Many hotel companies work with community-based organizations to provide opportunities to entry-level workers, but often, as well intended as they may be, the placements fail due to a true lack of understanding about the realities of the hotel work environment. Hyatt Hotels Corp. is launching a global program to fill those gaps through the use of technology.
On October 1, Hyatt Hotels Corp. announced the launch of RiseHY, a new global program designed to pair the hospitality industry’s career opportunities with young people who need them. As part of the initiative, Hyatt has committed to hiring 10,000 Opportunity Youth – people ages 16 to 24 who are neither in school nor working – by 2025.
Using virtual technology, youth across global communities will be able to experience what employment inside a hotel looks like, from home or a community center. They will learn about roles Hyatt hotels offer, including bell attendant, entry-level culinary, housekeeper, steward and waiter/waitress.
Funded in part by Hyatt Hotels Foundation, digital technology that taps into artificial intelligence will also be made available to community-based organizations to identify candidates’ inherent soft skills and match those to entry-level roles in the hospitality industry – and not just at Hyatt hotels. Candidates that match to hospitality roles will then have the option to be referred to human resources teams at a variety of hotels through community-based organizations.
HOTELS recently spoke to Audrey Williams-Lee, vice president, corporate human resources and global philanthropy, as well as Jessica Schultz, senior manager of community engagement for Hyatt to talk about the program’s development, opportunities and challenges.
H: What are more of the near-term goals of the program?
Audrey Williams-Lee: Our big focus is on extending our partnerships because we have found it’s really individual to the market. Another part of doing this is really identifying other organizations that are connected into the population of opportune youth that we want to hire… Once we have that in place, we’d definitely be able to scale and get numbers in.
We are piloting in 11 cities across seven countries, so we’re learning about what’s needed to make sure we have the right support in place.
Jessica Schultz: Some of our pilot hotels are in Ho Chi Minh City, as well as Cambodia, to Amman, Jordan, and Mumbai, and even in São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro… We make placements and then they find it is not something that they like doing at all.
So they were thrilled about this VR experience to learn more, but we’re also finding is that once you get these youth into either the training programs or even into these positions, having a mentor or buddy is something that we’re hearing consistently as being something that really helps them want to stay within the Hyatt family and/or in any hospitality role. They can talk about some of the challenges that they’re facing, like punctuality or what the next career position is for them. So that’s something that we’re really looking to build out.
AWL: We are also making sure our community-based partners really understand our business. It’s really important because they’re able to help explain that and from a job preparedness standpoint it also helps them be more targeted.
We have our partners visit our hotels so they understand what to expect, and we find that having ongoing communication and making sure that everyone is aligned helps a lot.
H: What investment is Hyatt making and what is the projected ROI?
AWL: Our investment right now is multi-millions of dollars, depending on how fast we scale. We are still learning exactly what’s needed to make this really successful.
From an ROI standpoint, as we grow in markets like Asia, and as we look at traditional turnover we’ve worked with our analytics team to project what those openings are expected to be. So being able to build a solid, diverse pipeline of talent is something that we see as having a huge payoff.
In addition, we will launch an internal grant program where we invite our hotels to nominate a local non-profit that they work with to make an impact in their community… We’re going to be announcing 30 of them in early December to show great examples of non-profit that align beautifully with RiseHY in the hopes that other non-profits will see how can they maybe shift to align with RiseHY.
H: What was key to creating content that you think will resonate?
JS: First, finding the right partner and platform to use to create the VR experience was definitely a journey. If we’re going to have our non-profits go into favelas or remote villages, it needs to be really portable. We wanted a partner that has both mobile and web browser accessibility. Also, that allows us to imbed part of the Hyatt culture into the VR experience.
We also want it to be something that’s at no cost to our non-profit partners to use, as well as our hotels. YouVisit made it really easy for us to just have it be living in an app, in a browser whereas others require a licensing fee, etc.
The experience is available both in English and Spanish right now, but also it’s ADA accessible because we really want to make sure that when we work with our organizations that work with people with different abilities, that they are able to also experience the VR experience.
In addition, we asked our regions for the top five common entry-level positions that they consistently have open. We identified them as a steward, housekeeping attendant, bell attendant, entry-level culinary, and a waiter and waitress. And that’s actually the same five roles that we have used to build for our assessment modules as well.
H: What were the bigger challenges to overcome?
JS: We didn’t realize how difficult the non-profit landscape is… We’ve had to be really thoughtful about how to be really strict in finding those non-profits that are going to best align and get the best ROI and the investments we’re making with non-profits.
Also, we’re challenging non-profits to think more like a business. We’re going to have to do a lot of hand holding, coaching and teaching so that they can be experts in working with hospitality partners like us.