The tourism sector is facing a shortage that is expected to get worse. In Banff, Alta., the situation is so severe rivals have even started co-operating
Looking out over the Rocky Mountains from the Rimrock Resort Hotel in Banff, Alta., Erin Langevin has a breathtaking view.
Tree-covered hills give way to snow-capped mountains. Crystal clear rivers carve their way through the landscape. Wildlife roams freely through the national park — the oldest in the country — that surrounds the world-famous resort town that is home to 7,000 people.
But it’s what Langevin, director of recruitment at the Rimrock, doesn’t see that troubles her the most. She doesn’t see a lot of resumés and she is recruiting from a very shallow labour pool that is transient and shrinking.
Alberta’s economy is booming. The unemployment rate between Jasper, Alta., and the American border is extremely low, hovering at around two per cent a lot of the time, she said. That poses a challenge because even the best recruitment methods will be ineffective if there isn’t a labour force to pick from.
“We need a real population surge right now,” said Langevin. “We’ve had a lot of good PR here in the last little while with our deficit disappearing, we don’t have a sales tax and we have all the oil.”
But that boom has left some industries with a critical shortage and the tourism sector, particularly in resort towns like Banff, is finding it increasingly difficult to attract candidates.
Poaching not a long-term solution
Langevin said it’s becoming clear the old recruitment strategy — simply poaching staff from a competitor down the street — isn’t a very good long-term solution for the town. So, in a rather extraordinary show of solidarity and co-operation, the town got together and created a website, www.banfflife.com, to showcase what it has to offer employees.
The basic premise of the website is to sell the idea that working in Banff isn’t something that’s only for university students or transient workers but it can actually be a permanent destination.
“We have a community and you can have a family here and it isn’t just a temporary summer job,” said Langevin.
Getting that word out has taken a lot of co-operation, a marked difference from how business has traditionally been run in town.
“I think in the past everyone worked against each other,” she said. “We were kind of out for ourselves.”
Behaviour that would stun many HR pros
But times have changed. On a recent trip to Ontario where Langevin was promoting banfflife.com at a job fair, Fairmont Hotels, a competitor to Rimrock that runs the Banff Springs Hotel, arranged for accommodations for her at the Royal York in Toronto.
That community spirit has become infectious and has led to behaviour that would stun HR professionals in other areas. Langevin said the environment has changed so much that if she had some extra resumés lying around and she wasn’t hiring, but knew the recruiter at the Banff Springs Hotel down the street was desperate, she would pass them over.
“I’m going to say, ‘You know what? I’ve got these resumés and I don’t need anybody this week. How about you?’ We just start working together that way,” she said.
Jon Kiely, director of communications for the Canadian Tourism Human Resources Council in Ottawa, said the idea of helping out competitors may seem foreign to most organizations.
“But that’s the kind of progressive thinking that in the future you’re going to have to see happen more and more,” said Kiely.
That’s because the workforce demographics in Canada over the next few years don’t look good for the tourism sector and while recruiting is tough now it might become next to impossible in the near future, he said.
“What’s happening in Banff is a really good example of people who are thinking outside of the box and thinking more, not from a very insular business aspect but they’re thinking of the impact on the entire industry,” said Kiely. “And this industry employs 12 per cent of the Canadian workforce. It’s a huge economic driving factor and we need more and more people to understand that it has impact and ramifications across the board.”
The council has been working on a number of initiatives to help ease the labour shortage. Kiely said it has been encouraging organizations to start looking outside the traditional demographic — those ages 18 to 26 — as a source of talent.
Using older workers
Since the younger demographic is shrinking, the tourism sector would be wise to start recruiting older workers, which is the only demographic that is actually growing in Canada, said Kiely. As baby boomers retire en masse, a good number of them won’t be satisfied to spend their golden years at home and might be excited about taking a tourism-related job, he said.
Organizations also need to work hard to retain staff. One of the best methods to do this is to lay out a clear career path when the worker starts, particularly for young workers.
