Hotel Tech Pays More, But Is It Better? | Edouard Clark

Speaker A: Let's talk about hotel tech startups. Um, a lot of young and inexperienced but super intelligent people working there, but they don't have the life experience of, of uh, of hiring and firing people of the whole life cycle. Um, so is they'll, they'll sign someone up, they'll recruit someone and on the first day there's no onboarding plan. Hotel tech isn't just a big industry, uh, one market where everyone kind of is uh, the same. It all starts in the recruitment stage and even in the job description. It's, it's all, it's actually, it's all about expectation setting. Uh, so what I usually ask my clients to do is explain to them what the worst week looks like working for you because there will be some bad days. No one really knows what someone in a certain position, certain hierarchy, um, and department should be earning or what is the average earnings, uh, depending on the geography that you're in, the product that you work for. Some companies are using uh, AI to hire people and I'd say 90% of the uh, feedback I get from anyone in the process, whether they're a hiring manager or a candidate. A job seeker, huh, Is negative. I saw my, my father was always working for um, a very, ah, large company and I always felt like he was just treated like a number, you know. After working for 25 years for the same company, he got made redundant and they hired lawyers to get as much out of his severance, uh, pay as much as possible biting him. And it caused him so much stress that it caused him to have a heart attack. I told myself I'm never ever going to let myself be in a position like that.

Speaker B: Do you know what? I believe that's the biggest lie in hospitality.

Speaker A: The biggest lie. No. You're listening to Schulering Hub, um, talking hospitality with Mauricio Schuler.

Speaker B: What's up hospitality? Hi everybody. Welcome back to another Schillering Hub talking hospitality podcast. I am your host Mauricio Schiller and today we are talking about hotel job, hotel tech jobs, salary, benchmarks and a lot of other things that I'm very curious to compare actually what's going on in the hotel tech and compared to our hotel jobs and see if the hotel tech will take the people from the hotels to actually work there. Uh, but to that I invited to talk to me here Edward Clark. He's um, French, British, former pro rugby player and ah, he had his own hostel, the student house and he worked in HR across multiple positions. He will talk about himself a little bit But I just want to welcome, welcome you. And you're calling from Brazil, my homeland. So that's awesome that you are there and I'm in your place here, so it's quite weird. Welcome to the show, Edward.

Speaker A: Thank you. Mauricio. Bom gia. Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: It's a pleasure to have you here. Can I call you Ed? Is that okay?

Speaker A: Yes, of course. It's easier.

Speaker B: It's easier, it's easier. So Ed, it's like man, you have a very fantastic story actually right when I research about you and we spoke before, we spoke a few times ah before today. But you have a super cool story, right? You work, you rebuild HR in pre owned it for numa and you open your own uh, you co founded Wondery as well. Uh now you founded the hospitality tech jobs which is a uh, recruiting company for hotel tech. But what really calls my attention is that pro rugby and the student's house, right? Um, man, how old are you? You look super young, look super good, super healthy. How did you manage to do all that and still be here now in Brazil?

Speaker A: Man, thank you so much for the shower of compliments at this, this. It's 8 o' clock over here in the morning. Um, yeah, look, to answer your question, um, I was, I was always mega hooked to, to rugby since the age of, of six years old. Um, but playing until now thankfully I always wanted to become a professional rugby player. Even though I was living during my childhood not in the best rugby countries, but I was simply, simply always around the top tier of players and I was uh, given an opportunity to go to South Africa to give it a real crap. Uh, and so spent 11 months um, at uh, the Sharks Academy over there. It's an academy that creates world renowned uh, rugby players. Went there and then ended up uh, in, in Scotland playing um, playing semi pro rugby. How, how I got into business into student house, hospitality tech jobs and all that. Um, I guess it, you know, I saw my, my father was always working for um, a very large ah, company and I always felt like he was just treated like a number. He was in a, in a golden cage, very well paid. It was, you know, allowed me and my sisters to be in international uh, schools, travel around the world including Brazil. So it wasn't all bad. But you know, after working for 25 years for the same company, he got made redundant and they hired lawyers to get as much out of his severance uh, pay as much as possible fighting him. And it caused him so much stress that it caused him to have A heart attack. And so since that day I, I told myself I'm never ever going to let myself be in a position like that. And I read entrepreneurship books during university. Uh, like a lot of people, what really, um, got hold of me was the rich dad, poor dad book. Um, and since then I thought, okay, well I want to get into property, I want to be an entrepreneur. And that's what kind of started my career really.

