HOTELIER: What are the challenges faced in hiring people with different training backgrounds, and how do you overcome this?

Sharon Barcock: The biggest challenge is getting people that are qualified, because in this region we are sourcing, typically, expats. It’s very rare that we get local people into spas and that’s been a challenge for a very long time, even though we are seeing a change in the ownership, particularly of private spas.

Paul Hawco: I guess for us more so around diversification. We are trying and we have tried to bring therapists mostly from other demographics — UK, Spain, Portugal, South Africa. We are aware that when we do that, there’s usually a short-term investment. If we get around 18-24 months out of that, then that’s a success. We want to diversify to meet the needs and demands of guests coming as well. But our challenges are that it’s not their first choice of place to be, so you have to make it quite a nice, incentivised package. They have to be paid slightly more and managed well.

Galina Antoniouk: I will totally agree. Another big challenge is staff retention, because you really invest a lot in their training, and very rarely do we get therapists who are qualified from other five-star hotels. And then you find out the standards are different so you have to train them. And when they leave, it’s the whole process of finding staff and training them again. I would say it’s an ongoing process and you have to always have a couple of CVs to make sure you are ready to replace people straight away. Sometimes you take a risk because if you interview them on Skype, you don’t do practical assessments.

HOTELIER: So training is an issue?

Paul: It starts with the base level coming into the region. They’re not as qualified as a lot of regions, and we hire different grades or levels of spa therapists and beauty therapists. Part of the issue is that we need to fill these positions and sometimes we compromise on the overall quality. But then we have to be the ones elevating the training. Working in other countries, the therapists are fully trained. You just have to brand train them and on their menu. And they run with it. They don’t come at that level here.

HOTELIER: Is all training done in-house, or are there places you can send your therapists?

Sharon: There is now, since we have had the start of all of the governments wanting to have certain legislations about the qualification. That started a chain reaction so there are a couple of locations that are doing training now. One of them being The Product House, and The Healing Zone that is doing theirs. But you’re talking about a very small expat population that is at a point where they may be leaving college and want to become a therapist, and then they pay to go through the training. Because accommodation is not available, people are not going to come here to do training. Maybe a therapist will come here and invest in themselves but companies are not, at this point, allocating funding to put them through training. For therapists coming here, it’s just a job for a lot of them. It’s a very different perspective to countries where people are investing in their future and see it as a long-term career.

Paul: I think an academy could be viable here. It could be used, not just for therapists, but for bringing in lifeguards, doormen. Everyone wants to come to Dubai to be something more, to develop a career, to learn, to be challenged, to be ambitious. It could definitely be a recipe for helping offset the challenges of overall recruitment. For us it’s more a talent gap than a recruitment gap. We have no issues with finding people, we have low attrition; it’s a strong business model and we’re busy and we have more people moving within. We have fixed term but we hire part-time as well during high season — for six month visas. That gets us through the high season. Another thing is that there are no part-time workers either — a lot of other markets have part-time.

Sharon: In the UK you would typically have on-call service. You can’t do that here. It is a very different structure.

Paul: So instead of having enough staff, we’re tight on service providers. In my opinion, if you call a spa and you can’t get an appointment it’s because there aren’t enough therapists. We did some math on that to justify recruiting, and in our model we said that a therapist does 2.5 treatments a week more than they are paid for. It’s worth having them.

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