Many aspects of the hospitality industry have changed over the past three years, but one thing has remained the same: the technology that human resources departments use to recruit and hire new talent.
In Hireology’s latest survey of over 150 recruiters, hiring managers and HR leaders specifically in this industry, 53% said that outdated and inefficient HR technology was their team’s greatest challenge heading into 2023.
This hot topic issue has proved to be a hindrance across the nation — and for good reason. When HR technology is not leveraged correctly, it leaves room for error while inefficiently using the team’s time, can cost companies hefty amounts of money and creates an environment where the use of these otherwise powerful tools is rendered ineffective.
One of the top headlines for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s dive into the current labor shortage highlighted the struggles that the industry has faced, remarking that it is a struggle to retain workers in hospitality. Despite the industry maintaining the highest hiring rate — between 6% and 9% — since November 2020 of all industries, it still isn’t enough to compensate for the initial loss of workers since the pandemic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment levels in the leisure and hospitality sector is 2.4% below February 2020 levels — 402,000 workers less — in spite of the industry maintaining upward employment trends. All of this to say: The hospitality industry is still significantly behind when it comes to filling roles lost by the pandemic, so adequately staffing hotels continues to be a numbers game for recruiters and hiring managers.
Modern HR technology allows hiring managers to perform all sorts of critical tasks within one centralized location, allowing oversight from higher ups while establishing consistency in hiring methods across multiple franchises. The benefits to using staffing software can be seen as early as in the recruiting process. Applicant tracking systems have programs in place within the platform to determine which candidate channels produce the best hires, allowing recruitment efforts to be better focused on methods that produce the best returns on investment.
Implementing and following the same hiring process steps at each location will give brands peace of mind to know that the same quality of candidate is being employed at all of their different branches. Without this technology to help, hotels run the risk of providing unpredictable experiences to their guests due to hiring variabilities from one recruiter to another.
In that same survey from earlier, 58% of respondents indicated that their HR teams spend between 6-10 hours a week on manual data entry, which is upwards of a quarter of the work week that could be better spent on recruiting or interviewing. Not only that, but when HR teams bear the onus of manually entering sensitive data, there is a large room for error, no matter how skilled the typist is. When data is entered incorrectly, additional payroll difficulties can arise that can impact new employees’ paychecks and overall employee morale. After all, one of the key tenets of business is to not mess up your employees’ pay — and those that rely on humans to correctly input data are playing with fire. With talent so hard to acquire these days, simple errors like these can significantly impact a hotel’s turnover rate.
At the root of these issues are ineffective and obsolete payroll providers. These unintuitive payroll platforms are inflexible and difficult to use according to 44% of responders to our survey, creating more obstacles for HR teams than they actually solve. Payroll software should connect easily with the applicant tracking system used at a hotel for optimal use. Technology is a tool to make certain tasks — data entry, candidate organization, recruiting optimization and more — easier. When technology is used ineffectively and creates more hassle than it solves, it may as well not be used at all.
The hospitality industry, as a whole, needs to adopt technology stacks that feature integrations that make all of these HR tasks much more easier to complete. Most modern applicant tracking systems integrate directly with payroll providers, so new hire data is transferred error-free — which can give HR departments some time back in their days to focus on other tasks that will have a bigger impact on ROI.
What you don’t change, you’re choosing — and the hospitality industry is continuing to choose to operate its human resources functions with their hands tied behind their backs. There are easier ways to complete these critical tasks through automation that plenty of other industries have adapted. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it is still such a struggle for those in the hospitality space to recruit and make the hires they need to fill their open roles; after all, candidates can typically spot inefficiencies in the hiring process as they’re going through it — and can choose to pursue opportunities elsewhere.
Things have changed dramatically over the past three years when it comes to hiring, recruiting and maintaining talent; based on the results of Hireology’s recent study, it has become clear that businesses in the hospitality industry are aware of what their issues are but may not know what the best solution is.
Adam Robinson is the co-founder and CEO of Hireology.
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