Five Benefits of Losing Your Star Players

My team is undergoing a tremendous amount of change as several of our long-term, star players are moving on to other opportunities both in and outside the organization. For several years the composition of my team has remained relatively stable but now we’re entering a new phase of growth, which is both scary and exciting. It seems like each day I’m having the old Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first?”conversation with my managers, as we try to sort out who’s going, who’s staying, and how we’re getting our work done.

It’s easy to get discouraged when top performers leave your team. The immediate reaction is often to look at all the challenges that lay ahead — How do we replace the intellectual capital that’s walking out the door? Who is going to cover the work while we hire replacements? Will the new hires be able to match the productivity and contributions of the previous employees? All those questions swirl through your mind as you ponder the endless hours you’re going to have to invest in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training new team members.

Rather than being discouraged, I’m energized and looking forward to the future because the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term difficulties. Here’s five benefits I see to losing top performers:

1. It proves you’re doing something right. Huh? Doesn’t it mean that something must be wrong with your leadership or team dynamics if you’re losing your top people? Well, if you’re a toxic leader and your team’s morale and performance is in the tank, then yes, there’s something wrong. But if you’re doing a good job of leading it means you’re hiring the right talent and developing them to high performance. I take a little pride in knowing that other leaders see the immense talent I have on my team and they want to hire them away.

2. Your team is better off for their contributions. The contributions of my star players have helped raise the level of professionalism, productivity, and capability of my team over the last several years. They have redefined what “normal” performance looks like and we’ll be looking to existing team members and our new hires to reach that same level. We are better off for having them on our team and I believe they are better off for having been on our team.

3. It provides a chance for existing team members to step up. Losing valuable contributors is an opportunity for other team members to step up their game, either by moving into higher levels of responsibility or by taking on short-term duties to cover the gap. When you have several high-performers on a team, it’s easy for other valuable team members to get buried on the depth-chart (to use a football metaphor). Losing a star player allows second-team players to step into the limelight and prove their capabilities.

4. You can bring in new blood. Having long-term, high-performers on your team brings stability and continuity. However, stability and continuity can easily become routine and complacency if you aren’t careful. Hiring new people brings fresh perspective, a jolt of energy, and a willingness to try new things you haven’t done before. Teams are living organisms and living entities are always growing and changing. I see this as a new era to bring in a fresh crop of star players that will raise our performance to even higher levels.

5. It facilitates needed change. Bringing in new team members is a great time to address broader changes in your business. You have new people who aren’t conditioned to existing work processes, systems, or ways of running your business. They aren’t yet infected with the “that’s the way we’ve always done it around here”virus that tends to infiltrate groups that stay together for a long time. It’s a time to capitalize on the strengths and ideas of new team members to help you take your business to new heights.

Losing high-performers is never easy but it doesn’t have to be devastating. I’m grateful to have worked with star players that are moving on to other challenges and I’m excited about developing a new wave of top performers that will lead us in the years ahead. It’s time for change…Bring it!

Counter-Offers Are a Sucker’s Play

By Kris Dunn · 03.15.2013

Retention is important for organizations.

Paying substantially more for the talent that’s currently sitting in your office is a total sucker’s play. Don’t confuse the two.

Let’s break this down a little bit. You found that diamond in the rough. You hired them, nurtured them and grew them to the point where they’re relevant in your industry, their profession, etc. Or maybe you just bought them from someone else at a price you considered at the time to be fair, right?

Either way, after a couple of years with you, they have more value on the open market. That means people are going to ping them and see if they can strip them away to another company. At which point many managers and companies start freaking out, even in reaction to the potential of a slightly above-average talent leaving the company to go to work for a competitor.

It all comes down to replacement cost. Can you find another cog to fill the gap with? If you can, you don’t freak out and you don’t counter with a raise that gets into the 20% range to save the referenced employee with another offer in hand.

In the Talent game, there are really two types of employees that warrant a counter-offer when they’ve told you they’re getting ready to accept an offer from another company:

Great Creators = the people who create what you sell, and I mean truly create. In a lot of companies, those are software developers. Good creators in any type of company that produces products and services are worth ten of their peers.

True Rainmakers = not salespeople in general, but people who have the ability to bring in business in a way that an average salesperson can’t. Generally, these people have networks that have been formulated in a way that’s different from the average sales pro. Normal sales pros bitch about the quality of the leads. True Rainmakers never seem to give a flip about the leads marketing is producing. Hmm.

