RMIT Classification: Trusted

Foreign Trade University Module: HRM (QTRE403)

Faculty of Business Administration Lecturer: Ngô Quý Nhâm
Department of Management & Human Resource Email: quynham@gmail.com

Recruitment and Selection

THE HOTEL PARIS CASE

The New Recruitment Process

The Hotel Paris s competitive strategy is to use superior guest service to differentiate the Hotel
Paris properties, and to thereby increase the length of stay and return rate of guests, and thus
boost revenues and profitability. HR manager Lisa Cruz must now formulate functional policies
and activities that support this competitive strategy by eliciting the required employee behaviors
and competencies.
As a longtime HR professional, Lisa Cruz was well aware of the importance of effective
employe recruitment. If the Hotel Paris didn’t get enough applicants, it could not be selective
about who to hire. And,if it could not be selective about who to hire, it wasn’t likely that the
hotels would enjoy the customer-oriented employee behaviors that the company’s strategy
relied on. She was therefore disappointed to discover that the Hotel Paris was paying virtually
no attention to the job of recruiting prospective employees. Individual hotel managers slapped
together help wanted ads when they had positions to fill, and no one in the chain had any
measurable idea of how many recruits these ads were producing, or which recruiting approaches
worked the best (or worked at all). Lisa knew that it was time to step back and get control of
the Hotel Paris s recruitment function.
As they reviewed the details ofthe Hotel Paris s current recruitment practices, Lisa Cruz and
the firm’s CFO became increasingly concerned. What they found, basically, was that the
recruitment function was unmanaged totally. The previous HR director had simply allowed the
responsibility for recruiting to remain with each separate hotel, and the hotel managers not
being human resources professionals, usually took the path of least resistance when a job
became available, such as by placing help wanted ads in their local papers.
There was no sense of direction from the Hotel Paris’s headquarters regarding what sorts of
applicants the company preferred, what media and alternative sources of recruits its managers
should use, no online recruiting,and no measurement at all ofrecruitment process effectiveness.
The company ignored recruitment-source metrics that other firms used effectively, such as
number of qualified applicants per position, percentage of jobs filled from within, the offer-to-
 RMIT Classification: Trusted

acceptance ratio, acceptance by recruiting source, turnover by recruiting source, and selection
test results by recruiting source.
It was safe to say that achieving the Hotel Paris s strategic aims depended on the quality of the
people that it attracted to and then selected for employment at the firm. What we want are
employees who will put our guests first, who will use initiative to see that our guests are
satisfied, and who will work tirelessly to provide our guests with services that exceed their
expectations said the CFO.Lisa and the CFO both knew this process had to start with better
recruiting.The CFO gave her the green light to design a new recruitment process.

Testing
As she considered what she had to do next,Lisa Cruz, the Hotel Paris s HR director, knew that
employee selection had to play a central role in her plans.The Hotel Paris currently had an
informal screening process in which local hotel managers obtained application forms,
interviewed applicants, and checked their references. However, a pilot project using an
employment test for service people at the Chicago hotel had produced startling results. Lisa
found consistent, significant relationships between test performance and a range of employee
competencies and behaviors such as speed of check-in/out, employee turnover, and percentage
of calls answered with the required greeting. Clearly, she was onto something. She knew that
employee capabilities and behaviors like these translated into just the sorts of improved guest
services the Hotel Paris needed to execute its strategy. She therefore had to decide what
selection procedures would be best.
Lisa’s team, working with an industrial psychologist, wants to design a test battery that they
believe will produce the sorts of high morale, patient, people-oriented employees they are
looking for. It should include,at a minimum,a work sample test for front-desk clerk candidates
and a personality test aimed at weeding out applicants who lack emotional stability.

The New Interviewing Program

One thing that concerned Lisa Cruz was the fact that the Hotel Paris s hotel managers varied
widely in their interviewing and hiring skills. Some were quite effective most were not.
Furthermore, the company did not have a formal employment interview training program , nor,
for that matter, did it have standardized interview packages that hotel managers around the
world could use.
As an experienced HR professional, Lisa knew that the company s new testing program would
go only so far. She knew that, at best, employment tests explained perhaps 30% of employee
performance. It was essential that she and her team design a package of interviews that her hotel
 RMIT Classification: Trusted

managers could use to assess on an interactive and personal basis candidates for various
positions. It was only in that way that the hotel could hire the sorts of employees whose
competencies and behaviors would translate into the kinds foutcomes such as improved guest
services that the hotel required to achieve its strategic goals.
Lisa receives budgetary approval to design a new employee interview system. She and her team
start by reviewing the job descriptions and job specifications for the positions of frontdesk clerk,
assistant manager, security guard,valet/door person, and housekeeper. Focusing on developing
structured interviews for each position, the team sets about devising interview questions. For
example, for the front-desk clerk and assistant manager, they formulate several behavioral
questions, including, “Tell me about a time when you had to deal with an irate person,and what
you did?”. And, “Tell me about a time when you had to deal with several conflicting demands
at once, such as having to study for several final exams while at the same time having to work?
How did you handle the situation? They also developed a number of situational questions,
including, “Suppose you have a very pushy incoming guest who insists on being checked in at
once, while at the same time you re trying to process the checkout for another guest who must
be at the airport in 10 minutes. How would you handle the situation?”

Questions
1. Given the hotel s stated employee preferences, what recruiting sources would you
suggest they use, and why?
2. What would a Hotel Paris help wanted ad look like?
3. How would you suggest they measure the effectiveness oftheir recruiting efforts?
Provide a detailed example ofthe front-desk work sample test.
4. Provide a detailed example oftwo possible personality test questions.
5. What other tests would you suggest to Lisa,and why would you suggest them?
6. For the job of security guard or valet, develop five situational, five behavioral, and five
job knowledge questions, with descriptive good/average/poor answers.
7. Combine your questions into a complete interview that you would give to someone who
must interview candidates for these jobs.