“The stories I hear from general managers and HR people in some of the bigger firms is that students come out of university or college expecting to move right into a management-type position,” said Kiely. “And that’s not really a practical sense of how the industry works. Quite often people like general managers in a hotel or resort area start out at a front-line position because they have to understand the nuances of working those various positions.”
So laying out a clear plan to a new recruit might help that worker see the benefit of staying with the company long term.
“That’s quite often where the disconnect is between employers and jobseekers,” said Kiely. “The jobseekers have an expectation right off the bat that are beyond what is normally the case of where they are going to enter in, and the disconnect on the employer side is that they don’t demonstrate to those people that there is that potential to move up.”
The council has also launched a training certification, known as emerit, that outlines professional qualifications for about two dozen tourism-related occupations including things like bartenders, taxi drivers and food and beverage servers. It sets a national standard for critical skills in the sector, something the council and employers hope will attract more workers and encourage them to seek out a long-term career.
The emerit branding is catching on, and Kiely said he’s starting to see requests for the certification being used in recruitment ads in the tourism sector. He said that’s because employers know that if a candidate has the certification, then the person has the skills necessary to excel in that position.
But he admits that it’s strange to be talking about certification, and essentially shrinking the labour pool, for areas that can’t find anyone, let alone a certified worker.
“From a simple economic standpoint, if you can’t find anyone you’re not going to put up barriers,” he said.
But having the certification opens up the door for employers to provide training to employees in key areas, and most firms understand the connection between training and turnover and that sending an employee off and paying for certification training can really impact retention, he said.
The council is also very aware of the fact that there is an entire segment of the tourism workforce that simply looks at jobs as a means to an end, he said. Many workers are simply putting themselves through school and a large number have no aspirations besides tending the bar and earning a decent wage.
“They just want the benefits of a job that can make them good money now while they have other career pursuits,” said Kiely. “So what we’ve learned is that there are these two streams of people and we need to talk to them in different ways.”
Increasing awareness in schools
With a turnover rate in the 30-per-cent range, the tourism sector has to aggressively market itself as a viable career option. The council has been working hard with its provincial partners to get the word out to young people about the benefits of a tourism job.
“Increasingly we are targetting even younger and younger people,” said Kiely. “Traditionally we would go to high schools and to job fairs. But more and more we are going out to junior highs and now even elementary schools just to let them know the industry exists.”
Kids are aware from a very young age that they can seek out a career as a police officer or a firefighter, he said, but they don’t know that as a job as a professional chef has just as much cachet.
Different areas facing different challenges
In other regions of the country, the staffing shortage is not as acute but still poses a problem. The Delta Bessborough resort in Saskatoon has been pretty much immune to a staffing pinch, except when it comes to filling highly specialized positions.
Debbie Kobelsky, director of people resources at the Delta Bessborough, said she has no difficulty filling most positions, has a glut of resumés and spends very little money on recruitment.
“It’s very minimal, which is great,” said Kobelsky.
Filling positions such as front-desk, housekeeping and banquet staff is a breeze because there are plenty of quality candidates available in the city and the turnover rate is very low.
But recruiting for some positions can be more of a challenge, she admits. The resort is currently searching for a junior sous-chef, an in-demand position where top talent is tough to find. For those kinds of positions, Kobelsky said she’s competing with cities like Edmonton and Calgary for the best workers.
Challenges in tourism recruiting
According to the Canadian Tourism Human Resource Council the industry is facing a number of human resource challenges.
One-third of the workers in the accommodations industry are 45 or older and will begin to retire in the next 10 years. One-third of the sector’s workforce is between 15 and 24, suggesting a possible solution for the accommodation industry might rest in finding ways to keep these young people in the sector. This situation begs the following questions:
•Can hoteliers take the students they employ “after school” and nurture them into supervisory positions to fill the void left by those retiring?
•Can co-op opportunities and career management plans entice them to stay with the company after high school or while they pursue post-secondary education?
•Will wage rates, benefits and career progression plans keep them after graduation?
