The management team: Karim Shawky, director of rooms; Rohit Salunke, director of engineering; Emmanuel Comble, director of sales and marketing; Mark Sittl, hotel manager; Christophe Schnyder, general manager; Olivier Chaleil, executive chef; David Hirber, director of food and beverage; Sayed Edroos, director of human resources; Navin Shah, director of finance.
Building a Team
Also in the planning for a long period was the team set up, with director of human resources Sayed Edroos leading the search to fill around 650 initial positions at the resort.
For his executive team, Schnyder set out some basic requirements for recruits: the team had to have multicultural or Middle Eastern experience in order to deal with the resort’s clientele as well as its staff, while prior experience of working on a pre-opening team was essential, as was working in large operations in the luxury segment.
“Our director of HR went on 14 or 15 recruitment trips,” explains Schnyder. “Even if you start one year in advance, start looking at CVs, start interviewing — we have a workforce now of 650 — on average we conducted three interviews per position so it’s a large number of interviews.”
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A delay in opening (the resort was originally meant to open in December 2012) also posed a few challenges for the hotel, he admits and to avoid losing staff after recruitment, the management decided to postpone hiring a full team.
“If you bring everyone on board in January and we open only in April or May, we would lose some people because you can only do so much training. After a while they really don’t want to keep learning and they want to start doing the real job they were hired for,” he says.
Once recruitment was completed, the teams got down to training right away in order to prepare for the opening.
“Once the ambassadors arrived, we had the theoretical training about all the Sofitel standards, and then we started with role plays, followed by brainstorming sessions to comment on how the process works and could be improved,” explains director of rooms, Karim Shawky.
The F&B team also began training by familiarising themselves with the basics — something David Hirber stressed on.
Trainings were divided into three components: “All of our ambassadors have enjoyed thorough training on basics such as fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, water, juices, teas, coffee — so one component was the basic knowledge of F&B.
The second is the Sofitel service that needs to be followed. The third component is the outlet’s individual fine-tuning of the general standards and it remains one of our hardest and most difficult tasks to do,” he says.
“Some of the ambassadors have never had F&B exposure due to the culture, due to the background, due to the origin. So if I look at what they have achieved already and if we continue at the same pace over the next couple of months, we will get there,” he optimistically states.
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