Dubbed as the smokeless industry, the hospitality industry has gradually proved its position in the structure of the economy as it continuously grows over the years and has provided plenty of opportunities for job seekers. In spite of high demand, it causes many obstacles for restaurants and hotels to find talented personnel because the supply is not enough to meet. Thus, how to make your restaurant and hotel impress the good candidates and make them dedicate their abilities to your unit? The following article will be helpful to you on this issue.
About Hospitality in Vietnam
In recent years, Vietnam's tourism is on the pace of growth with impressive growth figures. According to the latest statistics of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) in 2017, Vietnam ranked 6th among the 10 fastest-growing tourist destinations in the world and ranked first among Southeast Asian countries. Each year, the average tourism industry in Vietnam welcomes more than 14 million international visitors.
As a result, hospitality in Vietnam has also achieved remarkable performance. According to the 2018 Asia-Pacific (STR) hotel performance report, revenue per total number of rooms (RevPER) in Ho Chi Minh City increased by 5.1% to approximately USD 82.06.
Along with the rapid growth of the service industry, the hospitality and tourism system in Vietnam is increasingly receiving long-term investments from leading local and international corporations, which has demonstrated the strong potential of the hotel industry to prepare for leaps in the near future.
Unfortunately, the Vietnamese hospitality is on the edge of the shortage of workforce. This issue requires hotels’ owners to have specific strategies to attract and retain employees, ensuring the quality of hospitality service is as good as possible.
Essential strategies to attract and retain staffs in the hospitality industry
1. Building a professional working environment in your hospitality business
a. Recruitment and Training process
First and foremost, the professional work environment that leaders hope to show has to be shown in the recruitment process. Strict and apparent recruitment can boost the value of the hotel itself and make the candidates aware that they have to try their best with new roles. The total recruitment process is summarized in the following image:
Professionalism comes from well-training for new employees. Staff would feel like they're being cared for, seeing the high security of the job. Several tips are recommended for the purpose of training and development: developing a roadmap for career development or personal development and training; allowing training ideas from low to high as well as from the management level down; researching training methods, whether from business or outsourcing.
b. Hospitality management system
A smart hospitality management system is also a factor that shows professionalism. There is currently a variety of management software that can support you with a large number of jobs during the operation of a hotel. If staff can approach that software, they will find it more comfortable and put all of their passion to work.
2. Creating opportunities for personal growth
No employee likes to do a job and stay in the same positional these years. Everyone wants to be devoted and recognized with the ability to advance in their careers. As a result, managers in hotels should provide candidates with promotion opportunities so they determine the goals and positions they will achieve in the future if done well and endeavor to pursue them. In this way, everyone has a goal to strive to help the performance and quality of work become better. In order to obtain this purpose, hotels’ leaders should build a complete evaluation system to exactly assess the employees’ abilities. Since then, leaders can determine the appropriate development directions that satisfy their staff.
3. Strengthening the promotion of the hotel image when posting job vacancies
Not only restaurants, hotels, but most other businesses when posting job postings only focus on job descriptions and salaries but forget that candidates are attracted to many other factors. Meanwhile, most candidates tend to choose their ideal working environment as a specific reputation and position in the market. In addition, the attractive factors are the event activities at restaurants, hotels, culture in the working environment, bonuses, ... So when posting a job recruitment, you should wrap up the job description and spend a small part to promote the image as well as the operation of the hotel to show candidates that the environment here is really good for candidates to attract them.
4. Providing reasonable treatment
a. Regular recompense
Of course, if staff only work and receive monthly income, it certainly leads to the day they find the job so boring and the owner likely pays no attention to their contribution to the hotel’s operation. When employees strongly perceive that managers support them, they often express greater satisfaction with their job and exhibit a greater commitment to the organization. Thus, the owner should never ignore the value of recompense and encouragement. Do you know what employees often talk about their companies? These are salaries and perfect treatment that leaders give them. It can be denied that recompense is the core factor in the strategies of retaining staff.
b. Making a good relationship with staff
In any work environment, the relationship between leaders and their subordinates is absolutely important to the success of the whole team. No one can endure an atmosphere of intense pressure work or constant reprimand. Particularly, the characteristics of hospitality staff is to always show a friendly and polite attitude towards guests. Therefore, in order to ask employees to show a professional and caring working attitude, the leaders themselves also need to show fairness, create an enjoyable working atmosphere to avoid putting pressure on employees.
In addition, you can understand about the hospitality in Vietnam by reading through this article.
To sum up, facing the challenges of the shortage of workforce in hospitality, the hotels’ leaders may consider these strategies above and build up your own strategies to attract and retain talented employees. For Vietnam with abundant human resources, this is actually a potential market creating an opportunity for hospitality leaders to develop a strong workforce.
