Bylined Column by Cleo Clarke on ‘The Great Resignation’ Featured in Hotel Executive
Cleo Clarke, M&R’s Vice President of People and Culture, shares his thoughts on recruiting and retaining qualified workers in “Transforming the Great Resignation into the Great Retention,” a bylined column in the February edition of Hotel Executive, a respected online resource for the hospitality industry.
Confronted almost overnight by drastic drops in both occupancy and revenue during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, managers had no choice but to cut staffing levels. Many hotels —although none of those managed by M&R — were forced to close. Some career employees took jobs outside of the industry, never to return.
“Everyone in hospitality human resources is struggling to manage an unprecedented recruitment and retention crisis triggered by the loss of millions of jobs following the pandemic,” Cleo noted in the column. “While the industry has prioritized selling harder to restore occupancy and RevPAR, the heart of the house situation is bad and getting worse.”
Cleo outlines a course of action he believes the industry must take to adapt to this new reality. It includes recruiting at high schools, college campuses and retirement communities as well as sponsoring foreign workers through the J-1 visa program.
“Current circumstances call for different thinking,” he said. “Consider evaluating candidates for a range of jobs and hiring based on ability to adapt and learn instead of best immediate fit. This approach turns the hiring process inside-out, changing the emphasis from what the employer wants to what the candidate wants in a job and, for that matter, what they want from an employer.”
Cleo said retention “must be built on a foundation of competitive wages and benefits, including health insurance, paid time off and compensation for extra work.” To compete with other employers that can pay more, “hotels need to formulate a compelling mix of wages and both hard and soft benefits that make hotel jobs more appealing than logistics centers, food service operations and other service industries,” he said.
