Tips for recruiting and retaining staff
The hospitality industry has a high labour turnover and some employers find themselves constantly having to recruit staff to fill vacancies. This costs the industry more than £8m a year. So what can you do to reduce your labour turnover and keep hold of hard-working staff? Here are 10 tips:
1. Become the ideal workplace
Make sure you constantly promote how great your company is both internally and externally. You can use your existing staff as ambassadors for your organisation. They will tell other people what it is like to work in your company, so make sure they have some positive messages to pass on.
2. Communicate better
Find a way to make sure that communication is effective. Devise different ways to communicate your messages. Make sure information flow is fast and two-way, so that staff feel their opinions are important.
3. Make recruitment easy
Make the job application process as simple as possible for both the applicant and the interviewer. Train your recruiters not only to recruit professionally and competently, but to be salespeople for your company.
4. Have a clear vision and values
Be clear about what the company vision and values are and make sure everyone in the organisation knows them. Find out what values are important to prospective employees and see that yours are compatible.
5. Be flexible
Discover what drives your people and what they want out of the company. Try your best to give them what they want. This might involve implementing some work-life balance principles.
6. Be supportive
You can't expect staff loyalty unless you give it in return. Make sure new staff feel supported and welcomed. You could do this by introducing a buddy system where a new member of staff is paired with someone who can show them how things are done and looks after their needs.
7. Find out aspirations
Regularly review the progress of your staff and find out what their aspirations are and, if it suits the business, make sure they are fulfilled. People want different things out of work and have different priorities, so don't assume that everyone wants to be promoted.
8. Encourage development
While you might already have staff development programmes, make sure they are realistic and that you can actually work towards achieving goals in a set time. Tailor programmes to fit both the business and the individual.
9. Keep informed
Be knowledgeable about your staff and the industry. Find out about the trends and influences. Find out why people stay at certain places and why they leave others. Find out where the most talented people come from and where they go. Keep a close eye on your competitors and what they are offering.
10. Have effective leaders
Make sure that you have leadership at all levels throughout the organisation. A good leader will inspire, motivate and encourage other people.
Produced by Caterer-online in association with learnpurple
