Erik Schmidt: People might not be super familiar with the name IHG, but you guys own dozens of the most recognizable names in hospitality. Tell me a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you hire.
Eunice Clements-Tweedie: At IHG, we have 20 brands, half a million colleagues and around six and a half thousand hotels globally from Tahiti to Tokyo, you name it. We have properties around the world segmented into luxury, mainstream, and essentials. The hiring component of this is interesting because we have a mixed model between franchised, managed and IHG-owned properties. Because we don't do the recruiting across all of our estate it's very difficult to say the exact number of hires we make. But broadly speaking, you are probably looking at around 45,000 hires a year across our total estate.
ES: It sounds complex — what tactics do you use to make things more efficient?
ECT: When I joined in 2022, all our recruiters fell under the local regions, in the market under different functions. I centralized our TA function on the first day of 2023 — such a memorable moment during my tenure here at IHG — and now we have recruiting hubs across the world. We've got a big hub in the Americas that covers the Americas, Canada, Mexico, and the Philippines. Then we have another big hiring operation across EMEAA, and finally the awesome Greater China TA team. We have many IHG corporate hubs that fall within those three core regions.
Think of a donut — our recruiting teams are the middle, the jam in that donut. Then the enabling infrastructure, which is the round bit of the donut, that is the silent running of the operation. On the left, it's technology, it's innovation, data and insights, governance policies, eccetera. Then on the right, you've got brand and marketing, digital and social. You've got the infrastructure which enables the core to burn brightly. Everything is a symbiotic relationship. Nothing works without the other. You've got the storytelling piece which shouts about all the amazing things we're doing. Our operational excellence team ensures that things work brilliantly and keeps everything super safe. Then, going back to the middle, it’s the recruiting operations team which is the heart of what we do — it connects the engaged candidates to jobs and then pulls them through to hire.
ES: Hospitality has always been a competitive candidate market, made even more challenging by Covid. How have you handled the turmoil of the last few years?
ECT: I joined back in 2022, during a period of intersection post-Covid, when our hotels were still feeling the burn of not being able to staff their properties correctly, which was having an impact on the bottom line. The love of hospitality and its reputation had really been battered. Societal views around hospitality were flat. Confidence in traveling was flat. Travelers' confidence in themselves to travel was flat. Migration of workers back to their home countries created a talent vacuum. So much going on and so much to deal with — both practically and reputationally. So, there was something around building the love back up around travel, staying in beautiful hotels or affordable hotels to fuel other experiences, remembering that memories are not made alone, and so on.
Another key component of our talent and attraction strategy was to re-frame our EVP: “Room for You.” Through intentional storytelling, engaging content, and new and boosted channels and social platforms, suddenly IHG’s employer brand exploded into the market at a time that really mattered and we went from a handful of website visits to just under six million visits last year, with 50% of those visitors going to apply for a role at IHG.
So we are delighted with some of the results we've been seeing which are just extraordinary — we’ve gone from a flat line to a very, very fast heartbeat. In terms of the labor market and how it’s affected this industry, I definitely think it's steadied. I think in certain countries it is still very difficult to get talent, but overall we have a really unique selling point at IHG because we have multiple brands under our master brands. We've got 19 brands and they're segmented from uber luxury to uber affordable, Six Senses all the way down to Holiday Inn Express, and our message is: Whatever your budget, there is a bed for you — and that is very different from some of the other big hospitality giants.
So we are delighted with some of the results we've been seeing which are just extraordinary — we’ve gone from a flat line to a very, very fast heartbeat.
ES: What are some specific strategies you’ve used to attract candidates?
ECT: One thing we did was a targeted value proposition (TVP) for luxury general managers. In our luxury portfolio, we've got five luxury brands where we manage these hotels for our owners. So IHG employs the general manager but an owner would own the property and the colleagues within the hotel. Pre-myself and the team, typically the owners of the hotels, were using agencies to help them find general managers, and it was costing around $80,000 per hire. Which is a significant amount over 350 hotels if you needed a new General Manager. We do move a huge amount of GM’s around our properties but with our high net growth we were finding that we were running out and buying a huge amount of talent in this space.
So I set up a “hit squad” of talented headhunters to source and target luxury general managers into these properties. Alongside that, we did a TVP around why these incredible managers should join IHG, focusing on the growth story, focusing on our luxury brands, the fact that we have such global mobility, we've got incredible benefits, amazing tenure — we went to market with that, not really knowing if it was going to work or not. But our owners were delighted. We've been up and running for two years now and since we’re hiring all our luxury general managers directly, I'm pretty sure we've saved IHG probably $10 million as a result of our owners not having to pay $80,000 pounds a pop to hire a GM. A real testament of impact and value creation within TA.
ES: What does staffing a new property look like? How do you hire all those people — the right people — quickly and efficiently?
ECT: This is the magic of hospitality. You've got two scenarios: You are either building a hotel (which takes a few years) from scratch or you are flipping a hotel, which means you’re taking an asset and then rebranding it, which is the quicker scenario (sometimes only a few months). This is where our incredible general managers come in.
Ideally, we would have a general manager in queue 18 months before opening, and then they would be on site nine months before opening and they would hire three critical roles for that property. They would hire somebody to look after the finances, somebody to look after the marketing and sales, and then somebody to help with the HR side of things. That forms the leadership team of that hotel. Then those leaders who are hired start recruiting for the rest of the roles - sometimes in the 100’s per property. But it starts with finding the right general manager — they are managing this multi-million asset property, looking after that P&L for the owners all the way down to choosing carpets, wallpaper, signing off a signature cocktail, choosing the risotto dish of the day. It’s a monumental effort.
What has been a huge benefit from us is using technology. Paradox was an easy partner of choice — great minds, great values, and a great tech stack. We implemented a CRM that has allowed us to move away from dozens of spreadsheets and trackers to an integrated platform where we can tag and queue potential GMs, so when a role does pop up where we need to “buy” rather than “build” we can dive straight into the CRM and match the need to the talent. A great example of talent before need that accelerates our hiring process and ultimately enables those properties to have a GM at the helm, fast.
