Omni Hotels’ 'One and Done' Job Interviews: Tackling Hospitality’s Labor Shortage with Lightning Speed

Leisure travel is coming back, even if it’s in fits and starts. After being hit hard by the pandemic, the hospitality industry is now scrambling to hire staff to welcome guests back, all while in the throes of a massive labor shortage. Amid these challenges, Omni Hotels and Resorts has engineered a new approach to hire the right people right away — and stay ahead of the competition. 

In the depths of the pandemic, Omni, like other travel brands, furloughed many of their employees as properties were forced to close. Now, the Dallas-based company is rapidly increasing the staff at nearly all of its 48 properties across the United States using its new One and Done strategy.

With One and Done, Omni brings candidates for hourly positions and supervisory roles onto their properties for a single round of interviews. At the end, if they’ve decided they like what they hear, they make an offer and close the deal. 

This premium on speed ensures two things, says Martin Lake, Omni’s director of recruiting: First, that the candidate doesn’t accept an offer from someone else while the hiring team is comparing notes. Second, that the property can get back to its full suite of revenue sources — rooms, restaurants, resort activities — as quickly as possible. It’s no surprise that Martin views his department as a “rapid response team.” 

Hospitality struggles with workers leaving the industry 

Competition has been fierce as hotels rehire staff and advertise to new candidates. In the United States alone, there were nearly 1.4 million job openings in the accommodation and food services industry in September, following a peak of 1.7 million open positions in July, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The labor shortage and the Great Reshuffle are impacting every industry, but few if any as hard as the hospitality sector. Of all industries, leisure and hospitality had the highest percentage (6.4%) of workers quitting in September 2021, according to the Labor Department’s figures. About 25% of former hospitality workers report that they would not want to work in the industry again, according to a Joblist survey of 25,000 job seekers during the third quarter. 

The labor shortage has raised the stakes such that a pay raise, added benefits, or a bonus are the bare minimum in the fight for talent. Here’s how Omni Hotels is putting its recruitment process on the fast track.

Speed and scale: Hire the best before the competition does

The hotel chain needed to hire candidates quickly to get shuttered hotels and restaurants up and running again. The challenge started with the scale of hiring across nearly 50 hotels and resorts using, for the first time, a centralized recruiting process and a team that was being assembled on the fly.

And Omni wasn’t just hiring a few people at each of its locations. “It’s almost like opening a new property,” Martin says, “because each property — if it wasn’t shut down entirely — had a very bare-bones staff.”

Like many businesses in the hospitality industry, Omni had always done “interview days,” a common practice in which the company limits candidate interviews to specific days. But Martin says that prioritized the company’s calendar over the candidates’ and wouldn’t continue to be workable with the challenges of today’s hiring market. So, Martin and the team introduced its One and Done approach to recruiting: a commitment to interview one time onsite at a time that works for the candidate. 

Omni’s answer to hiring quickly: A ‘one and done’ meeting replaces endless interviews

Here’s how One and Done works: In Omni’s centralized process, recruiters will have an initial call with a candidate to make sure they meet the basic qualifications of the job and show a strong interest in hospitality. After this short phone screen (typically, no more than 10 minutes), candidates are scheduled for in-person interviews at the hotel property.

 “We are just very aggressive on that side,” Martin says, “to get that scheduled while they’re on the phone.” 

It takes a full team effort to ensure that recruiters, hiring managers, and everyone involved in the process updates their Microsoft Outlook calendars, so they can schedule in-person interviews for the same day. And every interviewer designates an alternate in case they’re not available. 

The day of the in-person interview, candidates typically meet one or two people, including the hiring manager in most cases. It’s a process used for everyone from dishwashers to those in supervisory roles.

There may be slightly different approaches for each property, Martin adds, but the goal is to keep interviews to one day and, if a decision is made to hire, to have an HR representative make an offer before the candidate walks out the door. An electronic offer letter is sent within 24 hours. 

Omni makes getting to interviews easier with free valet

Martin says that One and Done approach has been invaluable as properties return to full operations. The company hired 1,500 people in September and 1,300 people in October. Martin’s own recruiting team has grown from 11 to 23 since he took the helm in the summer of 2021. 

To make the hiring process as easy as possible for candidates, one of Omni’s hotels even made sure that candidates received free valet parking when they came in for an interview. The recruiting team will also flash the company’s hospitality chops by touting the benefits of working for a world-class hotel brand, which include discounted stays at its properties and, say, free skiing at its properties in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and Hot Springs, Virginia. 

The company is experimenting with weekend recruiting

In an effort to get a leg up on the competition, several of Omni’s properties began having recruiters work on the weekends for a few hours a day,  allowing the company to get a jump start on hiring candidates. 

“Instead of waiting till Monday morning and going through applications,” Martin explains, “we’re actually looking at bringing some people to work from home, on the weekends, earn some extra hours, and actually just monitor all our openings over a weekend, so we’re on top of the game earlier than our competition.”

Final thoughts: Staying ‘amped up’ on hiring in a competitive job market is a must

With no end in sight to the labor shortage, Omni is maintaining an aggressive attitude toward hiring.

“Like other companies,” Martin concedes, “we’ve learned that it’s all about flexibility now.”

The company introduced Part-Time on Your Time in which jobs are advertised as both full-time and part-time to support people who may want a flexible schedule. Gone, Martin says, are the days when hospitality companies could call employees at a moment’s notice and expect them to be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  

“Just come speak to us, and we’ll figure out a way to make it work for both yourselves and ourselves to fit your schedule,” Martin says. “One and Done is not going away, because this competitive job market is not going away.”

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