Why Your Hotel Should Start a Program for Early-Career Prospects

Four Seasons and Marriott have career development programs, and they are among the biggest employers in the hospitality space both domestically and globally. Why not your employer? Other employers do this, and they benefit from training up talent that may well stick with the company for years to come. Places big and small can benefit from an intentional strategy to attract and keep young talent.

Otherwise, they may not figure out where their ideal fit is in your company.

It can be difficult for students and recent graduates to figure out the type of jobs that might be meant for them once they have graduated. Even before they have crossed the stage, students are anxious about how to find the jobs that would fit them. A page that details the type of jobs that would be appropriate for those who are just getting their feet wet with professional experience takes some of the guesswork away.

You don’t strictly need students who are interested in hospitality either, though that can be a good start. These programs are a good way to find talent that is interested, and you can refer them to a particular program that they might be interested in.

Hotels hire accountants, they hire marketing people, and employees for plenty other parts of the operation. There is a scenario where these early-careers pages might pique their interest, and someone who might apply who could otherwise have skipped the opportunity. Your employer doesn’t need to necessarily appeal to every job seeker in the world, but there is value in making it clear that the hotel has jobs that would fit people that don’t have a strict hospitality background.

Whether it’s tacit or explicit, you may have an “ideal candidate” in mind when they post a given position. Understandably, plenty of people apply if they are close to the requirements, even if they don’t fully meet all the so-called requirements. That’s a fine and natural part of the process, and applicants are banking on the fact that companies will bend on their requirements if they want to fill a certain spot urgently enough. If the posting says an accountant needs five years of experience, but they interview someone with three and a half, he may get the job under certain circumstances.

Those are not the circumstances you should be thinking about when you consider these early-career pages. What your company might demand from an accountant with even a few years of experience could be outside the range of duties that a budding accountant could do. Your aim is to make it so that a new accountant will understand the difference between an entry-level position and one meant for somebody with a little bit more documented experience.

You don’t want unqualified or underqualified folks applying for jobs that they should not, since it may slow down the hiring process for a bevy of reasons.