Hiring on ice

Following reports of recruitment freezes at companies across the Middle East, Caterer Middle East met up with F&B professionals at Zuma Dubai, DIFC, to find out whether the end of the employment ice age was near, how this had impacted the industry and what other recruitment challenges were affecting the regional market

Has your property implemented a recruitment freeze at any point since last year?

Nicoleta Cucos: Yes, at Towers Rotana we have. It’s a normal reaction in the current climate — in times of change we all have to react somehow and it was our belief that this was the best step to take. Now we are recruiting again, but only for key vacancies.

Yvonnick Jegat-Deniau: We have implemented a recruitment freeze whereby we do not hire new employees and we do not replace the employees that left due to end of contract reasons.

We had to adapt to this period by working with fewer employees and managing their working hours so that business was not affected.

Swiss Johnson: Shangri-La has a philosophy of hiring selectively during the economic downturn. And in addition to full-time employees, we also take on numerous hospitality graduates who join us as trainees and are assigned to various departments throughout their tenure here to give them an overview of the hospitality industry.

Despo Pishiri: From our side, we didn’t ever implement a freeze as such, but we decided this year that we would only hire for key positions. We wanted to proceed cautiously and see how things would pan out.

But we are back on track now regarding hiring practices — in May we started recruiting normally again.

Ruben Tieken: I think we’re the odd one out here, because we actually had to kick the recruitment machine into a higher gear when most operations around here were putting a stop to hiring. When we opened we were luckily successful enough to need more staff rather than simply replacing essential members who left.

But recruiting at this time was difficult, because there were obviously a lot of people suddenly floating around and generally the first ones to be let go are those who aren’t that good. So we were sifting through huge numbers of resumés and being extra careful with our hiring process.

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Desmond Ephraim: We have been cautious; for the first quarter things were pretty good and now things are getting a little slack. So with our new property we’re opening in Dubai Marina, we’re just pulling out a few people from each of our other hotels rather than bringing in new staff.

Pishiri: We have done the same thing; and it is this continued and careful redistribution that helps us to keep our employees in a secure job.

Cucos: We also took advantage of hotel transfers, so that our employees could move to suitable positions at new Rotana properties. But in terms of the recruiting we are now doing for key positions, it’s a good time because there are so many top performers available.

Tieken: That’s true, there are a lot of people job-hunting at the moment. That’s why we’re not advertising, because if you do that right now you have to sort through thousands of resumés. So we’re doing it through networking, through recommendations from people we’ve already hired.

 What is the most difficult F&B role to fill and why?

Jegat-Deniau: Assistant F&B manager or F&B manager, as the employee needs to be qualified and able to manage operations smoothly in a period where we have a shortage of staff.

Cucos: Sometimes it’s challenging to get the right candidate, the right skilled chef, for a certain type of cuisine; someone who can create food to very high expectations.

Ephraim: At this point in time, we don’t really find any role too difficult to fill. We believe whenever we have a new opportunity we should recruit internally and as a group of hotels we have a big pool of staff to draw from; people who have been with the company quite a while, climbing the ladder. So when we do need to recruit it is only for entry-level positions.

Tieken: We have found it very difficult to find chefs with specific skill-sets in this region. For instance, Japanese chefs who can make sushi, sashimi, robata — they are still hard to find.

The good ones get paid really good money in Japan so they don’t want to leave, and others are so Japanese that they prefer to stay in their home country.