Speaker B: Oh man, that's uh, it's a sad story. But it's quite awesome that you came out on the bright side of it. Right. And using that um, negative experience to actually strength, uh, get the strength out of it and guide you to do something positive from it. And how was that experience in the student house? So what is the student house and how did it work?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I wanted to get into, invest into property and you know, one of the ways to get into it was actually to manage other people's property. So I set up uh, a letting agency, an estate agency, but with a specialization into taking care of student tenants. And so we did that in Manchester. We, we grew that from scratch and started making a decent, uh, amount of money, uh, grew that for over five years, uh, and then ended up selling it to one of our biggest competitors in, in Manchester.

Speaker B: All right, does it, does it compare to a, ah, hotel or a hostel in, in any way?

Speaker A: Um, it's, it's, it's, it's different because you know, people are staying six to 12 months whereas hotels, you know, people are staying from one one day. Plus now it's morphed into flex living. Now, um, most places you can stay one day, you know, 10 days or 100 days if you want. But I suppose for me that the biggest difference and the reason why we were specialists was because student tenants, it's the first time they're outside home. Sometimes you receive kind of tenant requests that you wouldn't receive elsewhere, such as how to change a light bulb, uh, or coming drunk in the middle of the night and they've forgotten their keys. We're receiving those kind of calls in the middle of the night. Um, I think it requires a lot more patience. And just to give you one funny example, if you have a 10 bedroom student house, if the Internet doesn't work within 15 minutes, you're going to be given an email. If you don't respond to that email within 15 minutes, you get a call from one of the tenants. If you don't respond within the hour, you've got all the tenants and their parents calling you. So all of a sudden you can have 20 to 30 people calling you incessantly about the Internet. Uh, the good thing about that is that it forced me to really think about systems, which got me really interested into prop tech, um, and then just went on from there.

Speaker B: That's awesome. And let's get directly then to the point because lately you being working, uh, on the hotel tax salary benchmark report. Right. And uh, please tell our audience here what it is that you've been building there and if anyone can collaborate as well, how they do that.

Speaker A: Yeah, so the idea came about was because I, I wanted to add as much value as possible to the industry that I was working in, which is hospitality tech. And I thought, okay, well, data, um, but data that no one's seen before. No one really knows what someone in a certain position, certain hierarchy, um, and department should be earning or what is the average earnings, uh, depending on the geography that you're in, the product that you work for, etc. So I thought, okay, well, why don't I send out a really easy to fill survey to get, you know, to get this, um, to get this data. And my initial goal was to get 500 people to, to answer it, which is pretty good. And then Danica and Zoe pushed me to aim for a thousand. We ended up just getting over 500 over a two to three month period. But that was really good and it uncovered a lot of things that, um, that actually surprised me. So, you know, the information that I have in this salary and sentiment benchmark report is I know how much people earn, uh, depending on the category, uh, that they work for. When I mean, category is whether they work for a PMS or an RMS company or a hardware company, for example. I know that depending on their seniority, uh, geography and the type of function that they're in, whether it's sales, marketing or accounting, for instance. Um, but then we also have asked about nps, which is sentiment, basically are you happy in this industry or not? Which was super surprising. Which I think is actually lower than hospitality operations. And I thought it would actually be much higher because of the typical things. You would think these people have their weekends off, these people aren't, you know, facing difficult guests, for example. I just thought that that alone might make things, you know, make them happier, but it's clearly not the case.

Speaker B: Wow, that's, that's quite surprising actually as well. Like I'm, I'm, uh, we've run a little uh, research, uh, in the casino for the employees as well, just trying to figure out first data on how happy they were. And we also got very surprised that the day people, the people that work during the daytime, were the most unhappy people in the casino. And we always thought that would be the nighttime people because they are busier, but it was the opposite. And it's very interesting to collect this data so you actually can, uh, go through your feelings. Uh, we like to think that we know things because we feel things. But when you get the data and we ask the questions, everything changes. What is your feeling on why people are more unhappy into the hotel tech compared to actually hospitality?

