Recruiting From Within: How Hyatt Hotels Engineers Talent Mobility

As one of the world’s leading hotel operators, Hyatt Hotels knows a thing or two about hospitality. Since its start in 1957 in Chicago, the company’s portfolio has expanded to include nearly 600 properties across 48 countries. But no industry is immune to change, so the ability to respond to new challenges (like tech-driven tourism solutions) and identify new opportunities (like the influx of job-seeking Millennials) are key components for continued success.

In today’s environment, this type of agility is a better predictor of success than company efficiency. Hyatt has long recognized that exceptional guest service, crucial to maintaining a competitive edge, demands a highly engaged workforce. In an age of rapid change, Hyatt wanted to answer one question: how can we make our employees feel as welcome as guests?

Internal Mobility: 21^st Century HR for a 21^st Century World

Hyatt already has a reputation for being one of the best places to work, thanks to perks like free hotel stays and international work opportunities. However, the workforce will undergo a massive generational switch in the next decade, and employee engagement is sure to take on a different flavor. As Baby Boomers ease into retirement, Millennials will make up nearly 50% of the workforce by 2020 and, as has been widely noted, this generation has a very different outlook on work.

Gone is the idea of the linear corporate ladder. Instead, Millennials expect to chart their own unique path up, down and across a career lattice. According to research by MTV, half of all Millennials believe that “switching jobs helps you climb the corporate ladder faster,” compared to 37 percent of Baby Boomers. Millennials also crave more frequent performance reviews and development opportunities.

Talent mobility — identifying the best internal candidates for the jobs that align with their evolving career goals — can be a key driver for both employee engagement in the Millennial age and company agility in a fast-changing business landscape.

Hyatt Careers: Engineering Talent Mobility

One of the biggest challenges in cementing a culture of talent mobility is gathering and acting on real-time data. Hyatt’s talent team worked with Cornerstone OnDemand to accomplish three main goals: gain a better understanding of associates, source internal talent more quickly and more fully engage employees.

Here’s how Hyatt and Cornerstone built an online infrastructure to help enable talent mobility across the organization:

• Career preferences: The team added a career resumé and preferences option that allows employees to tell internal recruiters more about their goals. The impact of this on talent mobility has been swift and impressive. Since implementation, the Hyatt talent team has seen a 53 percent increase in movement between Hyatt brands and hotels in North America.
• People Finder Report: Using Cornerstone’s software, the Hyatt team created a People Finder Report that allows managers to quickly match employees approved for promotions with their career preferences and available positions. Prior to software integration, sourcing the right internal candidate could take as long as a month. Now it takes the Hyatt talent team as little as a few days.
• More frequent, higher-quality talent reviews: With thousands of employees across the US, keeping up with performance reviews was a constant challenge for the talent team at Hyatt. Cornerstone’s online platform helps ease the process and Hyatt is now able to conduct talent reviews every six months.
• Increasing transparency to increase engagement: Transparency on employee evaluations is crucial to building employee engagement. Cornerstone allows Hyatt employees access to full performance reviews with a touch of a button. Since software implementation, the Hyatt team reports that employee engagement scores have actually increased.

You don’t have to look far to realize that there are big changes happening in the world of work, but when talent management can efficiently access the best data and employees can truly engage in their own career planning, both groups are liberated to perform their best.

About the Author: Kirsten Maas Helvey is senior vice president of client success for Cornerstone OnDemand. Helvey has an extensive background in the implementation of hosted and internal enterprise software applications. Helvey is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the client experience with Cornerstone OnDemand.

Helvey came to Cornerstone OnDemand from PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM Business Consulting Services where she was a member of the Supply Chain Operations Strategy Group. She has extensive experience providing operational expertise to Fortune 500 companies for large-scale, complex, re-engineering and cost reduction initiatives using enabling technologies.

Helvey holds a BA in English Literature from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. She is a member of Women in Technology International (WITI) and the American Business Women’s Association (ABWA).

Follow Kirsten on Twitter @kirstenmaas or connect with her on LinkedIn.

By Kirsten Maas Helvey

Kirsten Maas Helvey is senior vice president of client success for Cornerstone OnDemand. Helvey has an extensive background in the implementation of hosted and internal enterprise software applications. Helvey is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the client experience with Cornerstone OnDemand. She provides project management experience as well as improvement expertise, and is responsible for effectively implementing and integrating Cornerstone OnDemand’s Talent Management Suite using best-of-breed methodology developed from client best practices. Helvey has used her expertise to develop and grow Cornerstone’s global Consulting Services organization.