Is your recruitment too restrictive?

When the airline JetBlue was first founded and began screening candidates for its flight crew, one of the people they hired was a former fireman. He didn’t have experience working for an airline but, having rescued people from burning buildings, he understood how to care for people. A similar hiring approach might be helpful in the foodservice industry, where labor is a perennial challenge. While human resources experts tend to agree that a 10-15 percent annual turnover rate is healthy across all industries, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found the average annual turnover rate in the foodservice industry to be nearly 80 percent over the past decade. That makes it especially important to be able to attract and retain the right staff.
Yet the latest methods for recruiting and screening potential candidates may be leaving talent behind, according to a recent roundtable discussion held by the Institute of Hospitality. Specifically, the use of conventional HR practices, paired with artificial intelligence to screen candidates, may be detrimental to certain candidates who can perform well in their job but have invisible disabilities or conditions that affect social interaction or communication. As a result, something as routine as a group interview or a trial shift might introduce barriers for a candidate who could perform well in a role. AI-supported screening systems can compound these issues by overlooking transferable skills from outside of the industry – or by misinterpreting facial expressions or communication styles. Similarly, recruitment or training materials that aren’t in a candidate’s native language may present barriers too.
Looking at your recruitment processes, are there opportunities to broaden your scope when seeking ideal candidates? Do the tools you currently use to identify candidates inadvertently screen out people who, with training, could bring valuable skills to your business?