F
Donara Harutyunyan
HR Consultant at HOTELIER LLC
or me the most important trait is punctuality, which firstly means not being late for an
interview, and secondly means not coming to the interview half an hour earlier than the
arranged time. Lately punctually has acquired another, third, meaning which is to at least
show up for the interview.
The rest obviously depends on the position I am interviewing for and the HR strategy
the company is implementing. For example, if I am interviewing a sales specialist, I value
communication skills above all, and for an accountant I won’t value those skills as much.
And if the company HR strategy is people oriented, then I would hire promising young
people, who do not have much experience, but are very talented, and putting some resources
on teaching and training them will get us the results we want for the business.
But if the HR strategy is profit oriented, then more aggressive recruiting is required, which
basically means finding the best professionals in the field to get desired results in a short
period of time. And it is important to highlight, that the HR strategy is directly linked to the
overall business strategy of the company.
How you keep balance between the management of the hotel and the staff?
ow I will be talking about a very unpleasant topic for most employers. Certainly, one of
the main purposes of an HR manager is to make and maintain
the balance between the management and the staff by acting as the communication channel
between them and trying to make them both feel good, or at least not to disappoint both
parties. I would say this is the most difficult aspect of our job, considering the attitudes of
most of the employers nowadays.
And the balance is maintained by listening to your employee, the keyword here is
“LISTENING”. If you as an employer hire an HR specialist to discover and solve the issues
in the company, and at the end of the day you reject whatever has been discovered and the
possible solutions suggested, means you didn’t really need that specialist, but then you have
much deeper problems as a business owner which you don’t even realize yet. It is important
that this culture is changed in our society.
N
Donara has been working in the industry
since 2015 and has some very interesting
insights to share with us. Today we
are curious about HR tendencies in
Armenian hotels that she observed
during the past few years.
As a professional in the sphere
of Human Resources will you please
describe the benefits of working in hotel
industry?
otel industry is very different from
others. I believe a good hotel’s main
and most important goal is to make its
guests feel home away from their own home.
And the hotel staff can also be considered
as guests of the hotel, so they can also feel
at home at a vacation, at a party, at a special
event and at work at the same time. And
sometimes the work-life life balance is kept
even without leaving one’s workplace.
Trust me, it’s very easy to fall in love with
the hotel business and “falling in love” is
exactly the word for it.
Of course, all those advantages have also
their side effects, because it can sometimes
become tricky to draw a clear line between
work and personal life. Here is where the
H
HR manager should come to help the staff
with that tricky task.
What are the top departments
people apply for in hotels in Armenia?
t’s mostly front office, sales, and
curiously enough any position that has
the word “manager” in the title. Frankly
speaking, I have noticed that there is a huge
misconception in our society concerning
the word manager. People associate it
with higher then midrange salary and less
responsibilities, while the reality is different.
I
Which department of the hotel is
the most difficult hire people for even if
the offered salary is good?
’d say the hardest are Food and Beverage
and Housekeeping. Good confectioners,
cooks, waiters, maidens and cleansers, and
particularly managers who have experience
in F&B and HKS. I believe the matter is
that we do not have specialized schools who
would prepare these specialists. I do think
this is a big issue we need to start tackling
now.
I
What characteristics do you pay attention
as a Human Resource professional during
the interview?
What tactics should be implemented to solve problems?
f we are considering the HoReC sphere at large, I already talked about the problem we have
with the lack of professionals, and I’d say the ultimate solution would be to have some kind
of an institution, school, whatever you want to call it, which will make professionals, and
not just teach them, but put them to practice in the field. This also means that the teachers
shouldn’t be just people who have read a lot of books about HoReCa but are practicing
specialists in that field who can share their experience with the new generation of HoReCa
professionals.
If we take the hotel business separately then we also see issues with the salaries as well. The
salaries in hotels are not competitive with those in the HORECA sphere in general. A simple
example, if a waiter in hotel can earn maximum say 170,000 AMD (net) salary, in other
restaurants they can earn 300,000-450,000 AMD (net) salary, and plus do less work. And it
is very rare that a candidate chooses the first scenario, even though there are more career
perspectives working in a hotel.
In sum, I would add that even though there are too many problems in these field, which we
can talk about for ever, I think that because we have very talented and promising youth here,
the problems will get solved one by one. I very much hope so.
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