Speaker A: I think it's expectation, uh, setting that isn't, that isn't being done quite, quite well. Uh, I think maybe people are expecting things to be a lot easier in hospitality tech than it is in hospitality when, when it's not on the sales side, you know, for example, is you can earn the most working for an ota, but you'll be the unhappiest. Why is that the case? Because I don't have the data on exactly why that's the case, but I can only guess right here. So, you know, my, my thought is, compared to the other hotel tech products out there, I feel like the people who work for an ota, they kind of know that they're not adding a tremendous amount of value to hoteliers. They know that hoteliers want to decrease their dependence on OTAs, whereas all the other people that work in other hotel tech companies, I know they really feel like they're adding value to hotelier. They really feel like hoteliers want to use them as well. If only they knew what value they, they brought across. Um, a lot of, a lot of people who go into hotel tech come from a hospitality background and from all levels. Either they, they spent, you know, a couple of years, um, you know, working out, you know, front of house, um, or they, you know, they went all the way to GM level and just decided to go into the hotel tech. Maybe they miss that face to face contact because when you work in hotel tech, you know, the majority are working, uh, remotely. So that, that could be a factor to take into account. In fact, it would be good for me to do maybe another survey, you know, prodding more questions into the enps to find out exactly why that's the case. One thing is very clear though, is that women across the board are much less happy than men by, by a huge margin. And this is something I'm going to dissect, uh, with, with, with Danica and a few other, uh, women leadership, uh, women, uh, to go through to find out exactly why. But from, you know, from what we've seen from the data is that there is a change of behavior between men and women in terms of asking for a raise but also getting it. Um, so clearly, um, women are at a disadvantage, uh, in this case as well. There seems to be a bias towards men. Um, so that definitely needs to be. The conversation, needs to be talked about at least to, uh, try and understand why this is the case so that we can find out what the solutions are.

Speaker B: That's really interesting. And if we go a little bit into geography, uh, does it change if you are in a hotel tech job in America compared to Europe or the Middle east, does it have any influence?

Speaker A: Absolutely. Uh, the US pays the most, that's very clear and by a large margin. And then in Europe, uh, it's all micro markets really. Uh, you could be in France and you could have the title sales director, and you could earn either €50,000 as a basic salary or earn, uh, €120,000 as a salary. Um, and you know, you could be managing zero people as a sales director. You could be managing 20 people as a sales director. I would say France is the most unstructured, uh, not unstructured, maybe not the word, but the most inconsistent market in terms of salaries and job title. Um, but, you know, you asked me about geography. It also depends what product you work for. So someone working in an, you know, in an OTA will earn, um, considerably more than someone working in a HR InfoSystems company, which is at the bottom of the end. In fact, you'll see it in, in the report. The average salaries, the median salaries, total median salaries, and you can compare it compared to the type of products company, uh, that you're working for. It's crazy. So, I mean, the big, the big takeaway from this, just to answer your question, is that hotel tech isn't just a big industry, uh, one market where everyone kind of, uh, the same. It depends on geography, uh, and product type, uh, as well as function, etc.

Speaker B: Uh, talking about function then, right, because our audience is mostly about hoteliers. And I know that many of them have that feeling that they should, uh, jump, right, they should jump to the hotel tech. They get a lot of invitations to jump over, uh, because of their, know how their, their network or whatever. What are the types of, of positions that the hotel tech offers? Because you wrote on LinkedIn not long ago that, that, uh, we shouldn't consider hotel tech as one thing because it's really, really, uh, different. So, uh, can you can you dive in a little bit about what you mean by that and what the positions there?

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, first of all, of course it makes sense that people in hospitality are considering hotel tech. Your people, they're the prime people to work there because they will have real experience and real empathy for, for those that they're trying to help if they, they decide to jump into hotel tech. Um, if, if someone's looking to earn, um, more money, then sales is, is the way to go. I've met so many ex GMs who jumped into sales. They, you know, they were earning a certain amount and then they went into hotel tech sales. They've obviously had to take a pay cut because that's, that's just how it is. You have to learn how to sell to hoteliers, especially if you've never done it before. But they end up climbing the ranks very quickly because that, you know, uh, it's a GM talking to a gm. It's like, I've been through what you've been, what you've been through. I know what it's like to, you know, to find it difficult to manage people. I know what it's like, you know, if you're in an airport hotel where all of a sudden 200, 500 people show up because there's been a couple of flight cancellations and now it's all hands on deck. Even the GM is working, helping in the buffet or whatever. It's those kind of experiences where you don't quite understand someone's pain unless you've been through it. So it's much easier to sell a product that solves a problem that you've actually felt yourself. It's much more convincing to speak to someone like that, uh, to another GM or an operations director when you've been through that. So, um, yeah, one of the reasons to come over is earning potential. If you're selling a complex system, um, which usually demands you to sell in a consultative way, a GM would do very well in that. And you've got more power over your earning potential, uh, compared to, uh, a GM, maybe. And depending on the company, some GMs don't have, uh, a bonus scheme. Sometimes it's just a basic salary. So if money is important to you, Celtic can be of interest.

