1a) The gap identified with regards to the employee management is communication gap, which means that there is a gap between service delivery (i.e. how Shangri-La treats its internal customers), and Shangri-La’s external communications to potential internal customers in the recruitment process. For this question, customers refer to internal customers (employees). There is a clear ineffective management of customer expectations, where the communications by Shangri-La is not only missing the mark of consumer’s expectations in terms of pay level, but also, by not educating customers about the exact requirements of the job description and specifications, there was a mismatch of skills when it came down to employee selection.
External communication…show more content… 1b) Upon realization of the communication gap, Shangri-La should aggressively find strategies to narrow this gap, to ensure that potential and employees are managed well. With the competitive hotel industry, an assumption made here is that Shangri-La is not going to increase the pay of employees and will have to solve the issues via other strategies.
First, Shangri-La will have to manage service promises, which ultimately correlate to customer expectations. The first would be making realistic promises, as the expectations employees bring to Shangri-La would affect their evaluations of the quality (measured by pay level). Therefore, Shangri-La should only remove external communication such as being the first choice for colleagues until they can realistically live up to that name – such as providing in accordance to employees’ definition of “first choice” criteria. Next, they should communicate in their marketing collaterals an estimated pay level, so that employees will not be shocked in the case where the perceived and actual pay level gap is too wide. In addition, what they can do is to correct the perception that the market value of hotels is highly correlated to the pay level of employees. This can be done by making industry averages in the luxury…show more content… If Shangri-La gives the HR team that does job postings adequate information, tools and skills, they will be able to successfully gain the right traction to the interviews. This can be done through better downward communication. The HR department should show the hiring departments the relevant company’s marketing communication before it is published on the website. In addition, more horizontal communication is required. The goal of HR is to fill the manpower gaps in the company. However, for the relevant hiring departments, what they need in addition, are talents who “had the right attitude and the ability to fit in [Shangri-La].” Therefore, there needs to be coordination between the HR department doing recruitment marketing and the rest of the company, so that the communications out of the company accurately reflect the requirements of each job. Featuring actual employees sharing their experience in Shangri-La Bosphorus is one method Shangri-La can adopt to reduce the intangibility of the recruitment process.
Lastly, Shangri-La can leverage on the aggressive word-of-mouth phenomenon that is already happening. “So even if it was a person I had interviewed and rejected, this person too would probably send me somebody else’s resume to consider.” With proper customer education during the interview, applicants are able to better understand the job requirements of Shangri-La, and would thus be a better medium to