Project reference · Hospitality
Hiring a hotel that does not exist yet.
A luxury hotel group was opening a new property in the Gulf. Restaurants, bars, a spa and a pool club all had to open on the same morning, fully staffed. The building had a date. Recruitment had about three months.
Around 26 positions briefed at once
Scope
Three months to signed offers
Timeline
A seven-stage funnel, modelled first
Method
Written progress reports, daily
Control
The method
We worked out how many applications it would take, before running the first advert
The brief
What the client actually needed
A pre-opening hire is not the same problem as replacing leavers. There is no team to absorb a gap, no quiet month to catch up in, and the date belongs to the building.
Around twenty-six positions were briefed at once and had to be filled in parallel — front office, several restaurants and bars, a spa and a pool club. Every one of them needed working English, hospitality experience and the willingness to move country for it.
The hard parts
Where it gets difficult
A date that cannot move
An opening date is announced long before the hiring starts, and it is set by construction and by bookings already taken. Recruitment absorbs every delay upstream of it.
Planned, not improvised
We modelled the funnel before spending anything: how many applications, calls, interviews and invitations it takes to put a given number of people on a floor, with a drop-off rate assumed at every stage and the media budget costed against it.
Two selection formats at once
A two-day selection event with the client interviewing face to face, and a parallel video round for candidates and managers who could not be in the room — both feeding one shortlist on one timetable.
Reported daily, not weekly
Through the busiest month the team filed written progress reports every working day, with call statistics attributed to each caller. On a fixed deadline the client needs to watch the funnel move, not be told afterwards that it did not.
Getting the client into the country
Before a single interview could happen we had to issue invitation letters and certified translations so the client’s own managers could obtain Ukrainian visas — then find and fit out a venue, and print everything in it.
It does not end at the opening
Hospitality turns over. Individual job orders carried on for a year after the doors opened, and the search widened into neighbouring countries as the easy local supply was used up.
What we did
One partner, from the media plan to the medical check
- A costed advertising plan across the Ukrainian job boards, on a run schedule rather than a single burst.
- An outbound calling operation with a written script, per-caller lists and daily statistics.
- CV screening, phone interviews and video interviews with the client’s own managers, all tracked in one system.
- A two-day selection event: venue, agenda, signage, printed materials, logistics and visas for the client team.
- Offer letters, employment contracts, pre-employment medicals, start dates and handover.
The client briefed one Ukrainian partner and got a staffed floor on opening day, rather than managing an advertising agency, a call centre, a recruiter and a visa handler against someone else’s deadline.
How we work
We do not show you another company’s name
The client, the property and the people are not named here, and they will not be named in a meeting either. We are glad to talk this project through in detail — what we cannot do is discuss the last client that way with you, or you with the next one.
Next step
Opening something, or staffing it?
If you have a date you cannot move and a headcount you have not started on, thirty minutes is usually enough to tell you whether the plan is realistic.
