Tips from hospitality TAs: How to move fast and be strategic with new tools

“Getting the business to understand they needed a tool, data, to enhance employer brand, too, was really hard because the priority was all just hiring, getting people through the door.” - Alev Çağatay, Head Of People at Pasta Evangelists

Alev Çağatay, Head Of People at Pasta Evangelists, shared this at an event hosted by Pinpoint and Tech on Toast. No doubt, this experience is familiar to most TAs in hospitality recruitment.

We hear repeatedly that TA leaders want to turn their hiring data into actionable strategy but struggle to prioritize it over pace. However, we’ve also seen those leaders prove it’s possible.

Based on stories from TA leaders, this article explores four real examples of how to focus on both speed and strategy and create a virtuous feedback loop between the two.

1. Source smarter to source faster

Pasta Evangelists used to have no approval process for advertising a role. This meant hiring managers could spend what they wanted, where they wanted, without any oversight from TA. This felt faster for hiring managers but didn’t necessarily impact time to fill.

The simplest first step was to implement a manual approval process. Yes, it slowed the hiring managers a little. But it meant that the TA team could track where good candidates were coming from and if paid ads were impacting time to fill and quality of hire. It also meant the business could better see what it was spending.

With this data, TA could guide hiring managers on the best, fastest route to fill a role. It also reduced spending—good for hiring managers’ budgets.

When the team went on to look for a new ATS, they knew they wanted a platform that could mirror this process and build on it, making it even faster to get insights on what sources were working for which roles.

With Pinpoint, you can filter reports by job to see what channels drive applications and how many candidates are in each stage of the process.

2. Take small steps to make giant leaps with hiring managers

Push too far too fast with strategy, and you won’t get adoption. Hiring managers will do workarounds or won’t provide the data or responses you need to move your strategy forward. Meaning all push and no pace.

For some teams, bitesize improvements are the way to go. Pasta Evangelists and the hotel group citizenM took this approach when rolling out Pinpoint. They planned for a longer overall project to get incremental improvements faster—and results that would stick.

Both followed four key steps:

1. Sell the dream. Figure out what you want to achieve. Then, look at it from the hiring manager’s point of view. Describe that future state in a way that highlights how it benefits hiring managers and the business.

We needed to consider our capacity within the team, the volume of recruitment that we do, and the fact that ultimately they [hiring managers] are responsible for hiring decisions. We drive the process. But they will ultimately take the final decisions, and they have to take responsibility for the people that they want to hire. So we can support. But they have to also get empowered.” Talent Acquisition Manager, citizenM

1. Continue to build trust. Include hiring managers in your project. Gather feedback on what they find painful and what they’d love to see. Make sure you listen to their feedback. And keep them engaged so that your relationships are strong when you’re ready to start rolling out something new. As Alev said, “You need to make them think ‘they’re doing this to help me’.”
2. Find the hook. Once you have a new tool or process ready to go, identify an element that is easy to implement and will make life easier and faster for hiring managers. For citizenM, this was Pinpoint’s calendar integration, which means candidates can book their own interviews. As Davide Verucci, Talent Acquisition Manager, says, "While there is an initial hurdle of learning the system, the hook for a lot of them of this automated process is really good.”
3. Take it one step at a time. Pasta Evangelists didn’t give its hiring managers complete control when it went live with Pinpoint. Instead, Alev and her team gradually empowered them. Similarly, citizenM gave more support to hiring managers on the first few roles. With a little repetition, TA could step back, knowing hiring managers could confidently run their parts of the process. And TA was free to get their work done faster.

3. Get what you want by knowing what you want

If you’re looking for a new tool, it means you’re experiencing acute pain. But, resist the temptation to make a snap decision based on the pitch of one feature. Once again, living with what you have for a little longer helps you get where you want to be faster.

Why?

Because doing your homework and knowing what you need for your vision of recruitment means you can go out, be bold, and ask for it. It means you can:

• Whittle down the market more quickly.
• Be more confident a system will work for you because the sales process can focus on clarifying expectations on both sides.
• Ensure a faster implementation because everyone already knows what they need to do.

Pasta Evangelists interrogated each shortlisted ATS provider deeply over several meetings. The team brought the CTO in for technical discussions on APIs for integrations. And Alev wasn’t shy in asking for what she wanted.

Once they chose Pinpoint, it took only two months to be up and running, with everyone trained and ready to hire. And after launching, Pasta Evangelists kept its time to hire to one week while boosting candidate NPS to an impressive 9.5. It was a similar story for New York Public Library—a non-profit that faces the same high-volume, candidates-as-customers recruitment challenges as hospitality—which went live with its 400+ hiring managers in six weeks.

4. Lay the groundwork for speedy senior leadership sign-off

Alev Çağatay got sign off from her senior leadership team for a new ATS in just two meetings. How? She put in the groundwork so that when she was ready to ask, they were ready to say yes.

This meant doing a deep dive into the priorities the board would care about most. She did pre-research so that when she started talking to vendors, she knew the value of the improvements any ATS would need to deliver for them to resonate with leadership. She also spoke to the CFO and CTO in advance so that when it came to the board meeting, she already had the backing of 50% of the room.

As with hiring managers, you need to:

• Solicit what the SLT is looking for and include it in any new project.
• Understand the business strategy and how your project serves it.
• Figure out who your most formidable challengers will be and spend extra time with them one-on-one to get them on side early.

Do all this, and the conversation is already live when you are ready to ask for what you need. And you can get the ‘yes’ fast when you need it.

‍