Speaker B: Yes. Comparing then. So because you just uh, uh, mentioned about like GMs becoming salespeople and it's look, it's a very different set of skills, right, jumping out from a GM to become a salesperson, where I would say that resilience is the Most important thing probably for a salesperson on, uh, being hit, hit and hit, and just saying like, that's okay, that's okay. It's not about me. Right. And it's a very different set of skills. But when you come to, let's say, a similar type of position. If I would compare a, ah, um, front desk officer or manager in a hotel comparing to a, uh, customer experience, uh, a manager or employee on a hotel tech. How different is their salaries?

Speaker A: Oh, that's a really good question. Well, that, that depends on the. It will depend on the product and geography, but it's definitely a little bit more than what someone would, would earn in, in the reception. So a lot of receptionists correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not a specialist in that area. But I assume that the earning minimum wage, roughly.

Speaker B: Yeah, ah, just above that should be. But you know how it goes.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it goes above. And in customer success, for example, you can get bonuses as well. I've spoken to actually a lot of sales leaders who say sometimes customer success bring in more money than the actual sales team because they can do some upselling. They can also ask the current client, is there anyone else that would benefit from our service? So you've got that going. And I suppose in terms of benefits. Well, yes, you get to work remotely, if that's what you prefer. Um, depending on the hotel that you work with, you might have easier guests to deal with. Um, but it doesn't come without stress as well. You know, I've heard of customer success managers who've had to deal with over 200 clients. You know, with, you know, many onboardings in a day, you know, that hotel is expecting your 100% attention and handholding to, you know, to open up because, you know, it's usually because they've just opened up the hotel or they've migrated from one system to the other. And that can be an extremely stressful period for the hotelier. Um, and it's not just one person they're speaking to. It's probably the entire operations team on the ground that they're speaking to as well. So it doesn't come without its own stresses. And of course, when you're working in a hotel, depending on the location and type of hotel it is, you can have some very demanding guests or even, uh, in some areas it can be almost dangerous guests that you need to kind of handle.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a funny question. Now, like, um, who is the most difficult, uh, customer? Is that, like, would it be, uh, a guest for A, uh, hotelier, someone working in a hotel or the hotelier themselves for a hotel tank. Sorry to interrupt. If you're enjoying this show and if you are learning something new today, please consider following the show, subscribe to our channel, or leave us a review. It helps us to help more people through the podcast and it would mean the world to us. Thank you for listening and we're back on the chat.

Speaker A: I'd say it's different and it also, it also depends on the, on the personality of the main contact from the customer success manager. But look, if, if you have a hotelier that has very high standards for themselves, you can bet they'll have very high standards with, you know, whichever tech that they're taking on as well. If they're paying attention to every little detail for the guests, then they will expect the same from the system that they're using.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. And I brought some data here just uh, as we're talking about. What's the benchmark for uh, the receptionist? Yeah. And are like here in the Czech Republic, unfortunately, people working service, working hospitality have the lowest pay of all industries across, uh, the country. What's pretty shocking to a country of at least a region that depends so much in tourism and uh, it's really not getting uh, what they deserve. Like these people have skills, right? They can speak six, seven languages from English, English, Italian, French to Russian and German. They mix a very special set of skills. And still, um, uh, the pace is pretty low. And you said something very interesting that on the upsale part, because I believe that in every market they consider the front desk to be doing up sales today, right. To use the opportunity there and do up sales. Many hotel tech companies are uh, providing with this data, providing with the services and products to provide, um, upsell. However, when I speak to them, they don't feel like they don't like to be salespeople. They say that they are receptionists. They are not on sales. Is there anything that happened to that when it comes to the hotel tech, when you are recruiting, uh, is that something that is. It's um, ah, a plus on the

Speaker A: recruiting side in terms of knowing languages and so. Well look, I think in terms of.

Speaker B: No, in terms of knowing sales really, if you are hired for someone like a customer success, for example, uh, but having that upselling skills, uh, or seeing an opportunity to sell, um, is this something that the hotel tech, uh, consider on the recruiting or is something that they throw after uh, into the training?

Speaker A: They'll definitely consider it as a Bonus. But it's not the most important thing. I think the most important thing is, uh, empathy, knowing how to deal with a stressed out client. I think if you've got that and the more languages you speak, the better. Because you know, let's think about, you know, one of my clients. Um, they were looking to, to go into the French market and they were initially looking for a salesperson. And that salesperson taught them that, look, if you don't have someone in customer success that speaks French, then don't even bother, don't even bother selling at all. Because they're going to expect you to do the onboarding in French. They're not going to be happy if you do the onboarding in English. Um, so, um, it's a huge bonus to have several languages if you can speak them fluently. And at the end of the day, whether you agree with it or not, talking about salaries, it's all about supply and demand. If there's a short supply for that, it's shorter than the demand, then um, the salaries will rise. And if it's the opposite, the opposite will happen. But yeah, for customer success, the most important thing is empathy, understanding hospitality. So if you're someone at the front desk who has been through an opening or that has experienced, you know, a migration to a different system, this experience puts you in a really good position to get a customer success role.

