH Hotels, is skeptical that most big hospitality companies are walking the talk.
“Generally the industry and the majority of the hotel schools are educating for a top-down organization that through clear job descriptions provides the content and process of each job, and then measure quantitatively against that desire,” he says. “What I think more contemporary organizations, and definitely what we do, is we look at the context in which service is provided and see that there is a connection or a need for connection between the guest and the hotel employee. A more human or natural flow of that through empowerment and a cooperative spirit provides higher guest satisfaction.”
That doesn’t mean tossing out job descriptions. “But it is mostly empowered to the employee to execute, and the context is provided as to how they know the organization would like them to focus. They have all the autonomy. They deal directly with the guest, and you need full autonomy to handle the guest needs in every sense.”
Levie wouldn’t detail how CitizenM screens potential employees except to say the techniques help character show through – “not role playing, that would be too easy” – that looks at outcome and not necessarily behavior.
Changing the approach
The old way to train graduates for a hospitality career involves becoming a management trainee. Now, bigger companies are reducing the duration of trainee positions or skipping right to a formal contract that still allows hires some unstructured time as long as they are always contributing, Lausanne’s Fresnel says.
“We have, on a scale of 1 to 10, reached an 8 or 9 in the number of opportunities out there compared with 20 years ago in terms of jobs and career paths,” he says. He adds that the fast-tracking is happening at a much greater scale in Asia, where hospitality and tourism are booming.
“Today, younger generations have different affinities with corporations,” CitizenM’s Levie says. “People are willing to change careers, have a certain relationship with an organization that still allows them freedom privately.”