Helping Radisson Blu rebuild their team after COVID

The Challenge

Finding the right candidates with the right mindset

Conrad Geske is the General Manager of Radisson Blu’s Hamburg Airport location and runs the day-to-day operations of the hotel. It’s a busy hotel, with 266 rooms and an average occupancy of around 80% all year round. 

Since the COVID pandemic, Conrad’s has also been in charge of the hiring process. This can be a challenge because of his hotel’s location. “What makes it difficult to hire in our case is the location”, he explains, “because most staff want to work in the city centre of Hamburg, and they don’t like to travel out to the airport for work.” The pandemic also saw many trained hotel professionals leave the industry.

Conrad feels that for the hotel industry, the biggest challenge is recruitment. “I think worldwide right now the biggest hurdle to successfully run your hotel is to find the right people for the right job.” 

Building a successful team means looking beyond skills and experience. “The traditional ways, hiring staff that you know have the right experience, the right knowledge, I think that doesn’t apply anymore. What we are looking for is to hire staff that have the right mindset.”

The three biggest pain points Conrad and Radisson Blu needed to solve were:

• Finding the right job boards to reach candidates
• Creating an application process that identifies candidates with the right mindset
• Continuously attracting new candidates to facilitate industry growth

With the help of JOIN’s easy-to-use talent attraction software, they’re solving these problems and rebuilding their team.

“Whenever I post via JOIN, I know I’ll get the result and hire somebody, and the return on investment is absolutely worth it.”

Conrad Geske

General Manager

The Solution

Radisson Blu partnered with JOIN to solve their recruitment woes

As the hospitality industry began to recover from the COVID pandemic, Conrad found himself organising recruitment on top of all his other responsibilities, and he was struggling. “I was frustrated one day, really frustrated, because our business was picking up and we couldn’t find staff.”

For Conrad, it was a hassle to organise recruitment through a variety of platforms and job boards. He went searching online for a better solution, and he found all-in-one software – JOIN.

Here’s how JOIN’s easy-to-use talent attraction solution has helped Radisson Blu build their team:

JOIN has streamlined the hiring process

Before, Conrad was juggling Harri, Hotel Jobs and LinkedIn, as well as testing the recruitment potential of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The way that JOIN centralises all of these platforms in one place and allows Radisson Blu to multipost to different boards was a revelation. He says “What I really like about JOIN, is how efficient it is. You create your ad in one place and then you can just spread it everywhere with one click!”

JOIN has allowed Radisson Blu to take full advantage of different boards and platforms

Trying to figure out which job boards work best for different kinds of jobs was overwhelming for Conrad, especially when it came to social media. But, thanks to JOIN’s multiposting, he can take full advantage of all the different platforms out there:

“I really like that I don’t have to worry about posting the content. I do it one time in JOIN, then I just click the button, and the job ad just goes out.” 

Conrad has been pleasantly surprised at how many great candidates he’s been able to recruit through social media: 

“Instagram and Facebook work well for new junior positions in the service industry, but we even hired a restaurant manager posting on Instagram. There was a time when I had to fill eight positions at the front office, and we just used the ‘social media special’ and filled all positions with JOIN’s social media bundle.”

JOIN’s smooth, easy-to-use software lets Radisson Blu snap up the best candidates before the competition

Conrad has found that candidates applying to work with Radisson Blu rarely apply to only one job. “They’re not applying just to my advertisement, they apply everywhere!” 

Because of this, hiring companies need to act quickly to arrange interviews with promising talent or risk losing them to their competitors. 

JOIN’s smooth user experience for both hiring companies and candidates means applications can be assessed and processed very quickly, something top candidates appreciate, and Radisson Blu have been able to gain an advantage in a competitive recruitment market.

What kind of results has Radisson Blu achieved with JOIN?

Conrad stumbled across JOIN while searching for an alternative recruitment solution, and was so intrigued he signed up without head office clearance. He saw immediate results and quickly began to spread the word to other hiring managers within Radisson. 

Since then, JOIN has become their main hiring software, and Conrad is now getting triple the number of candidates he was getting before, so many that he’s taken to recommending them to his colleagues:

“I have to refer candidates to colleagues within Radisson or colleagues around the airport now. I have a lot of great applicants, and not enough positions!”

What does the future hold?

Conrad is very optimistic about the future of the hotel industry. “I think it’s going crazy this year. We’re gonna almost reach pre-pandemic levels and occupancy.” 

This, of course, means he’ll need to keep expanding his team, using JOIN: 

“We have a really strong focus on middle management and F&B Manager, Restaurant Manager and supervisors, and the plan is just to go to JOIN. Because the results that we’re getting, for the time and money being invested, are great.”