You can look at the hiring of talent for the hotel industry as straightforward, but in today’s employment environment, finding the best fit—and the best chances for success—is most effective when done using competency-based assessment, otherwise called behavior assessment. The basic premise is that past performance is the best indicator of future performance, but it is so much more than that.
Instead of relying on the career history and the reason for job transitions, this new method helps to get to “how did you do it?” and “why did you make that decision?” These questions, often open-ended, help to screen those who say all the right things from those who actually did all the right things.
Keep in mind a person does not need to be perfect or to have done everything well in order to be an excellent candidate. Those who have learned from their mistakes and missteps are often better than those who have always seen things go smoothly. Hearing about how someone reacts to stressful situations can be illuminating.
No interview process will have complete objectivity, but by incorporating these tools into the process, you can have more consistency in your evaluation. Because you are focusing on the details of what they did, how they did it and why they did it, you can inform your boss or the rest of the interview team as to why you think they are the best. You move past the quality of their educational pedigree, the power of the brands/companies where they have worked, and get to the value they added to their organization. This can help drive better consensus in hiring decisions.
Rating candidates
Because you are hiring based on specific competencies, such as the ability to drive sales in a highly competitive category, you can rate candidates more easily.
Most experts would agree you should limit the number of competencies to three to five. First, it becomes cumbersome to have a laundry list of “must haves,” especially when most are not musts, but rather, “nice to have.”
Second, the interview process itself can be lengthy as you are drilling down to better understand these behaviors and actions and how they were successful (or not). There is no substitute for asking questions about why someone moved from one job to another, but those answers come secondary to what they accomplished (and how they accomplished it).
Finding the fit
Do not assume you cannot use competency-based assessment to understand cultural fit. Take, for example, the executive who drove sales volume up 20% in a 12-month period. One executive might describe replacing half of the team with hard-driving, ruthless (“win at all costs”) sales talent, while another might talk about having to find new ways to motivate and drive the existing team that simply was not well equipped to meet previous goals (lack of product knowledge, lack of training, poor communication, inappropriate compensation drivers).
One is not right and the other wrong. These are two distinctly different approaches. This approach can also help to discern whether someone has the “hospitality DNA,” or is service-oriented, which is so essential to success in this industry.
The other benefit to competency-based assessment is that it significantly limits your legal exposure. If you can demonstrate that you selected a candidate based upon specific competencies, against measurable goals or targets, it becomes much more difficult to argue you selected one candidate over another for the wrong reasons. A candidate who thought he or she didn’t get the job because of race, religion, gender or age can easily be shown why your successful candidate got the job.
In the hotel industry, we assess sales and marketing talent, finance talent and general management talent constantly. References do help, but digging into the details of how candidates turned around a struggling property or how they found $3 million in cost savings is key.
We all know GMs of properties who are outstanding with the staff and the guests, yet do not manage profit and loss (or the financial ends) as well. Knowing how to dig at these areas and get to the bottom of things is crucial. Have you ever interviewed a candidate who could not answer questions directly? It becomes a red flag if candidates cannot remember how they came up with that brilliant new idea.
Lastly, I want to implore you to study this method and get some help with using it. Behavioral interviewing is not easy. It takes skill, patience and practice. There are scores of professionals out there who provide excellent training in this area, but that training might be residing right in your human resources department today.
After 18 years in executive search with some of the world’s largest and most prestigious search firms, including Heidrick & Struggles, Spencer Stuart and Korn/Ferry International, Ann Fastiggi joined Herbert Mines in 2012 as a managing director. At Herbert Mines, Ann is leveraging her knowledge of the consumer market to help build stronger leadership teams for the hospitality industry around the globe. Ann received her Master’s degree in counseling psychology from Temple University and her undergraduate degree from Boston University. Ann and her husband live in Wilton, Connecticut, with their daughter.
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