Humanizing hospitality industry human resources management to improve recruitment and retention of resilient hospitable talents in the sector

Attracting, retaining, developing, and motivating hospitable talent is a perennial problem in hospitality industry talent management. This thesis sought to address this problem by examining how human resource (HR) practices can improve talent management (TM) to attract persons with the right personal characteristics and support them to thrive in a hospitality career. There has been a shift in the academic literature from a focus on the organisational practices of talent management to understanding the implications of the employee’s experience as they develop within an organisation. There remains much to be understood about the role of human resources management (HRM) practitioners in the attraction and retention of talents with the right personal attributes to succeed in hospitality careers. This thesis aims to advance the theoretical understanding of HR theories and strategies to improve recruitment and retention in the hospitality industry.

To meet the aim of this research, a mixed method approach and a sequential data collection approach was adopted. A personality self-profiling questionnaire survey was used to profile 309 students from business management degree programmes on their hospitable personal characteristics to understand whether students selecting hospitality management degrees had more hospitable characteristics. A Delphi study was conducted with 14 hospitality experts with different national and international hospitality leadership and management experience. The study aimed to research consensus on the strategic HR approaches required to improve recruitment and retention in the hospitality industry.

The main findings of the research study were the need to review HR strategies in the hospitality industry. These strategies need to address recruitment and retention by promoting careers in the sector, investing in training and development, rewards and wellbeing strategies appropriate for a younger work force, closer working with training institutions to develop graduate competencies that are multi-disciplinary HRM practices and policies that humanize HRM throughout the employee journey.

This study makes an important contribution to understanding the role of humane HRM strategies in recruitment and retention of a skilled and resilient hospitality workforce. One of the outcomes of this study is the development of a theoretically supported and empirically validated strategic HRM recruitment and retention toolkit. The toolkit is an end-to-end process that operationalizes and maps the HRM strategies throughout the employee experience journey to facilitate HR managers to improve the process of recruitment and retention in the sector. It identifies empirically found strategies and reveals possibilities to integrate an end-to-end strategic approach in talent management prioritizing employee wellbeing, training and development to nurture employee emotional resilience. This is the first research study to illuminate an end-to-end strategic approach towards an employee journey in the hospitality industry. To identify the scope of research to be explored in the future, implications for future research and practice are outlined.