Not everyone who creates or sells for a living is special. In fact, most are average. BUT – when you find a top tier creator or rainmaker, they are different. They can drive results for your company in ways that others can’t.

That’s why they’re the only people you should counter when they appear to be seriously considering another job. Everyone else’s replacement cost is too low to freak out about.  Accounting, Marketing, HR, Operations, Customer Service – you only save people in these areas if they qualify somehow as a creator or a rainmaker. Few will qualify.

Four final thoughts about retention and counter-offers:

1. You should pay people aggressively/fairly and provide career paths so talent can grow and get theirs at your company in at time frame that’s fair. I’m not talking about playing hardball when you pay people at the 17th percentile.

2.  You create a culture over time related to how you handle resignations and counters. If you always go into save mode, there are a lot of people who play games. If it’s crickets when even a solid player brings their notice, you’re going to stop “I’m taking another offer” games.

3.  Your tendency to freak out over average people resigning means you haven’t institutionalized knowledge transfer and operational soundness. The knowledge is in the average person’s head and nowhere else, thus your freakoutedness (that’ a word, I just made it up).

4.  For a great primer on who Creators and Rainmakers are and who is replaceable, look to the New England Patriots. Their creators are Tom Brady and Bill Belichcik, and everyone else (and they mean everyone) is replaceable. The goal should be to have our stuff together as organizations to the point where we can replicate great results with different talent – while protecting the creators/rainmakers.

Retention and counter-offers.  Don’t confuse the two.  Counters are a sucker’s play in most cases. If they’re not, we’ve got to look at our organization to find the answers why.

http://fistfuloftalent.com/2013/03/counter-offers-are-a-suckers-play.html

Managers often think that they have reached a career level where they have been magically imbued with the gift of giving a good job interview. It doesn’t work that way.

By Stephenie Overman

FORTUNE — What songs best describe your work ethic? How many cows are in Canada? A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?

Those queries come from the Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions for 2013, as compiled by the job hunters’ website Glassdoor. Allegedly, they’re all actual conversational gambits used by corporate interviewers.

You may think such questions could produce useful insights. Or you might see them as off the wall. But are your interview questions any better?

Managers tend to think of interviewing job candidates as “something that’s easy,” says Pamela Skillings, president and chief trainer at Skillful Communications in New York. Believing they’ve reached a career level where they have been magically imbued with the gift of giving a good job interview, such managers wing it and fail to prepare questions that will reveal the best potential employees. All too often, they get a penguin in a sombrero.

“They end up hiring someone who costs the company a lot” in wasted training time and salary expenses, Skillings says. “You try to fix the mistake you made in the interview process. Then you have to fire the person or move them into a different role, and you have to start over.”

A bad interview “hurts the manager first,” Skillings says. “A bad hire is going to come back to bite you.”

Some managers try to protect themselves with vague questions of the “tell-me-about-yourself” variety. But experts say such prosaic questions produce answers of little use.

Before you sit down with job candidates, “you need a great shopping list” that lays out what you need to know about each applicant for a particular position, says Mel Kleiman, author of Hire Tough, Manage Easy and president of HR consulting firm Humetrics, which is based in Sugar Land, Texas. It’s basic stuff, Kleiman says: “Can you do the job? Can you do the job at the degree of excellence needed? Will you do it? Can you and I live together? If you are hired, can you put up with our culture and [can] we put up with your personality?”

Those aren’t the interview questions, Kleiman says. They’re templates you can use to design questions whose answers will tell you, “Is this person right for the job and is this job right for the person?”

Rather than focusing on eliciting the answers they need, inexperienced interviewers often ask rote questions that “bounce along the surface without getting to know the real person behind the interview hype,” says Paul Falcone, author of 96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire. “There’s not much rhyme or reason to their questioning techniques” and they ask the same basic types of questions to all candidates for all positions.

Falcone’s examples of rote questions:

• Who was your favorite boss, and what would he or she say about you?
• Which position was your favorite and why?
• Why do you think you’d want to work here?
• What questions can I answer for you?

Effective interviewers ask “behavioral” questions, according to Skillings. They use phrases such as, “tell me about a time, give me an example,” she says, because the way a person reacted to a past situation may be an indication of what he or she will do in the future.

So, “instead of asking ‘Are you a good negotiator?’ it’s better to say, ‘Tell me about a negotiation and how it went.’ Get a real example. Probe for details. Get to the heart of what you need to know,” Skillings says.

