• Improving Performance at the Hotel Paris performing firms on HR practices such as number of qualified applicants per position, and percentage of jobs filled from within." The New Recruitment Process It was safe to say that achieving the Hotel Paris's strategic aims The Hotel Paris's competitive strategy is "to use superior guest service to depended largely on the quality of the people that it attracted to, and differentiate the Hotel Paris properties, and to thereby increase the length then selected for, employment at the firm. "What we want are employ-of stay and return rate of guests, and thus boost revenues and profitabil- ees who will put our quests first, who will use initiative to see that our ity." HR manager Lisa Cruz must now formulate functional policies and guests are satisfied, and who will work tirelessly to provide our guests activities that support this competitive strategy and boost performance, with services that exceed their expectations." said the CFO. Lisa and by eliciting the required employee behaviors and competencies. the CFO both knew this process had to start with better recruiting. As a longtime HR professional, Lisa Cruz was well aware of the The CFO gave her the green light to design a new recruitment process. importance of effective employee recruitment. If the Hotel Paris didn't Lisa and her team had the firm's IT department create a central re- get enough applicants, it could not be selective about who to hire. cruiting link for the Hotel Pariss website, with geographical links that And, if it could not be selective about who to hire, it wasn't likely that each local hotel could use to publicize its openings. The HR team created the hotels would enjoy the customer-oriented employee behaviors that a series of standard ads the managers could use for each job title. These the company's strategy relied on. She was therefore disappointed to standard ads emphasized the company's service-oriented values, and ba-discover that the Hotel Paris was paying virtually no attention to the job sically said (without actually saying it) that if you were not people orient-of recruiting prospective employees. Individual hotel managers slapped ed you should not apply. They emphasized what it was like to work for together help wanted ads when they had positions to fill, and no one the Hotel Paris, and the excellent benefits (which the HR team was about in the chain had any measurable idea of how many recruits these ads to get started on) the firm provided. It created a new intranet-based job were producing or which recruiting approaches worked the best (or posting system and encouraged employees to use it to apply for open worked at all). Lisa knew that it was time to step back and get control positions. For several jobs, including housekeeping crew and front-desk of the Hotel Paris'$ recruitment function. derk, applicants must now first pass a short prescreening test to apply. As they reviewed the details of the Hotel Paris's current recruit. The HR team analyzed the performance (for instance, in terms of appli-ment practices, Lisa Cruz and the firm's CFO became increasingly con- cants/source and applicants hired/source) of the various local newspapers cerned. What they found, basically, was that the recruitment function and recruiting firms the hotels had used in the past, and chose the best was totally unmanaged. The previous HR director had simply allowed to be the approved recruiting sources in their local areas. the responsibility for recruiting to remain with each separate hotel, and After 6 months with these and other recruitment function chang- the hotel managers, not being HR professionals, usually just took the es, the number of applicants was up on average 40%. Lisa and her path of least resistance when a job became available by placing help team were now set to institute new screening procedures that would wanted ads in their local papers. There was no sense of direction from help them select the high-commitment, service-oriented, motivated the Hotel Paris's headquarters regarding what sorts of applicants the employees they were looking for. company preferred, what media and alternative sources of recruits its Questions managers should use, no online recruiting, and, of course, no measure. ment at all of effectiveness of the recruitment process. The company 5-21. Given the hotel's required personnel skills, what recruiting totally ignored recruitment-source metrics that other firms used effec- sources would you have suggested it use, and why? tively, such as number of qualified applicants per position, percentage 5-22. What would a Hotel Paris help wanted ad look like? of jobs filled from within, the offer-to-acceptance ratio, acceptance by 5-23. Based on what you know and on what you learned here in Chapter 5 of Dessler Human Resource Management, how recruiting source, turnover by recruiting source, and selection test results by recruiting source. This despite the fact, as the CFO pu