Victoria Gasparyan - Personnel
Manager | Corinthia Hotel
St Petersburg
First and foremost, let me thank you for this interview
and congratulate you on your interesting and important
project.
I will celebrate my 10th anniversary in the field of human
resource management in a month. It’s been an honor for me
to work in such leading organizations in various spheres as
Gold’s Gym, Public Television Company of Armenia, Radisson
Blu companies.
At the beginning of 2018, I had the great opportunity to join
the Corinthia Hotel Chain located in the heart of St. Petersburg as
an HR manager. I should note that the hotel that has 388 rooms and
17 conference halls for business meetings was recognized as Russia’s
leading conference hotel by the World Travel Awards in 2011, 2012, 2013,
2016, 2017, 2018 and I am sure this year too. Of course, this experience can’t
be compared to any other experience considering the business volume of the
hotel. We were also one of the few hotels that had the opportunity to host teams from different
countries during the FIFA World Cup. It was a very
busy, responsible and at the same time fun period.
Eevery market has its own peculiarities, but the
thing that is repeated almost everywhere is the
lack of professionals in the market. Despite the
multimillion workforces, hotels are “struggling” for
every professional. As an advantage of the Russian
market, I will mention the abundance of work (if
there is a wish to work you can’t stay without work
even for one day) and the employee protection
by the law, which unfortunately is still not in a
satisfactory condition in Armenia.
The advantage of the Armenian market is
the natural hospitality and tremendous potential
- the cuisine, nature, the history that surely will
soon make us one of the most popular travel
destinations. The working day passes in one
moment. In addition that I am responsible for
the staff recruitment (running the process of
recruitment for at least 20 vacancies), we also deal
with a variety of tasks/requests/ inquiries related
to the employees, state institutions and so on with
our HR team during the day. We also organize
various events to make daily life of our employees
more enjoyable, for example, an evening with
the theme of the Venice carnival night, with the
participation of professional actors and TV hosts,
summer bbq-party, New Year performance for
children with the participation of Santa Claus and
Snow Maiden and many other events that require
enough time and effort. However, being in a
company that carries the best values and is
surrounded by devotees of their work, it only
remains to enjoy every moment, which I have
been doing for already 10 years.
As I mentioned, the lack of staff is
typical both for the Armenian and Russian
hotel industry, but this fact should remain
unnoticed for the guests. On the one hand, it
is certainly very convenient to take advantage
of such an opportunity when there is a weak
spot in the service field, but don’t forget that
such employee does not carry the hotel’s value
system and history. The employee can work
here today, tomorrow at another restaurant,
and in this case, a great responsibility lies on
the shoulders of the managers, who must
prepare the worker in advance, before releasing
into the “field”. On the other hand, taking into
consideration, for example, the seasonality of
the Armenian market, outstaffing is a good
tool in terms of effectively managing the salary
fund. The problem is that such companies also
have a lack of staff, and during the high season
they can’t provide the continuity of services as
well.
I think that from the perspective of profitability
outstaffing is one of the spheres that have a
future in Armenia.