Falcone agrees. “We need objective diagnostic indicators of an individual’s probability of succeeding within our organization.” Otherwise, interviewers are “left picking from among people who may sell themselves better than others.”

Falcone’s examples of effective interview questions:

• Walk me through the progression in your career leading me up to what you do now on a day-to-day basis.
• What makes you stand out among your peers?
• What criteria are you using in selecting your next employer, including the industries you’re considering, company criteria, and the roles and titles that you’re pursuing?
• If you were to accept a position with us today, how would you describe that to a prospective employer five years from now in terms of your career development and longer-term goals?

Ask questions that “reveal a candidate’s level of career introspection,” Falcone says. “Do they know what they want? Can they articulate their career history in a clear and compelling manner?”

During the interview, really listen to the candidate, Kleiman says. “You’ll never learn anything while you’re talking.”

If hiring people isn’t your main job, don’t be afraid to ask for help, recommends Skillings, who teaches workshops and online courses on conducting interviews. “We see a little bit of attitude from managers” at the beginning of training, she says. “`I don’t need this, I know how the deal works.’ By the end, they realize they didn’t know things, or were rusty.”

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/08/why-so-many-job-interviewers-are-terrible/

Applying the core principles of project management to your hiring and training practices is one of the best ways to both attract and retain qualified hospitality staff with a positive attitude. “Plan and execute,” the mantra of accomplished project managers, refers to the second and third phases of traditional, or phase-based project management, which are all about strategy.

Here are some tips to help you create an effective strategy for hiring the best professionals for your establishment.

1. Set clear and precise hiring and retention goals. How many people do you need to build your dream team, and how are their duties divided? Will your team members acquire new skills and responsibilities throughout their tenure at your establishment, or are their roles fixed from the start? Remember, while setting goals, that the hospitality maxim of “hire the smile and train the skills” is only as useful as you make it; and that means defining in words, what a positive employee attitude looks like in practice.

   Bear in mind that it probably won’t look the same for every employee, especially those with very different skills and responsibilities. So don’t just list general personal attributes; place your ideal hires in challenging, position-specific situations and describe their speech and actions.

2. Get organized. Take inventory of the resources at your disposal, including available project-management tools, hiring budget, and time-frame. Schedule plenty of wiggle room for unexpected obstacles: a surplus of qualified applicants, budgetary changes, employee illness, hard-to-reach applicant references, etc. Then, start planning your interview process.

   Be sure to include at least three or four behavior-based questions, such as “Tell me about a time when a stressful situation got the best of you at work,” or “What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made as a server/front-desk manager/chef/concierge/etc.? How did you remedy the situation?”

3. Use role play. Any major change to your interview process merits a practice session with a team member or fellow hospitality manager, particularly when first adding tough questions, such as those above, to the roster. As your establishment’s representative and manager, you are firmly in charge of the interview dynamic, and deploying forced questions will get you forced answers.

   You may also want to role-play with applicants when posing your challenge questions. Pay attention to the entire person as he or she responds; body language, tone of voice and facial expression are all powerful indicators of attitude.

4. Keep the lines of communication open. Your supervisor, current team members, and even professional competitors can help you refine and revise your hiring process if you keep an open mind and seek out their expertise, experiences and feedback. Meet regularly with front- and back-of-house staff and establish interdepartmental communications protocol, whether via email, project-management tools, or shift-change documentation. Recognize strong employee performances in front of other staff members, and thank employees frequently for their service and loyalty.
5. Initiate new and existing employee training. In any high turnover industry, consistency in quality and kind of services rendered, particularly when integrating new hires, is best established by ongoing employee training sessions and performance incentives. When crafting training sessions, seek your team members’ input. Ask them what “soft skills” comprise a positive attitude and how they recognize those skills in practice. Solicit feedback on the most challenging aspects of customer service in your establishment and consider formalizing, with recognition or award systems, employee best practices.
6. Stay flexible. Seasoned project managers know better than to expect perfection of any person or process. Instead, they find humor and opportunities for personal growth in every possible outcome. If your first round of interviews or new hires is a flop, step back from the experience, make note of where things went wrong (mistakes are usually attributable to inadequate planning or preparation), and revise your strategy accordingly.

Finally, never forget that attitude flows downhill from the top. Staying open to acknowledging and learning from your mistakes will insure that your attitude remains positive and your employees will follow your lead.

