Challenges of HRM Practices in Hospitality Industry: Employee Attraction and Retention

Running Head: HRM
[
]
2018
Australia

HRM 1
Human resource management is the key element contributing in the success of an
organization. HRM practices different activities in order to help operational and functional
departments of the organization to achieve their goals by providing efficient and skilled
employees to them. When hospitality industry is concerned these practices have more
importance as in this industry, employees play more significant role than the other industries.
This industry depends more on the employees and also faces several critical challenges
regarding human resourcing. Most critical challenges for HRM practices in this industry are
the attraction and retention of the employees. The discussion below thoroughly describes
these two most critical challenges of HRM practices in the industry and also describes briefly
the important factors and their influences as well, which affect these challenges. The analysis
of these factors and influences may help HR management for strategic planning for the
evaluation and improvement of such specific activities. A strategic approach for these aspects
of HRM in hospitality industry is much needed as per the requirement of industry. Industry
also needs to recruit skilled and educated employees for the better understanding of their
responsibilities to achieve their goals along with the organization’s success.
Hospitality industry depends on the human resources more unlike other industries.
Human resources play key role in the success of any organization in hospitality industry. This
makes it more important to maintain retain the skilled and educated employees for as long as
possible. This makes the discussion even more important to understand the basic essentiality
of employee retention to form effective strategies for the employee retention purpose. One
particular industry to explore the importance of human resource attraction and retention is
tourism and hospitality. The World Tourism Organization states that the total receipts of
international tourism in the year 2003 were around 6% of the total worldwide exports of
goods and services. In this industry the success and prosper of an organization cannot be
achieved without the contribution and support of its employees. Identifying and recruiting the

HRM 2
right candidates for the job are two initial steps of HRM activities, but for the development of
an organization it is more important to maintain or retain the employees. In many studies it is
defined that that one of the main motive of development of tourism and hospitality industry
in any economy is provision of the employment to the people of that economy.
Human resource practices in the hospitality industry face many challenges like
employee attraction for the job and retention of the employees as long as possible. Attraction
of the employees is very challenging for the HRM executives as they are operating the
tertiary sector of the economy where service is provided to the customers instead of the end
products. This report consists of the thorough discussion about the challenges faced by the
HR management in process of attracting the employees as well as retaining them for a time
period in the organization.
Human resource planning is the key element of the organization’s strategy planning. A
strategic HR planning helps the organization in achieving its goals successfully.
Organizations complete their financial plans routinely to achieve the organizational goals,
however, they does not consider the workforce management plans most of the time. But,
integrating the human resource management with the other strategic plans associated with the
business help the organization to achieve its improvement goals as the employee need meet in
this manner (Esenyel & Mahafzah, 2016). Therefore, according to the researches which have
done in previous human resource management can be defined as the management and control
of the human resources. The department of human resource management is responsible for all
the activities related to human resources starting from recruiting to the retention of
employees. The human resource management of an organization integrates the performance
improvement and the strategic planning of the organization (Saad S. K., 2013).

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A number of constraints and problems in tourism industry have concern with the
development of human resource. It is found that majority of the employees working in
hospitality sector agree with the fact that an effective management of human resource should
be considered as a major influencing factor for the enhancement of efficiency and to increase
the productivity of the organization (Khan, 2008). Although most of the tourism and
hospitality organizations are concern to provide a high quality of service to their customers,
maximum staff of their organizations consists of the low or semi-skilled employees. Apart
from the planning for recruitment of high skilled and educated employees, managers in the
industry are able to recruit relatively low skilled employees just for temporary requirement
and face some alarming problems like low productivity of the organizations and low
efficiency of the employees (Saad S. K., 2013).
In this industry the nature of the practices of their relevant service production are
inextricably associated with the involvement of the customers and some behavioural norms
are to be established for the customer satisfaction, expectations and exceeding their
expectations. Researches defined that the ethical practice of the services in hotel business is
very critical, specifically in the HRM practices. Employees’ view of ethical climate of their
organization is completely depends on their job satisfaction, organizational performance, and
the commitment of the organization (Pettijohn, Petttijohn, & Taylor, 2008). Ethical problems
of the industry mainly reflect the key challenges which occur in the specific case based
industry. Ethical violation is not a new term for the industry as 44% workers in restaurant
industry had reported that they had stolen case or other merchandise from their workplace.
Another recent study states that in the year of 2008, one out of the 30 employees working in
the retail restaurant and food-sector has been caught while stealing from the respective
employer.