Personnel management: strategies for the high season, with Amado Jiménez

Our co-founder and CGO Mireia Cuyàs interviewed Amado JiménezDirector of HR, Quality and Communication at Silken Hotels about talent management and strategies for the high season in hospitality. You can also listen to it on our YouTube channel and on our LinkedIn profile.

Welcome, Amado. To begin with, tell us who you are and what you are passionate about. Tell us a little about yourself.

I am a professional in the hotel sector and, in particular, before being a hotelier, I have been a Human Resources manager. I am a people management professional. That which is so difficult and they don't teach us at university. Normally they teach us about finance numbers, processes, strategies, but not about how to manage a conflict, how to motivate a person. I am more from the legal or juridical world, but I am passionate about people management and I started dedicating myself more to this than to law. And here I am with a career at Silken. I just celebrated my 23rd birthday in January, many years already.

What strategies do you implement at Silken to attract, recruit and captivate talent? Which we know is not easy.

It is not that it is not easy, it is very difficult right now after the pandemic. It has changed the mentality of a lot of people. It has changed all of us and the job seeker. Also the conciliation between family or personal and professional life has become a key factor. I would say that beyond the monetary or emotional salary, the employee is looking for a purpose, a challenge, a fulfillment and that balance between personal and professional life.

With this, the strategy in our case -and I told you before that I have been in this company and in this sector for 23 years now- is not that it has changed too much because the core, the nucleus, is still the same. The key remains the same, it is what we have used and what characterizes us: the culture we have at Silken.

More than ever, we have to seduce, we have to make people fall in love.

Nowadays, the employee asks you a lot of questions that he/she didn't ask before, because before he/she was looking for the job and that was it, and then he/she thought about retiring in that company... Today, no. Today, no. Nowadays, the employee or the candidate evaluates and asks you: what are the conditions? what are the challenges I am going to face? what is the culture? what training will you give me? how much free time will I have? You have to tell them all that and give them a truthful answer. You cannot be selling things that are not true, because otherwise we would not have the personnel.

But we face a double difficulty. The pretensions and the mentality of that talent has changed and also, it is very difficult to find it in this sector. Hotel management has been demonized a lot, more than hospitality, after the pandemic and the type of work... as a kind of hard work, out of normal working hours where you work on a New Year's Eve or a Sunday when others are having fun.

However, fortunately there are still many candidates or students who finish their studies and really want to work in a hotel or more than, sometimes, in a travel agency or a Tourist Office, because every day is different. And, moreover, if it is a chain or a company like Silken that can and wants to develop that candidate, first I want to bring them in, build loyalty and develop an internal culture that facilitates what the candidate and the employee demands before and after their incorporation.

So, do you think that training and onboarding are equally important when it is someone temporary?

It is the same. We do not like to differentiate. Now, there are no pure "temporary" hotels, they are "discontinuous permanent". Our typology is that of a hotel that is fundamentally urban and open for 12 months, but in recent years we have had some more seasonal hotels that, for example, start their season now at Easter and continue until October.

Our obligation is to make the permanent employee feel the same as the permanent employee of any other hotel. In addition, beyond their period of inactivity, they want to return, feel as important as any other employee, participate in the same training, answer the climate survey when it is done, and so on. In other words, for us it is even a little bit more important, because we want to build loyalty among employees who have been with us for 12 months, but we also want to build loyalty among permanent employees so that, from one year to the next, they come back and continue.

In addition, if we can, during this period of inactivity, if possible, we try to offer him a job in another hotel, not seasonal. We provide you with travel and accommodation so that you can continue your training, seeing how to work in a different establishment, in a different destination, with a different management.

For example, we have a chef that we have moved this past year to another establishment with a much larger kitchen, with a much larger team, used to hosting events and banquets. And that nourishes him a lot. We are providing him with that continuous learning, which is one of the things I said before that the employee now demands so much.

You mentioned that you work with universities. Tell me more about how it benefits you in attracting talent.

Indeed, we worked and have worked much more a few years ago, because at that time there were many more students in universities or in tourism schools, hotel schools. We have worked a lot with the CETT in Barcelona or we have worked a lot with the Artxanda school here in Bilbao and with many others.

But that, too, has changed. The number of students is decreasing, precisely because the sector is probably perceived as less attractive from the point of view of professional development. This means that we have fewer relationships, because it can offer us less, less curriculum and less candidates.