This guest post is provided by Ren Lacerda who works with University Alliance on behalf of Michigan State University and University of Florida covering topics on Hospitality Management and Human Resource Management. You can follow Ren on Twitter @RenMarketing.

Give em’ the Pickle …

My very first restaurant job was washing dishes at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor in Portland, Oregon. At that time Marriott owned the brand, and I was a Marriott employee, but we all “worked for Farrell’s”. Being in Portland we had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Farrell and his wife Mona in for a quick bite. He was, and is an incredible man.

After that I had the pleasure of working for Mr. Farrell at Pacific Coast Restaurants in Portland. He was the CEO and the face of PCR. At every new unit opening [and we had many as the company was growing like gang busters], and two times a year, Mr. Farrell gave his “Pickle Speech”. I saw it countless times, and never grew tired of hearing it.

The basis for the “Pickle Speech” was a guest that was in a Farrell’s and was being charged for a side of pickles by the server. The guest told the server that they always get the pickles, but the server insisted on charging for the side. Well, the guest left, and wrote Mr. Farrell a letter to tell their story. Bottom line … Give em’ the Pickle!

Every business in the world has pickles to give away. Something little to make your customers know you care, and make them customers for life.

As I look back, his wisdom and teachings were so vital to not only me, but thousands of employees that heard the speech, and lived it out in his stores.

At a time when great service is often set aside for profits and cost controls, I reflect on these principles and realize they really cost very little to do. On the flip side, they are very expensive with lost business if you don’t.

What are these four simple principles for giving away Pickles?

1.       Connect with customers and guests. Ask yourself, how I would want to be treated, and then do it!

2.       Anticipate your customer’s needs. Stay one step ahead of them. What are they needing, and put it into place.

3.       Look for ways to delight your customers. Surprise them, and ask how we can exceed their expectations.

4.       Inspire yourself and others. Seeing with your heart. Ask yourself, am I willing to do whatever it takes to make a difference?

So what do giving away pickles have to do with Gecko Hospitality? Plenty! We strive day in and day out to give pickles away. Not only to our clients, but to our candidates as well. A thank you note, a small trinket of thanks, a text or e-mail of encouragement. We want to make a difference in all the folks we come in contact with. You [clients and candidates] are our lifeblood and we value and need you.

Thank you for choosing Gecko Hospitality! Ready for some pickles? 

Kevin Kalstad – Gecko Hospitality

Leadership is a learned skill. The myth of the natural leader halts too many restaurant manager careers and discourages many restaurant professionals from aggressively seeking better jobs in the hospitality industry. In reality, the only true obstacle to becoming a restaurant manger is knowledge. Everyone may be at different stages of the leadership learning curve.

The plugged in leader understands the ‘life force’ behind a strategy and can anticipate what may go wrong, problems they may face, and create exit strategies, or a ‘plan B’. They divert problems before they evolve, and have prepared their team to execute a plan of action at a moment’s notice.

Here are 10 questions that will help you determine whether you are a critical leader and place you on the learning curve.

•           I am/not interested about execution within the group of people I am currently in.

Take the time to answer this honestly. Do you have influence and can guide people to perform better? If you are interested then you make things happen. If you are not interested then things happen around you and you ignore them, or gossip.

•           The organization is efficient.

If everything is good enough then you have no execution plan.  Can you see places where things can be improved. Can you envision and can imagine improvements. Do you have suggestions for improvements in every aspect of your life? Do you walk into a job and achieve more results than your predecessor

•           I enforce consequences of ineffective execution consistently

The problem with enforcement is that it imposes your level of integrity, belief system, and perceptions on another person. It is a self centered form of leadership management which disrespects those who are not fitting into your plan. Once this happens those around you stop believing in your dream. They lose their motivation. The strategy looses synergy and any serendipitous opportunities are lost as the team either abandons their leader, or withdraws inside themselves and stops contributing.

The Critical Leader learns how to motivate and reward good behavior, motivating their actions based on results. This forward moving form of leadership produces results. When a leader focuses on correcting inappropriate behavior they are in fact doing nothing more than trying to solve problems by force.

•           I break projects down into measurable, result focused goals

The final result may be the culmination of several goals. Leaders who fail often try to execute too many goals at one time. Leaders who succeed put all their efforts into achieving results. The successful completion of a goal is merely the symptom of an effective leadership strategy.

Any job in the hospitality industry can lead to a better career. There are very few ‘dead end’ jobs. Everyone is a job seeker at any given time, at any stage of the learning curve. We all have the opportunity to develop leadership skills. Each problem is an opportunity to learn our problem solving and opportunity development skills.