Speaker B: Mhm. What's the hardest position to fill in the hotel tech right now?

Speaker A: Good question. Any of the AI engineering roles. Because if you have skills in AI and engineering, you are needed across several industries. So it's not just wholesale tech that's competing for you, it's the other industries and sometimes the other industries have a bigger budget. However, I think what would excite someone in engineering, um, with A.I. is, is that you can make some huge changes in hospitality. There are so many core opportunities out there and it's kind of like solving a Rubik's cube because you know, hotel systems can be quite complex so it can be something really fun to go into and there's so many stakeholders involved. So that's, that's the way I would sell it. But you know, if we're talking on the sales side, you know, one of the hardest roles to fill is actually the, the German speaking roles, uh, for several reasons. So the demand is higher than the supply. Um, there's not so many salespeople that understand hospitality that also speak fluent German, um, but also from a cultural perspective, German people in general. And I'm not painting all Germans with The same paintbrush, but a lot of them are more risk averse to, to moving then I would say like your typical English candidate that I speak to or American candidates that I speak to. Um, so you've got, you know that to take into consideration as well.

Speaker B: Like very good point. I'm, I'm based in Czech Republic and they share that uh, risk averse as well. So I totally understand what you mean. When it comes to changing technology in a hotel around these region, let's talk about uh, the training on onboarding as well. Like uh, that's what I love about this, trying to figure um, it out what we can do to keep people working a hotel. Uh, but at the same time what the hoteliers can really do to make their lives better. So uh, they are happy working a hotel. Right. And uh, training onboarding is crucial. The turnover for hospitality is huge. Right. Is the turnover in the hotel tech uh, such an epidemic as well,

Speaker A: well see this is where I see uh, a massive opportunity for you Mauricio, because I see the same issues over here and it's, it's for, it's for different reasons. So hotel tech. Let's talk about hotel tech startups. Um, just like any startup, there's a lot of young and inexperienced but super intelligent people working there but they don't have the life experience of uh, hiring and firing people, uh, of the whole life cycle. Um, so you know, what I've seen too many times happen is they'll sign someone up, they'll recruit someone and on the first day there's no onboarding plan or the expectations weren't set. You know, someone, you know, a candidate who just joined might think they're going to have one or two weeks of onboarding, learning about the systems, whereas you know, the second day they're already asked to start cold. Calling for clients for a product that they don't quite understand. It's mental. I'm seeing the exact, you know, the exact same issues. I just cannot, yeah, it's for me, I mean I've, I haven't got enough time on my hands to set up a new business and help companies on board. But a lot of companies have no clue how to onboard. They won't, you know, talk to them about what the vision, mission and values are. They won't, you know, give them a proper onboarding, give them the right tools needed to do their job or even expectations on, you know, what does a good job, you know, well done look like? Um, unfortunately for people to learn the importance of that, they have to Go through a few car crashes and experience that. But this is what I'm seeing in startups. And you know, and it's not because, you know, some managers are uh, bad people. It's simply because they haven't been taught that their CEO doesn't have the time to teach them, hey, this is how you recruit someone. This is how you onboard someone, this is how you manage someone. This is how you do an appraisal. This is how you know if you wanted to fire someone, these are the steps that you need to do before you get to that stage. You know, it's not like uh, after a week of bad work, you have the right to fire something. That's not how it works. So there's a lot of things to learn that and I really see an opportunity in the hospitality tech startup market to help people become better leaders and therefore save a lot of time, heartache and money.

Speaker B: You say that now and uh, one thing that I truly believe is, uh, we build teams, right? We just don't form them. We just don't hire anyone and figure it out. Normally we know what we are looking for. We should at least know what we are looking for. So, uh, I like to make a parallel with a football team, right? So if your, you are in a football team and yeah, as a Brazilian as you, and you have a strong defense, right, like you, you build a team with a strong defense but you can't score goals and you almost got relegated the next year, you gonna look, you won't look for defenders, you look for like strikers or midfield, right? You will strengthen your team. And I like to think a uh, hotel team, maybe a hotel tech. Uh, in the same way you need to understand the set of skills that your team already have and the set of skills that you are miss and then look for that when you are recruiting for them. Uh, what's the guidance that they give you to look, they send you, I just need a position or they actually already work with you with values and a little bit of the mission of the company to find the right person.