Every year, the hotel supply increases. Therefore, the number of employees in the sector is also increasing, but the number of students who go out into the market and want to start working is not increasing to the same extent. So that's where that difficulty comes in, that difficulty. I am not going to deceive you, in some very specific seasonal hotel, because in the end you have to end up hiring a letter carrier on leave, then you train him and train him, but he is not a vocational person, nor does he come from an academic background in the sector.

Now the employee or candidate evaluates and asks you: what are the conditions? what are the challenges I am going to face? what is the culture? what training will you give me? how much free time will I have? You have to tell them all that and give them a truthful answer. You cannot be selling things that are not true, because otherwise we would not have the personnel.

The number of students in hospitality-related careers is not growing at the same rate as the hotel supply, what other challenges do you face in attracting talent?

I am going to tell you a couple of other things so that you can see that the scenario is even more complicated. Now there are two factors we have to work with.

The first is the aging of the population. We know how low the birth rate is at the moment and how the demographic pyramid is. That is what we have to play with and that is what we have to think about. Then, we have to work a lot with a culture of inclusion. Before, it was only Barcelona and Madrid where employees from any continent were exclusively employed. Today, in any hotel we have staff that is not European, but from another continent that has come here to develop. And with that we have to work and promote inclusion, regardless of culture, ideology, color, etc., but that also has to be managed.

Twenty years ago, I was much less involved in this type of management. And now you also have to dedicate yourself to managing that inclusion, because it is also part of our values, our culture, and we are delighted to do it.

So, look at all the variables that make people management very complicated at the moment. But at the same time, it's a challenge for me and for HR managers to pull all this off.

What do you do for the rapid onboarding of people?

As you said, onboarding is fundamental. You have an interview with an employee and you tell him/her about the goodness and excellence of your company, and since I believe it because I live and feel it, I understand that the person in front of me also believes it. But then we have to demonstrate and facilitate this: a good welcome, mentoring by management, facilitation of learning and continuous development.

In our company we have a culture based on facilitating future development and fulfillment. A very high percentage of directors come from internal promotion and development. We work a lot, to use a sports simile, on our youth. We are very attentive to our people. We have developed management development programs in times of higher growth, in order to have people prepared to take the leap and occupy a management position. We have been one of the companies that has incorporated younger people into management positions and with good results, because they are still there. We have not done so badly on the management committee, nor have they done so badly as hotel managers, because we are still there.

But yes, in those aspects, the onboarding part is fundamental, but also the communication part and the technology. Communication in both directions, both sent and received, helps you make good decisions, and technology eliminates a lot of processes and bureaucracy. It is here to stay and I think it is essential to consider it, use it and value it.

Technology is an essential factor in the strategic and Human Resources process. But I would say that, even though it is an essential process, if we want those decisions to be made with passion, with emotion, with the heart, we must never forget that it is the person who makes the decisions.

How do you build loyalty among those workers who are not part of your "quarry"? For example, does what you offer to a 50-year-old change much from what you offer to a 20-year-old? How do you manage this?

I have experienced this first hand. I travel a lot, I go to all the hotels and, as I was saying before, since I have a low turnover, I meet people. I go to Tenerife, for example, which is the first hotel I opened in 2001, and I meet the reception manager, Sandra, who I hired. I greet her and we both say to each other "Here we are, eh? Time has passed", I guess because we both look a lot older. I suppose there is still someone left, but that person who started out at 30 or 25 years old is now 50.

If I talk about a person who has just joined us, the situation is different, but at the same time what a 50-year-old person demands from us, who does not put so much emphasis on the future, because he or she is looking for more stability. But the other part of culture, of facilitating learning, development, of living in a culture with a balance between personal and professional life, in an environment that I call happiness and fulfillment, but without forgetting profitability, because that is also where that person who joins us at that age feels comfortable. Let's say that we have been adapting because the circumstances are very different.

Technology is an essential factor in the strategic and Human Resources process. But I would say that, even though it is an essential process, if we want those decisions to be made with passion, with emotion, with the heart, we must never forget that it is the person who makes the decisions.

I'll take this last little bit you said about an environment of happiness. We create happiness in every hotel.

I think some people might think it's a little corny to say it that way, but I don't think so. I think we have to facilitate that environment and that culture of happiness and fulfillment, without forgetting profitability, because we are here in a business and we want to make it profitable, which is what our shareholders and our owners are asking us to do.

Happy employee = Happy customer.

Indeed.

Thank you very much, Amado. A hug.