Leadership development is vital, but many people who are just starting fail in their first attempts because they lack the skills and knowledge needed to succeed. Both success, and failure are behavior habits. When a leader fails, they learn, study more, seek help, and try again. Often, people who are just learning to become managers become discouraged. The myth that some people are born leaders, or have a knack for leadership has kept many talented leaders from developing careers as restaurant mangers.

Controlling the elements of failure + Cause and Effect = Success

Many leaders fail because their plan is not congruent, realistic, and effective. The effective leader is willing to watch the day to day aspects of a business and measure their effectiveness based on results. The distant leader makes assumptions and tracks their success and failures – after it is too late.

Successful leaders share some common behaviors.

1. Listening

They have developed the art of listening. You can learn more about a person, problem, or situation by listening to people. Understanding what a person wants, or needs, can often reveal the solution to a seemingly unrelated problem.

2. Identifying Need

One of the easiest ways to gain control of a situation is by learning to identify what someone needs, then creating a solution that meets the needs. There are always multiple solutions to a problem. Finding the solution that meets your boss’ needs is a vital aspect of career development.

3. Finding Opportunities

The opportunities a successful person looks for are those that will meet the needs of their managers. Selling your ideas doesn’t depend on identifying an opportunity. It is more important to ‘sell the idea’ by identifying how it will solve your boss’ needs. For example, more training is necessary to reducing the time between ordering a meal and placing it on a table. This causes a problem for most restaurant mangers because it effects the bottom line, reducing revenue, and making it look like they are a failure.

However, your general manager is only focused on the bottom line and only sees career development as another expense. Selling the idea of training requires outlining the long term cost savings, return on investment (ROI), and how the general manger will be able to present this ROI as his/her personal success.

One of the obstacles to career development is the ability to turn plans into executable strategies. Colleges and universities spend years teaching managers ‘what’ they need to know to run a restaurant. They have a poor track record at giving budding restaurant managers the skills needed to turn those ideas into ‘real’ plans that can be executed in the real world.

Coming up through the ranks gives a restaurant manager a solid understanding of the obstacles and problems which arise when trying to direct a team and bring everyone on board to the manager’s ideas so that their plans can be executed easily and cost effectively.

The restaurant manager who is seeking a job in a high profile restaurant, or wants attract a management headhunter, needs to be able to blend both the ‘know how’ and the ‘knowledge’ into a strategy of success.

Job seekers need to do both, but they also need to present their skills in a way that a human resources manager can easily translate a resume into a set of measurable skills. One way to do this is to learn the Art of Execution and then use the skills learned here to create a resume that ‘solves problems’ instead of one that just lists past experience.

How to Become a Restaurant Manager

•           Establish a mindset of execution. People waste most of their day doing mundane tasks that do not generate a reward whether it be creation, financial, or social. People need to learn how to focus on tasks that meet the goal, and reduce the time spent on, or delegate those which are inconsequential.

•           More important, they need to learn how to do this without the ‘labour’ force feeling being treated like they are the low man on the totem pole. A pyramid is more stable than a flag pole. When the leader focuses more on people, the lower they are, then the performance increases. When looking at ‘input’ and ‘cost’ view the goal as a pyramid. Turn the pyramid over so it is a funnel to see how the rewards return to the ‘head’.

•           Be a leader. Let people choose their own destiny, but hold them accountable. Let them choose whether they want to participate and make things happen, or sit back and complete the mundane jobs. Once they choose, support them where they are. Like Morpheus in The Matrix who asked ‘The red or blue pill,’ every strategy needs one person who can influence the destiny of the entire team.

The introduction to these three skills can be learned in any performance coaching book. Once a person knows how to be a leader, they need to be able to manage others and encourage them to ‘get onboard’ with their plans. Show the HR manager that you are able to create, sell, and execute a plan successfully and you are one more step closer to your dream job.

By: Marty Tarabar, CPC

I attended a conference recently, and had the opportunity to listen to the keynote speaker. He spoke about how his family, a well to do family in Memphis, adopted a homeless boy.  The boy came from a broken family, his mother, a crack cocaine addict, had given up taken care of him.

The family helped with his schooling, hired a private tutor and encouraged him in his efforts to try out for sports.  He studied hard, practiced at sports and was accepted in to college where he became a first team, freshman all American. He finished his college career and was picked in the first round of the NFL draft. In his first year, he came in second in the voting for the Associated Press  NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year Award.