Speaker A: It depends. Every client is different. They usually come up to me and say, hey, I'm looking for this person. They usually don't have time to find that person or don't have the network and they want to tap into mine. And then they don't realize that I actually asked them deeper questions. You know, let's go through the job description together. What is your company about? What does the future look like? Are there, you know, any new funding rounds, any new exciting projects? What, what is happening to your department? Are you just looking for that extra person? What is the reason why you're looking for that person? Uh, because sometimes it's not a case of just me saying, yeah, I will find that person for you. Sometimes I might say, actually, you just need a consultant for a few months and that will solve the problem that you have. Most calls, I usually start with this, what are your biggest challenges? Because I might have some information that tells me actually I should be advising them not to hire this type of person. Maybe they need a different type of person based on the challenges that they're talking to me about. It also depends on their budget as well and how fast they want to solve that challenge. It might be that they do really need my recruitment services or they need a consultant. And this is also part of why I'm part of the GAIN consultants.

Speaker B: Mhm. And if you, uh, talk about gain, then what do you do with the gain? What does gain, uh, work together with you?

Speaker A: Yep. So again, I like the power rangers, I would say, of consultants across the hospitality and the hotel tech industry. They work globally. Um, and they reached out to me because they wanted to leverage the network they already have. Uh, and they wanted to create a recruitment arm to their business and they wanted me to kind of spearhead that for them, uh, and open it up. Um, as you know, they have a network of hospitality businesses as well as hotel tech companies that are always looking to hire. Uh, and they've seen that I, uh, do specialize in hotel tech, but I've also done a lot of recruitment for hospitality operators as well. I've not marketed myself to do hotel, uh, operational companies just because I know the market is saturated with a lot of very good recruiters. But I never say no. And I think once I've set the real foundations of, uh, the hotel tech side of my business, we will go into, into serving hotel hotel operating clients.

Speaker B: All right, that's exciting. And if I think that, like my opinion about recruiters is, um, if the person that you bring in stay, you are great, you found the right person.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: If you bring a person and this person leaves or doesn't fit in, I may blame you for that, right? Um, not totally, but I can see that, uh, how the picture is formed and many times it's just onboarding, uh, that wasn't right. The environment wasn't right, or the expectations, as we said, were not built. So if you would suggest or tell the companies that you work with or someone listening today, what would be that? Um, a framework Onboarding, uh, what would be the onboarding practice that they should install, they should put in practice that the people that you bring in would stay?

Speaker A: Yeah, for me it all starts in the recruitment stage and even in the job description. It's, it's all, it's actually it's all about expectation setting. Uh, so what I usually ask my clients to do is explain to them what the worst week looks like working for you because there will be some bad days. And I think if you already tell them that up uh, front that that helps them realize is this really for them? The last thing you want to do is to convince someone to work with you and hide the bad parts because they're going to feel like they've been missed, sold to. It's like someone selling something to you. You buy it and then it turns out to not be what you thought it was. Wouldn't you have preferred for that salesperson to say to you this is really good but just be aware that this, this and that is not available in the products or whatever. You would be much more thankful for that and it saves you less headache down the line because you might ask for a refund. Anyway, um, this is, this is what I tell everyone and this is what I used to do when I, when I recruited, uh, for myself. So when I recruited my pre opening team M, I would say to them, you know, I might parachute you into a country where you don't speak the language, you don't know anyone there, uh, you're in a hotel, it's dusty, there's no Internet, there's no nothing. You have to figure things out by yourself and you'll have to be there for a few weeks. Are you ready for this? And a lot of people would be like, well thank you for telling me this really isn't the right thing for me. Or some people would jump to that and be like, do you know what? This actually sounds amazing. This sounds like a challenge that you know that, that will really push my limits. Um, but I, I think it's also important. So there are, look, there's some really easy wins to put in there. Say this, this is the result that I want you to produce for me. This is the support I'm going to give you. Is this aligned with what you're trying to do? But I think it's also important to ask the person that you're about to hire what's important to you. Also ask them what are your boundaries? It's an open ended question, but it might, it might reveal something to you. They might say, uh, you know, I have to have my lunch at this time, or I have to take care of my dog, uh, at this time I can't leave the house or whatever. All these things help you realize, you know, how, how it's going to be working with this person. There's a lot of questions that you need to do, but you know, in finding out what's important to them, that what are the kind of goals? Don't ask the silly question, where do you see yourself in five years though? Like ask, what do you want to achieve out of this job? What are the kind of skills that you want to get out of this? So when I was recruiting for the, the pre opening team, you know, I would find out how ambitious they are. If they were really ambitious, I would say, well, look, this is the perfect place for you because with all the responsibilities I'm going to give you, you're going to get the skills to manage your own team in the future, even start your own business. Because you have to manage so many stakeholders in this process, so many things are going to go wrong. You're going to have to find out solutions just like that. Um, and it's going to put you outside of your comfort zone, but you're definitely going to grow in one year's time. You're going to look back and you're going to think, holy shit, look at all of this that I've managed to do, all of this that I've managed to achieve. So look, uh, expect if there's one thing to take away from this is expectation setting and do not sugarcoat what it is actually like. I think it's also important to, you know, a really good question to ask if you want to know, you know, if someone is skilled in XYZ or if they have a certain character trait that you're looking for for always ask the question. Give me an example where you demonstrated X. Instead of asking are you a hard worker? Because that's the easiest thing to answer, you just say, yeah, okay, great. But if you say, give me an example of, you know, where you've demonstrated that you're a hard worker, that's uh, much better because they're going to have to give you an example. Now if they say I'm a hard worker because, you know, I've always arrived on time at 9 o' clock in the morning for my shift, you know, they're not a hard worker because it doesn't take a lot of hard work to do that. However, you know, if they say you Know, I've, you know I've been doing, I've never, I've always been on time for all my shifts which have either been at 5 o' clock in the morning or another time. And I've had to you know, make sure that all these things are done. XYZ type of people or departments rely on me to do this. Um, you know the, the more, the deeper the example that they give you, the more it will tell you. Um, you know, let's, let's talk about stress. You know, give me an example where you've shown that you're stress resilient. You know I, I had one person, one candidate tell me once that they, they went to university in a different town in the same country that they've lived in for the rest of their life and they thought that was an extremely stressful period. Suffice to say this person was not right for pre opening. Yeah but I've, you know I've had someone speak to me and say yeah, I just came from a war torn country. Uh, not very much phases me anymore. Then I'm like okay, pre opening will not be stressful for this type of person. Uh, so it's very important to ask these type of questions where you ask where they examples that have demonstrated XYZ that you want to see.

