The 5 biggest mistakes hospitality companies make when onboarding new starters

1. No one ‘owns’ the new starter pre day 1

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Recruitment teams tend to think that once a candidate has accepted an offer and signed a contract, that’s their job done.

And management teams tend to think that a new team member becomes their responsibility when they walk through the door on day one.

Both attitudes are perfectly understandable, but it leaves an awkward hiatus for new starters. There’s the initial excitement about getting and accepting the offer, but then nothing really happens and they’re not sure what’s going on.

Improving your ‘pre day 1’ experience is a great way to improve your speed to alignment (the time it takes for a new starter to feel like they ‘get’ and ‘belong’ to your brand and can make a significant contribution to your team). And if you have a lot of no shows or people who drop out of your process at a late stage, improving the pre day 1 experience could save you a lot of money.

Check out these 3 tips for improving the pre day 1 experience of new starters.

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2. Not automating the admin

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Digital contracts. Right to work checks. Getting bank account details and P45s. Completing the tax declaration. Compliance training. Creating new accounts on the POS, rota, LMS etc, etc.

It all needs to be done. And it’s boring as hell.

If you leave it to people to manage all this stuff, things get missed. Or they’re done last minute or there are errors. 

And frankly, managers have better things to do than chasing people to fill in forms.

So automate it and give people the time back.
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3. Not personalising the experience

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In the old days, hospitality companies could get away with a bit of a ‘one size fits all’ employee experience. Before Covid and Brexit no one was really worried about whether they could attract and retain the people they needed to staff restaurant teams.

But there are now 100,000+ unfilled vacancies in the UK hospitality sector and the best people have a real choice about who they work for.

If you want to be successful in this new environment, you need to recognise two things:
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1. Employees expect an employee experience that lives up to their expectations and experiences as consumers. This is especially true of Gen Z who’ve grown up with the iPhone, Netflix, Amazon, Instagram, etc. Employees now expect a digital experience at work that feels seamless, personalised and responsive.
    
2. You need an employee experience that appeals to more than one talent pool or persona. If you’re starting a new job and you’re an experienced hospitality pro, your expectations and needs will be different to someone who’s starting their first job or someone who’s an ex-offender or someone who’s returning from parental leave or someone who’s switching from another industry. Your onboarding experience should reflect this.

Meaningful personalisation of the onboarding experience starts with collecting new sources of data. It’s very difficult to create personalised, resonant employee experiences if the only thing your systems know about your people is their name, address and NI number.

The good news is that it’s very easy to set up an AI chatbot that can help you get a more holistic perspective on your new starters.  So you can find out things like: what else is going on in their life? Are they studying? Working another job? What other commitments do they have? What do they want to get out of working for you? What’s important to them? How long do they expect to stay at your company? What would make them leave?

When you marry this insight with your stats on speed to effectiveness, speed to alignment and 90 day turnover, you start to get the insight you need about how you can meaningfully segment your employee base. So you can identify the opportunities to personalise the onboarding experience in a way that makes life better for the new starter while also improving business outcomes.

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4. Not getting insight from the new starter

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Every new person who joins your business is an opportunity for you to learn and get better. New starters have this unique, liminal perspective on your business. They’re half in, but they can still look at everything with curiosity and a fresh pair of eyes.

Personally, I think this is a huge and under-utilised opportunity for hospitality companies.

Imagine the insight you could get if you asked every new starter:
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• What aspects of our customer experience don’t live up to our brand values?
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• Which aspects of our employee experience are in tension with our values?
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• What was the best thing about our recruitment process?
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• One idea that would improve the efficiency of the restaurant?
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• One idea that would improve the customer experience?
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• The best thing about the last place you worked?
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• One idea that you’ve seen work elsewhere that you think we should test?

Honestly, the scope for insight is huge. And again, using an AI chatbot to manage this means the enquiry can feel like a natural conversation that responds to the individual and what they want to talk about, rather than pushing everyone through an inflexible questionnaire.

And you can and should also be using automations to get regular feedback from new starters throughout their first 90 days. How was your first day? First week? These regular snapshots can help you identify the peaks and troughs in your onboarding journey, which means you can focus in on the areas where you can improve.

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5. Not looking at the situational factors that influence your 90 day turnover

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Working in hospitality isn’t easy. And it isn’t for everyone.

But that truth has given rise to a bit of a myth: that successful recruitment in hospitality is about finding the right person, with the right personality… and trying to avoid hiring people who 'haven’t got what it takes'.

If you approach it with this attitude, then onboarding a new starter can become a bit of an exercise in throwing eggs at a wall to see which one doesn’t break. And I’ve seen some hospitality companies where they deliberately overload new starters as a bit of a right of passage to see if they’re resilient enough to make it.

The reality is a bit more complicated.

Yes, there are likely to be things you can find out about a recruitment candidate that will make it more likely they’ll thrive in your company. That could be certain personality traits. It could be past experiences. Or it could be their motivations and expectations.

But there are also a whole host of situational factors that almost certainly influence whether a new starter chooses to stay with you. These are likely to include:
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• The stability of the team they join (it’s probably easier to be a new starter in an otherwise stable team than to join a team with high turnover and lots of other inexperienced colleagues)
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• The behaviour or approach of their manager
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• Whether they form a positive informal mentoring relationship with a buddy or teammate
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• Their rota pattern… things like whether they get 2 days off in a row; whether they get the hours and days they were hoping for; how soon they get scheduled onto the busiest shifts, etc.

If you’re not including this type of data in your model, then you’re going to miss some of the controllable factors that you could change to improve your 90 day turnover. And instead, you’re likely to fall into the trap of searching for this mythical holy grail of a personality test or assessment that will enable you to predict who’s going to be successful in your business and who isn’t.

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If you’d like to find out more about how Youda can help you improve your onboarding experience, why not book time for a quick chat with me now.