Sounds like a Hollywood movie, right?  Well the speaker was Sean Tuohy. He and his wife Leigh Anne adopted Michael Oher in 2004 and he was drafted in the first round by the Baltimore Ravens in 2009. The movie:  The Blind Side which starred Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw.

Sean talked a little bit about how his family was able to change Michael’s life, his successes on the football field and a little about the movie. But Sean talked mostly about how this all came about. It all started with just two words. TURN AROUND!

The family was driving home on a dark, cold and rainy night. Sean and Leigh Anne saw someone walking alongside the road, without a jacket, soaking wet. The children told Leigh Anne and Sean they knew the boy’s name was Michael and he went to their school.

Many cars passed Michael along the road that night, Sean passed him as well, but when Leigh Anne heard the boy went to the same school as her children, she said “TURN AROUND”.  Those two words changed the Tuohy’s and Michael Oher’s life forever.

So how does this relate to your employees, or your managers?

Without the Tuohy’s intervention, Michael would have ended up on the streets, in a gang, and involved in drugs or worse.  Leigh Anne and Sean made a difference.

Who works at your restaurant?  What are their stories and what help can you give them?  Do they need that little extra attention to make them a stand out employee? Can they be your next assistant manager or help open your next new restaurant?

TURN AROUND, talk to your staff, the time commitment you make to them now will pay back tremendous dividends.  There is an A-list of former McDonald’s employees: Romney VP running mate Paul Ryan singers; Pink, Seal, Macy Gray, Olympic athlete; Carl Lewis, actors; James Franco, Sharon Stone and Jay Leno and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

TURN AROUND pay attention to your staff now, or someone else will. One of the main reasons employees leave a position has very little to do with the work, it’s usually about how they are treated or respected as people.

TURN AROUND make a difference in your employees and managers today.  If not, they will be calling a recruiter like me, tomorrow, to find them a new restaurant management position.

by: Marty Tarabar, CPC
marty@geckohospitality.com

How often do you hear these words?

As a management recruiter, we usually hear the opposite. Restaurant managers send us their resumes, looking for a new position.  When we call to do the initial interview, we always hear what ‘s wrong with their job.

• They are not appreciated
• Bonuses and raises were promised and not delivered
• They are stagnant in their current position with no room for growth

What’s great about recruiting for Gecko Hospitality is being able to place candidates in positions they love, where they get the opportunities they are looking for and the quality of life they are looking for.

Three recent placements come to mind.

Tony – After 8 years working in the contract services side of the hospitality industry, Tony decided to try his hand at managing a full service restaurant. He was very successful.  He was quickly able to build sales, increase profits and put together a good team of employees.  But, he was the only salaried manager at this privately owned restaurant. He had two shift managers who he could depend on, but the success of the restaurant was squarely on Tony’s shoulders.

He worked mostly closing shifts, leaving the restaurant after 2am.  I was able to place Tony with a local company, working 5 days a week, usually done by 5pm.  When I visited him just last week he was gushing with how wonderful his new position is and how much he enjoys working for his new company.

“I can’t thank you enough, I love this job”  he said.

Ralph – Opening up new hotels is a challenge and Ralph enjoyed it. He had opened new locations for a few different Hotel Management companies, but was longing for a place to call his own.  I’ve talked to Ralph a few times since we placed him at an established property. He had moved to take the position, but is ecstatic about his hotel, the management group he works for and the hotel ownership.

I e-mailed the owner after a recent stay at his hotel and he said “Ralph is doing a fantastic job with the hotel and how he has proven to be such a positive leader for the staff. Ralph has truly been a wonderful fit for us…”  Ralph absolutely loves his job.

Jeff -  I’ve known Jeff for over 6 years. We’ve spoken often, whenever I had a position I thought he might be interested in , I would reach out to him.  Every time we talked he would tell me about the goings on with his company. They changed the bonus structure, they reduced the number of managers, and  payroll was  getting tighter. After almost 8 years, he was no longer enjoying the company he had worked for.

We contacted Jeff about a new opportunity, in fact, he was the first person I thought of when the job order came in to our office. His skills were a match, the lifestyle was what he was looking for, and the owners of the restaurant shared the same beliefs .  His interviews with the new company were great and the owners were excited about bringing Jeff in to the fold.

Jeff loves his new job.

The right job is out there!  Sometimes you fall into it by accident and sometimes the job finds you.

I love my job!