Speaker B: Uh, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Thanks for sharing all that. I will make a parallel of something that I tell hoteliers to ask because I believe in and for hospital it's really important to understand uh the soft skills, the empathy. Right. Like how empathic this person is. Um, because that's what it is with the guests in the end of the day. And one question that I tell uh, directors and you can copy that and use in your interviews as well or hoteliers listen to this is uh, when is the time that you help someone without telling anyone you've done that and, and just to get uh, is this person has, is it natural to tell them or they will make up a story right now you know that you, you can, you will notice but you really get them out of guard uh because they come to the interview prepared to answer all these five years questions and uh, you get them out of guard and if they get emotional you clearly know that uh yes, it's something important for them and you know that this person will care about people around them and this is probably much more important than the skill and experience that they had before.

Speaker A: So it's a great question.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love to ask that. Let's Jump into future. We are talking for a long time. Wow, I just saw the time now. So one question about the future. Yes. AI is ah, taking over, stressing people out. Exciting. So many. Um, it's, it's such a mix of emotions when we come to um, AI, um, it's AI changing the job market itself, rewriting job descriptions and reinventing what hotel tech is going to be.

Speaker A: It's definitely changing the job market um, in different ways, in good ways and bad ways. I'd say the bad ways is that some companies are Ah, using AI to hire people. And I'd say 90% of uh, feedback I get from anyone in the process, whether they're a hiring manager or um, a candidate, a job seeker, huh is negative. Uh, and I would say human humanity wins in that case. For example, the way I do things, it's, it's, I mean it's all relationship based. I can't, I can't use AI, ah, to do what I do. Um, but it also helps people to stand out. The more human you are, the more you stand out. So when I reach out to someone, I don't, I don't use templates. I tell them exactly why I want to speak to them, whether it's a hiring manager or a candidate. In terms of changing hotel tech, well now we're coming in an age where one marketer with AI skills could replace a team of 10 marketing, uh, a team of. A marketing team of 10 people. So I think it's, everyone should make some sort of effort in learning to harness AI in terms of the jobs in the future. Um, I wrote an article with Mihaly Boat. Mihaly Boat is probably the smartest person I know in hospitality and AI. He just completed um, an AI course, uh, from Berkeley, which uh, is one of the best schools of AI in the world. He sat with people who work in the Pentagon in the US for example. So he's the only person I know in hospitality who knows this much on AI. And one of the things he mentioned was the human in the loop role. And so what that means is you could have a hotel that harnesses AI. Let's talk about revenue management systems that will tell a hotel that it needs to do this, this, this and that. Um, but before it actually actions it, you need a human to check if it's actually correct. Check for context. Because that AI might say, oh, we should raise the ADR price by a thousand percent because there is a concert happening or whatever. But the GM or the human in the loop might think, well, Actually, no, that's a bad idea because it might ruin our reputation and things like that. Um, same thing for maybe payment systems, accounting systems. There might be a mistake right there. You don't want it to pay for 20 crates of, um, you know, toilet paper to come in all of a sudden. So you do need a human in the loop to check for these things. Um, and that's in several industries. If you search human in the loop manager, you will see that that will turn up and that, you know, that might not be just the GM that does it. It might be shared responsibility amongst people across the ranks in hospitality, which could be quite interesting. Um, but what, what I see is that there's going to be a race of hotel tech companies to be able to do everything, um, that Italian does. But I think this will take time because the ownership and decision making in hotels varies across the board. Um, sometimes it's owner managed, uh, otherwise, um, there's leases to operators. Just that alone changes the dynamics of who decides when is the right time and the budget of taking on new systems. It's anyone's guess of what the future looks like, but that's my thought.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's crazy. It's great thoughts there. Um, it's really crazy what's going on. And, uh, AI now is getting very expensive as well. So sometimes it's even getting more expensive than humans. Uh, we are balancing on that. But do you know what? I believe that's the biggest lie in hospitality.

