Graduates shun hospitality industry

A distinct shift in the attitudes of graduates in recent years has left hotels struggling to recruit the staff they need. Even graduates of the most prominent hotel schools are shunning the service industry in favour of more lucrative professions.

It is not just the salary that puts them off, but the prospect of shift work and the concept of serving others - which is no longer an attractive proposition for today's young graduates.

Gentiana Cheung Pui, director of human resources at The Kowloon Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, believes the problem has its roots in the way children are bought up. They were spoilt and had come to believe that it was beneath them to serve others, she said.

'People used to have a lot of kids [in Hong Kong], but now they only have one. That is why kids are so treasured by their families and grow up believing they should be served and not serve other people,' she said.

Connie Ng Mun-wah, training manager at the hotel, said even graduates who joined hotel management training schemes often had unrealistic impressions of the job and left within three months once they discovered the hard work and long hours expected of them.

'When we interview some of the graduates or internship trainees they say that after two or three years they want to be a manager in the hotel. But it is very difficult to be a manager within this time because you need experience,' Ms Ng said.

For hotels, this sea of change in the mindset of potential employees has led to an extreme shortage of suitable, willing candidates, and to an urgent need to retain the talent they have. Retention is constantly challenged, however, by the many new hotels in Hong Kong, the mainland and in Macau, leading to an increase in the turnover of service staff across the region.

High turnover is costly in recruiting and training more staff, but also affects the impression of regular visitors to hotels as guests like to rely on the same service from familiar faces, year round. The Kowloon Hotel is tackling the problem by breeding loyalty in staff and a sense of ownership in the business.

Ms Cheung said: 'Once we can get their heart, they will stay.'

The hotel begins this process at the interview stage, where they aim to make a perfect match between the candidate and the hotel. Ms Cheung makes sure that she helps candidates to identify their personal goals, and to establish whether or not these will be reached by working at the hotel. She said she was determined to minimise the gap between the candidate's expectations of the job and the reality of it, and to identify strengths and weaknesses straight away so that Ms Ng and her colleagues in the training department could work on them.

In addition to ensuring that staff get off to a good start, Ms Cheung has tried to safeguard their ongoing happiness at work by introducing training programmes that benefit management and staff. The programmes aim to narrow the gap between management and staff to ensure that management messages are consistent and that staff have an effective method of communication with management. The programmes start at the top with the department heads, who take part in a one-off 'Exemplary Leadership' workshop and an 'HR Management for Non-HR Managers' course which runs over six months and covers employee ordinance, recruitment and selection processes, counselling and disciplinary action, and effective meeting skills. Middle managers are expected to complete additional training. They are enrolled on a year-long management development programme culminating in a presentation to senior management to demonstrate their new skills.

The hotel's communications manager, Kannas Lau Sin-wah, a graduate of the management development programme, said it united her and the 10 other members of middle management who completed it. 'We have developed a friendship, so when we need help we support each other,' she said.

Getting to know you

Hotels struggle to recruit graduates amid a competitive market

The service industry has lost its lure for young graduates

Retention has become vital as service staff look to other industries

The Kowloon Hotel introduces management development programmes to encourage staff to feel a sense of ownership in the hotel

Trainees are united by year-long programme