There are more than 90,000 tourism-related businesses across Canada, employing 12 per cent of the Canadian workforce. Most are small businesses. From 2000 to 2003, an average of 76 per cent employed fewer than 20 people. Only four per cent employ more than 100 people.
Tree-covered hills give way to snow-capped mountains. Crystal clear rivers carve their way through the landscape. Wildlife roams freely through the national park — the oldest in the country — that surrounds the world-famous resort town that is home to 7,000 people.
But it’s what Langevin, director of recruitment at the Rimrock, doesn’t see that troubles her the most. She doesn’t see a lot of resumés and she is recruiting from a very shallow labour pool that is transient and shrinking.
Alberta’s economy is booming. The unemployment rate between Jasper, Alta., and the American border is extremely low, hovering at around two per cent a lot of the time, she said. That poses a challenge because even the best recruitment methods will be ineffective if there isn’t a labour force to pick from.
“We need a real population surge right now,” said Langevin. “We’ve had a lot of good PR here in the last little while with our deficit disappearing, we don’t have a sales tax and we have all the oil.”
But that boom has left some industries with a critical shortage and the tourism sector, particularly in resort towns like Banff, is finding it increasingly difficult to attract candidates.
Poaching not a long-term solution
Langevin said it’s becoming clear the old recruitment strategy — simply poaching staff from a competitor down the street — isn’t a very good long-term solution for the town. So, in a rather extraordinary show of solidarity and co-operation, the town got together and created a website, www.banfflife.com, to showcase what it has to offer employees.
The basic premise of the website is to sell the idea that working in Banff isn’t something that’s only for university students or transient workers but it can actually be a permanent destination.
“We have a community and you can have a family here and it isn’t just a temporary summer job,” said Langevin.
Getting that word out has taken a lot of co-operation, a marked difference from how business has traditionally been run in town.
“I think in the past everyone worked against each other,” she said. “We were kind of out for ourselves.”
Behaviour that would stun many HR pros
But times have changed. On a recent trip to Ontario where Langevin was promoting banfflife.com at a job fair, Fairmont Hotels, a competitor to Rimrock that runs the Banff Springs Hotel, arranged for accommodations for her at the Royal York in Toronto.
That community spirit has become infectious and has led to behaviour that would stun HR professionals in other areas. Langevin said the environment has changed so much that if she had some extra resumés lying around and she wasn’t hiring, but knew the recruiter at the Banff Springs Hotel down the street was desperate, she would pass them over.
“I’m going to say, ‘You know what? I’ve got these resumés and I don’t need anybody this week. How about you?’ We just start working together that way,” she said.
Jon Kiely, director of communications for the Canadian Tourism Human Resources Council in Ottawa, said the idea of helping out competitors may seem foreign to most organizations.
“But that’s the kind of progressive thinking that in the future you’re going to have to see happen more and more,” said Kiely.
That’s because the workforce demographics in Canada over the next few years don’t look good for the tourism sector and while recruiting is tough now it might become next to impossible in the near future, he said.
“What’s happening in Banff is a really good example of people who are thinking outside of the box and thinking more, not from a very insular business aspect but they’re thinking of the impact on the entire industry,” said Kiely. “And this industry employs 12 per cent of the Canadian workforce. It’s a huge economic driving factor and we need more and more people to understand that it has impact and ramifications across the board.”
The council has been working on a number of initiatives to help ease the labour shortage. Kiely said it has been encouraging organizations to start looking outside the traditional demographic — those ages 18 to 26 — as a source of talent.
Using older workers
Since the younger demographic is shrinking, the tourism sector would be wise to start recruiting older workers, which is the only demographic that is actually growing in Canada, said Kiely. As baby boomers retire en masse, a good number of them won’t be satisfied to spend their golden years at home and might be excited about taking a tourism-related job, he said.
Organizations also need to work hard to retain staff. One of the best methods to do this is to lay out a clear career path when the worker starts, particularly for young workers.
“The stories I hear from general managers and HR people in some of the bigger firms is that students come out of university or college expecting to move right into a management-type position,” said Kiely. “And that’s not really a practical sense of how the industry works. Quite often people like general managers in a hotel or resort area start out at a front-line position because they have to understand the nuances of working those various positions.”
