92 – How Your Hotel’s Digital Presence Impacts Recruiting and Staffing

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Host Ryan Embree discusses ways hoteliers can help attract employees in the midst of the staffing shortage by focusing on their digital presence. From reputation management to social media to review responses, hoteliers need to make sure their hotel is giving the right impression not just to guests, but to future staff as well. Listen now to learn what you can do to help combat the staffing crisis at your hotel. Suite Spot Podcast · 92 - How Your Hotel's Digital Presence Impacts Recruiting and Staffing Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check-in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. Thank you for joining me and listening in. We've got a great episode for you today. And today we're gonna be talking about recruiting and hiring. Now I'm sure this is a conversation that you've had with a lot of your teams right now. I know we are hearing it all over the country. Where can I find employees? We are just looking for more and more hospitality professionals to fill our front desk staff, to fill our management teams. Management groups out there looking for people. We had just gotten over this just devastating pandemic to our industry, and now we have this staffing crisis. Hotels cannot find people right now to work. So what this episode is talking about is how your hotel's presence impacts recruiting and hiring. Now I know that is a weird correlation. Ryan Embree: Your hotel's digital presence, things like social media, reviews, even review response, but this has an impact. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. But first we'll start off with a quick couple stats. Now, hospitality employment is still down 1.2 million jobs from where it was in February 2020. 1.2 million, which is so sad because this is a people-serving-people industry. So when we can't find the people to give these great hotel experiences, we obviously see that impacted every single day and, and could impact vacations and, and the, just the overall guest experience. So call it the great resignation, call it whatever. The hotel industry is a loss of 7.2% of its workforce. Now that's compared to 2% for the rest of U.S. jobs. So hospitality has been extremely impacted from this staffing shortage, and it's just so difficult to get people again, to work for our hotels. Ryan Embree: So it's an employee job market. As you can imagine, employees are getting to pick where they want to work. They're going to do their due diligence before signing on, and that's where your hotel digital presence comes into play. So today what we're gonna do is we're gonna discuss the way again, your digital presence impacts recruiting and the first place we'll start is reputation management. Now just like Glassdoor, employees are going to check your hotel's reviews to see where they're gonna be working. They're gonna ask the question, "What will my day in the life look like at this property?" Now, a really good exercise that I would suggest to you, the hotelier, is to go to your hotel's reviews online. So think about Glassdoor, right? When someone's looking to potentially sign on and become an employee, they go check reviews for that company on the website Glassdoor. Ryan Embree: So of course, employees are gonna do this for your hotel because there's public reviews online about your hotel experience there. So the exercise would be, is read all of those reviews and imagine that instead of them being reviews, imagine being behind the front desk and hearing that feedback directly from your guests. How many times is that guest complimenting you?