With customer service now outranking low prices among consumers making purchase decisions, hiring good hotel staff is a must. Asking the right interview questions helps managers identify the best candidates to meet changing guest expectations.

Whether you’re looking for front of house team members, food and beverage staff, or housekeepers and groundskeepers, it’s helpful to think of serving candidates like you would guests — with attention, courtesy, and care. We’ve gathered the best hotel hiring tips and interview questions to help empower your hospitality recruitment strategy with speed and efficiency.

Inside this guide, you’ll find:

1. Key qualities to look for in hotel staff
2. 25 interview questions for hotel staff
3. Tips for hiring hotel staff more efficiently
4. Give your candidates a 5-star experience

Key qualities to look for in hotel staff

As technology transforms hospitality through industry adoption of mobile apps, contactless payments, self-service kiosks, and AI-powered chatbots, hotel staff become even more important for safeguarding the guest experience. 

In fact, 83% of guests now look for personalization when traveling, while just over half (53%) care about friendliness and service. Here are 12 qualities to prioritize in your hotel staff hires so you can ask interview questions to build teams that deliver a human touch.

• Customer service orientation: The ability to anticipate guest needs, make people of all backgrounds feel comfortable, and exude authentic enjoyment of customer service.
• Communication skills: Clear verbal and written communication skills that are appropriate for respectful interaction with team members and guests.
• Attention to detail: Understanding of guest preferences, upholding of property standards, and demonstrating a commitment to excellence.
• Positive attitude: Friendliness, approachability, and an optimistic mindset that focuses on solving problems, not complaining.
• Self-starter mindset: Staying two steps ahead, taking ownership of the guest experience, thinking critically, and having pride in a job well done.
• Teamwork skills: Collaboration and active listening, the ability to take personal responsibility, and a track record of honesty.
• Time management: Performing work responsibilities to a schedule, abiding by hotel service level agreements to guests, and prioritizing tasks effectively.
• Problem-solving: Conflict resolution for guest complaints, creative thinking skills, and resourcefulness.
• Computer literacy: Ability to use hotel software, point of sale (POS) terminals, and other technology used on your property.
• Food service: Order-taking, ingredient preparation and handling, excellent personal hygiene, and kitchen safety.
• Physical fitness: Core strength, wrist strength and good posture for front of house staff, lifting skills and ability to stand for long periods of time for housekeepers, groundskeepers, and food and beverage staff.
• Safety and security: Emergency protocols and basic first aid and CPR for key staff, hazardous materials handling for housekeepers and groundskeepers, and safety checks for food and beverage staff.

25 interview questions for hotel staff

Even though 76% of hotels are experiencing a staffing shortage, the industry’s increased wages and expanded benefits are starting to attract candidates. The following list of behavioral, competency, and traditional interview questions can help you evaluate applicants effectively.

Background and experience

1. What were two things that made you want to apply for this position?
2. Why are you looking to leave your current role?
3. Tell me about your experience working in hotels.
4. What is your experience in customer service?
5. What is your experience with using point of sale and/or reservation systems?
6. Tell me about a time you had to complete a task you were unfamiliar with.
7. Tell me about a career or personal achievement that you are proud of and why.

Customer service

8. What does excellent customer service mean to you?
9. What’s the best customer service you’ve ever received? 
10. Tell me about a time when you dealt with an unhappy customer or guest.
11. How do you ensure high standards and quality are met?
12. What would you do if we received a guest complaint about your service?
13. Imagine that a guest asks you for a local restaurant and entertainment suggestion. Where would you recommend if they were a single business traveler, a young couple, or a family with children?

Teamwork

14. Tell me about a time when you worked on a team or with people from different departments.
15. When you work on a team with others, what role do you tend to take? Leader, team player, researcher, planner, or expert?
16. Describe a time when you had to make a difficult decision.
17. Tell me about a time you disagreed with a coworker.
18. Tell me about a time when you were able to motivate others to get the desired results.
19. Describe a time when you saw a coworker struggling. What did you do?
20. What would you do first if there was an emergency in the hotel?

Brand and culture alignment

21. What is your impression of our hotel so far? What stands out to you?
22. What makes our hotel different from our competitors in your opinion?
23. How have you managed stressful situations at work?
24. True or false: The guest is always right. Explain your answer.
25. Is your schedule flexible? What hours are you available to work?

Tips for hiring hotel staff more efficiently

With an estimated turnover rate of 79%, improving retention of skilled staff is a top concern for hospitality employers. Beyond better pay and opportunities for advancement, here are six additional strategies to ensure your hiring process is built to withstand high-volume pressures.

Tell your story on the career site

An effective career site showcases your hotel brand’s culture and values, elevates employee voices through video and photography, and encourages applications with a user-friendly design. See four examples of what that looks like here, or explore our SmartRecruiters Attrax site builder tool.

Communicate with candidates via SMS or WhatsApp

High-volume candidates are less likely to conduct their job search from a computer or use email frequently, so it’s important to offer the option to communicate through mobile messaging. With SmartMessage, the entire hiring team can view the text-based communication on SMS or Whatsapp in the ATS’s candidate inbox.

Enable candidates to self-schedule interviews

With all the back-and-forth, scheduling a single interview can take upwards of 30 minutes or more. Empowering candidates to self-schedule not only puts them in the driver’s seat of their own experience, it also helps reduce your time spent scheduling interviews with candidates, ultimately speeding up the hiring process.

Surface relevant applicants faster with AI-based candidate matching

Many applicant tracking systems now offer AI-based tools like SmartAssistant that harness the power of machine learning to match candidate skills to the job description based on a validated skills taxonomy. Learn more about using AI in your hiring and how to ensure compliance with local and state hiring laws.

Centralize job board contracts for streamlined posting

With hundreds of job boards in existence, and at least 20 specific to hospitality recruiting, managing and posting jobs manually is a time-consuming task. Using a modern applicant tracking system (ATS) with a product like SmartDistribute lets you post everywhere instantly with one click. 

Use a CRM for seasonal and local hiring

Just like hotels advertise to guests months in advance of peak travel dates, hotel managers need to source candidates in the preseason hiring period to be ready to fill roles. A candidate relationship management like SmartCRM can help reduce your recruitment marketing spend by allowing you to collect and nurture interested candidates year-round.

Give your candidates a five-star experience

Leading hotels know the secret to success is a seamless guest experience from check-in to check-out. Your candidates deserve the same attention to detail across your company’s hiring process, with personalization, automation, and time-saving features built-in at every touchpoint.

Aspen Skiing Company operates the four mountains of Aspen Snowmass in addition to Aspen Hospitality, a portfolio of hotels and residences.  In the first year of implementing SmartRecruiters, the combined companies saw:

• 104% increase in candidate volume
• 24% decrease in recruitment marketing spend.

Are you ready to ease the burden of juggling multiple open roles amidst constant attrition? Sign up for a demo to explore how SmartRecruiters can help you address seasonal surges with a collaborative hiring platform that enhances the candidate experience and streamlines hospitality recruitment.