Hotels Train In-house, Hire Diverse Talent Amid Scarcity

Battered by the pandemic, most hospitality companies had laid off thousands of employees. During this time, an estimated 25% of the workforce permanently left the global hospitality industry. This has triggered a talent crisis in the industry at a time when it’s facing a renewed surge in demand.

Marriott International, for instance, is working with state governments across India to scout for new talent and train them, while Lemon Tree Hotels is looking to hire from alternate industries. It is looking at expanding its talented workforce by working with local governments.

Ranju Alex, area vice president for Asia Pacific at Marriott, said while India doesn’t have any shortage of labour, it has a scarcity of skilled labour. To change that, Marriott is partnering with local governments, especially in locations like the Northeast and other parts of India, to add fresh talent and train them for six months before bringing them onboard on a full-time basis. The company is looking to build a pipeline to create about 10,000 incremental jobs for its upcoming hotels.

Royal Orchid Hotels, for instance, runs a hotel management college where it teaches multi-skilling. After opening about 15 hotels during the pandemic, the company began to promote a lot of its team members to these new properties, which helped develop people internally and promoted them to heads-of-departments. This helped increase job satisfaction, said Chander Baljee, chairman and managing director of Royal Orchid Hotels.

Similarly, Indian Hotels Company Ltd, the operator of Taj Hotels, has opened 16 skilling centres and aims to skill 100,000 people in the hospitality industry by 2030. Today, the company needs 28,000 employees, which may further increase to 35,000.

Dilip Puri, founder and chief executive of the Indian School of Hospitality, which just graduated its first batch of students, said hospitality companies will have to spread out their recruitment efforts beyond hotel schools. The industry needs to not just change the perception of long hours and low pays but that it offers better conditions of work, pay parity and a better work-life balance.

“This this has to be a collective effort. Lately, we are beginning to see it with some of the hotel companies and brands like The Leela who are paying more and are also investing more in training and upskilling their managers or brands like Hyatt that have a policy to give eight days off in a month. They are all now beginning to enforce this. The good thing is that the technical, hard skills needed for this sector are easy to learn and the soft skills learnt in hospitality are transferable too," said Puri. He estimates that about 12,000 seats get filled in the Institute of Hotel Management (IHM) every year across India.

This is India’s largest hotel management graduate programme. About 50-60% of those individuals start working in the industry but only about 30% stay on in the industry after four or five years. But some of that talent are now able to get jobs abroad because there’s a massive scarcity of talent in Europe, for instance, in the hotel sector in the post pandemic period. Typically, based on the category of the hotel, the hotel staffing ratio per room can vary from 3.5-2.3 persons per room in the luxury category to 0.4-1 persons per room in the budget category of hotels.

Radisson Hotel Group’s Elie Younes, who serves as executive vice president and global chief development officer said talent is proving to be an industry wide problem. He estimates that about 25% of the entire hotel workforce left the industry during the pandemic.

“The World Travel & Tourism Council predicts that we need 20 million jobs in the next ten years in the industry. That’s a lot of people. All of them will have to be young and be willing to work long hours, weekends, and instead of working for Amazon, Google or Uber or Uber Eats. We as an industry need to recreate the passion for the industry. We have to spend a lot of time identifying young people, recruiting them, training them and creating opportunities for them in the local markets, primary or even secondary and tertiary markets. And this is critical. But at the same time we have to believe we have to probably operate with less people per room than what we used to do before. That is also a fact that was anyhow about to happen due to technology, artificial intelligence, contactless etc. But no one will go to a hotel with people," Younes added.

Hotel companies became much more lean during the pandemic. Indian Hotel Company Limited reduced its workforce from 1.53 staff to a room in April 2020 to 1.14. The company in its annual report from that year said it redeployed staff in new properties that are opening and redeployed some of the corporate employees in other group companies. It also scaled its people in different areas so they were able to work in different departments within an eight hour shift.

Another listed hotel owning company, Chalet Hotels’ staff-per-room ratio was 1.2 in 2019 which it substantially reduced to 0.7 in June 2021. Similarly, SAMHI Hotels, which recently filed its draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) said that it has used technology to manage hotels and because of its space efficiencies and shared services centers, it has one of the lowest staffing ratios amongst peers. It said it has 0.94 staff per room in its upscale hotels. In the midscale category, it has just 0.29 persons per room as compared to the industry average of 0.40-0.60.