Speaker A: The biggest lie. No.

Speaker B: Yeah, AI will give people time to spend with the guests. I just don't believe on that. M. Do you know why? Um, uh, because this is something that of course the tech used in the beginning not to go against the people that they need to sell to, right? Like, uh, well, AI will not take your job. And it makes sense, right? Uh, and I'm not saying that they are lying, it's just the lie itself. Okay? It's not that, the tax lie. But if you worked in a hotel, if you work in hospitality, you know that the moment that an employee has time, they go to smoke a cigarette. If they have free time in their hands, they will gossip, they will have a coffee because this is what they've been doing for 30 years. They've been behind a screen and when there is free time, they take the free time to rest up. They work long hours and everything, right? So now all of a sudden you put a system that starts to automate their boring jobs, but nobody's training them to how to use this free time. Now how do I talk to a guest? What, what does it mean? I'm gonna talk to a guest, I'm gonna get out from the position I am and go there to the guest and start having a random conversation out of nowhere. Nobody's training for that. And basically for some time I, I, I still believed on that until I start to see like the bad GMs, the bad manager, that we know that they are not very good. You know, we know that there is stories behind and how, uh, not empathetic they are, how bad they treat people. And when they start saying that and it's like, all right, so uh, they are just buying a system now and they want to justify the buyer, the system they're buying. But they are not trained, they are not reaching out to me to ask how, uh, we're going to train our people to use this time, right? And if we don't train the people to use the free time to actually make an upsell, to uh, collect the data, uh, to get the data to uh, build on that guest profile and help the guest. And uh, there are solutions for that, right? But if we train people to do that, they will not do it. And if they're not doing, the GMs will see it. Well, now we have time and they are not doing anything. So we cut the people because they are not doing what I thought they would do. Uh, they think, but they don't train for it, right? So for me, this is the biggest lie running right now because I haven't seen really people focusing on the training. What do we do when automation takes over? So if you're listening, let's get to it. Let's get to it. It's, it's Ed. Let's move on to one message that you have. Man. What, what would you tell some hotel tech founders, uh, sitting on their fence now about the hire, what they should do? They should wait for AI. They should start building on their teams. Uh, what would be that message that would leave this for them?

Speaker A: If you want to attract and retain the best talent, being human, setting expectations and not sugarcoating the job will put you, will put you in the right direction. But I would say what I mean, being human, don't rely too much on AI, uh, because you will have some people who might fall through the cracks and you might miss that gem and it is worth the time and effort to get the right person. Otherwise later down the line, it will cost you in time and money.

Speaker B: That's a very good message. And how can our listeners get in touch with you. Get your report as well. Uh and find some open roles that you are hiring for for.

Speaker A: Yeah of course it's uh, everything's on on my uh LinkedIn profile. If you just put ID Clark, uh, you'll be able to find me there. I'm easily reachable. Uh, or go on hospitalitytechjobs.com and you will find us on on there as well.

Speaker B: Awesome. I will put the links here on the notes as well but thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Thank you for waking up that early to talk to me on our. Thank you so much Obrigado Genada and children than for listening to this new episode and I hope you like it. If you have anything to say, anything to complain or any comments just write it down. Send me a message or email info at. Oh sorry helloing dot com. I'll see you next time. Bye.