Over the course of building, growing, and scaling businesses, most leaders will be asked the question: What is the secret to success in business?
While there may be various answers, mine will always stay the same: the people you work with.
Business is all about people
Many leaders fail to realise that a business is inherently a human endeavour. Every organisation is simply a group of people coming together to move forward on a shared purpose. It makes sense then that the accomplishments of a business are directly proportional to the quality of the people working in it. This basic business principle especially stands true in the hospitality world—a service-oriented sector. Employees working across hospitality engage and serve customers face-to-face and are an intrinsic building block of the overall experience.
Hiring smarter (even on constantly-shifting ground)
The hospitality sector is infamous for its shortage of talent and low retention rates. Pre-Covid, the industry was already experiencing an estimated annual staff turnover averaging more than 70% and reaching close to 100% in certain markets due to seasonality. Today this gap has increased further following the pandemic-driven exodus and benching of hospitality staff.
As the sector reopens for business, employers want to take advantage of a shifting window of opportunity, while managing constantly fluctuating health and safety requirements, and the effective hiring of talented individuals is essential to that. However, one cannot go around employing anyone who shows up and is willing to do the work for the offered salary; it takes more than knowing what to do and having the requisite years of experience to add long-term value. As any successful hospitality employer knows, employee character and personality are key ingredients in their customer experience. The values employees embody and the attitude they bring to the table (pun intended!) surpass their skillset and competencies by far.
Once we know whom to look for, we must turn towards perfecting how we look for them.
Perfecting your hiring
The hiring process greatly varies from business to business and industry to industry. Everybody has a different opinion on how to do it, and many claim to have cracked the code. When it comes to the hospitality world, our view at Coconut is that there are three essential things employers must do (or not do) to hire better!
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Forget the CV
I must admit that I, together with my fellow co-founders at Coconut, share a deep disdain for that outdated relic which is the CV. With all due respect to Leonardo da Vinci who might have written the first resume ever, in this day and age a CV does not convey an accurate representation of the potential of an individual, nor does it portray any useful information on a candidate’s values, personality, character or attitude—the very things that determine the right fit.
To solve this problem for the hospitality industry, we built Coconut as a social recruitment community, which helps individuals shine through their highly visual profiles. It turns out that both recruiters and jobseekers love the idea of the CV taking the backseat. Our results prove it and our ultimate goal is to get rid of it completely… more on that soon!
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Do it yourself
Most employers dread the hiring process; they outsource the heavy lifting to recruiting agencies and only meet their prospects towards the end. In doing so, they miss out on some great employees and end up hiring only from candidates that reach the final stages.
At Coconut, while we do not eliminate the process, we have instead simplified and enhanced it through social, visual, and community-referral features that make it easier and faster for busy employers to identify the right candidates as they are the ones who know their venue, its character, and their customers better! Simultaneously, we empower jobseekers to decide if a prospect is a good fit for them, by shying away from complicated job descriptions and reducing job postings to the key criteria that matter in such a dynamic and vibrant industry.
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Do not automate everything
Rapid digitisation within the hiring process and the rising use of machine learning algorithms to predict candidates for a business might actually be working against both employers and job seekers. I believe no one can assess a human being better than another person. Gamified assessments or artificial intelligence models cannot replace human judgement and decision-making when assessing personality, confidence, and humour. Furthermore, algorithm-based matching based on specific criteria such as fees and availability, dictating terms and conditions and generating just one result masquerading as the perfect match, rob both the recruiter and the jobseeker of their basic right of (wider) options.
At Coconut, we stand for choice, empowering both sides to decide whether they are a good fit and determine the conditions under which they should work together.
We envision a world where hiring the right staff and finding the best jobs in the hospitality world is done efficiently and effectively. We are on a mission to make it happen the Coconut way: quick, simple, and seriously fun.
Wirelessly yours,
Ziad
This article was written on a laptop while sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee that allowed for extra introspection. The soundtrack was piped through a Bluetooth speaker via a smartphone running a streaming music app that might or might not have merged with a SPAC and is listed on the Nasdaq. All devices were seamlessly connected to the home wireless network.