So laying out a clear plan to a new recruit might help that worker see the benefit of staying with the company long term.
“That’s quite often where the disconnect is between employers and jobseekers,” said Kiely. “The jobseekers have an expectation right off the bat that are beyond what is normally the case of where they are going to enter in, and the disconnect on the employer side is that they don’t demonstrate to those people that there is that potential to move up.”
The council has also launched a training certification, known as emerit, that outlines professional qualifications for about two dozen tourism-related occupations including things like bartenders, taxi drivers and food and beverage servers. It sets a national standard for critical skills in the sector, something the council and employers hope will attract more workers and encourage them to seek out a long-term career.
The emerit branding is catching on, and Kiely said he’s starting to see requests for the certification being used in recruitment ads in the tourism sector. He said that’s because employers know that if a candidate has the certification, then the person has the skills necessary to excel in that position.
But he admits that it’s strange to be talking about certification, and essentially shrinking the labour pool, for areas that can’t find anyone, let alone a certified worker.
“From a simple economic standpoint, if you can’t find anyone you’re not going to put up barriers,” he said.
But having the certification opens up the door for employers to provide training to employees in key areas, and most firms understand the connection between training and turnover and that sending an employee off and paying for certification training can really impact retention, he said.
The council is also very aware of the fact that there is an entire segment of the tourism workforce that simply looks at jobs as a means to an end, he said. Many workers are simply putting themselves through school and a large number have no aspirations besides tending the bar and earning a decent wage.
“They just want the benefits of a job that can make them good money now while they have other career pursuits,” said Kiely. “So what we’ve learned is that there are these two streams of people and we need to talk to them in different ways.”
Increasing awareness in schools
With a turnover rate in the 30-per-cent range, the tourism sector has to aggressively market itself as a viable career option. The council has been working hard with its provincial partners to get the word out to young people about the benefits of a tourism job.
“Increasingly we are targetting even younger and younger people,” said Kiely. “Traditionally we would go to high schools and to job fairs. But more and more we are going out to junior highs and now even elementary schools just to let them know the industry exists.”
Kids are aware from a very young age that they can seek out a career as a police officer or a firefighter, he said, but they don’t know that as a job as a professional chef has just as much cachet.
Different areas facing different challenges
In other regions of the country, the staffing shortage is not as acute but still poses a problem. The Delta Bessborough resort in Saskatoon has been pretty much immune to a staffing pinch, except when it comes to filling highly specialized positions.
Debbie Kobelsky, director of people resources at the Delta Bessborough, said she has no difficulty filling most positions, has a glut of resumés and spends very little money on recruitment.
“It’s very minimal, which is great,” said Kobelsky.
Filling positions such as front-desk, housekeeping and banquet staff is a breeze because there are plenty of quality candidates available in the city and the turnover rate is very low.
But recruiting for some positions can be more of a challenge, she admits. The resort is currently searching for a junior sous-chef, an in-demand position where top talent is tough to find. For those kinds of positions, Kobelsky said she’s competing with cities like Edmonton and Calgary for the best workers.
Challenges in tourism recruiting
According to the Canadian Tourism Human Resource Council the industry is facing a number of human resource challenges.
One-third of the workers in the accommodations industry are 45 or older and will begin to retire in the next 10 years. One-third of the sector’s workforce is between 15 and 24, suggesting a possible solution for the accommodation industry might rest in finding ways to keep these young people in the sector. This situation begs the following questions:
•Can hoteliers take the students they employ “after school” and nurture them into supervisory positions to fill the void left by those retiring?
•Can co-op opportunities and career management plans entice them to stay with the company after high school or while they pursue post-secondary education?
•Will wage rates, benefits and career progression plans keep them after graduation?
There are more than 90,000 tourism-related businesses across Canada, employing 12 per cent of the Canadian workforce. Most are small businesses. From 2000 to 2003, an average of 76 per cent employed fewer than 20 people. Only four per cent employ more than 100 people.
