Jumeirah to recruit thousands as portfolio doubles

Luxury Dubai-based hotel company Jumeirah Group will be looking to grow from 15,000 employees to up to 30,000 over the next five years as the number of its operating hotels doubles from 20 to 35-40.

Speaking to HotelierMiddleEast.com on the sidelines of the Arabian Hotel Investment Conference in Dubai, Jumeirah executive chairman Gerald Lawless said: “If we have 15,000 [employees] from 20 hotels, although some of our hotels are very large within Dubai, but you would have to think we would be up in the region if we were in that number of hotels [35-40 open within five years] we would certainly be in the region of 20,000, 25,000, maybe even 30,000 {employees]”.

He added: “We’re a labour-intensive industry but we keep saying; tourism travel and hospitality is a great provider of jobs and jobs is what its all about at the moment on a global basis. There are 235 million people working in the industry right now, expected to go to 300 million in five years”.

Jumeirah Group’s pipeline of hotels expected to open over the coming years includes projects in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Qatar, as well as hotels in Indonesia, Bangkok, Anguilla and five properties in China.

To assist with recruitment at the upcoming Chinese properties, Lawless said he was looking to introduce an incentive scheme for Chinese employees working in at Jumeirah’s Dubai properties.

“We believe the culture of Jumeirah can be exported very effectively through Chinese colleagues who have worked here for a number of years,” asserted Lawless. “So we’re working out an incentive programme to say to your Chinese colleagues, ‘look if you go back to China and you don’t have to stay forever, go back for a year, a year and a half, we will guarantee you a job with Jumeirah whether in Dubai or somewhere else, but we want you to go back into China initially’.

“I said this on a one to one basis to a number of Chinese colleagues, in fact I was talking to a Chinese chef last night and said ‘what would you think if we did this programme’ and he said he was absolutely thrilled to do it.”

“I think the human capital is always the most important part of a hotel and we in Jumeriah recognise that, we drive our brand through the people that work for us, that’s not just talk, we believe in that and to do it effectively we have to do programmes like I’ve just described. We have to be aware that we need to populate our hotels with a number of Jumeirah colleagues who have already worked for Jumeirah for a number of years which gives us a great potential and great career potential for all of our colleagues to not only be able to develop in Dubai but out of Dubai as well,” Lawless explained.

He added: “Within the region itself, if we get things together in terms of good vocational education within the region, within the Middle East region I think we will have a lot more qualified Arab employees who would come and work for us and I really do hope that ultimately that will occur as well”.