Hiring for Greece’s Tourism & Infrastructure Boom | Strategies

Having been a secret of the sea, Greece is currently among the most sought-after holiday destinations in Europe. The country has been boasting of record-breaking performances in tourism over the past decade, with strategic gains in infrastructural, air, and regulatory efficiency, which have seen it emerge as a real rising force in the European travel market. Although global tourism has rebounded well, staffing gaps have been increasing due to long-term structural challenges such as a shrinking talent pool and an aging workforce. As the travel and tourism industry grows at an unprecedented pace, faster than the economy as a whole, the challenges of recruitment become more intense.

Recruitment and Retention Challenges in Greece’s Tourism Hiring

While the country has witnessed steady improvements in overall employment, the available pool of skilled and willing domestic workers remains shallow. To better understand the landscape, consider three key recruitment challenges the Greek tourism sector is currently facing:

• Sourcing and attracting the right talent

One of the major challenges when hiring for skilled workers in Athens is sourcing candidates with the right skills, experience, and personality traits. For starters, they aren’t the only ones vying for this type of talent. Businesses are competing with several other organizations for the same pool of potential employees.  The COVID-19 pandemic further intensified this competition, leading many hospitality workers to quit the industry in search of more stable employment opportunities.

• Combating high turnover rates

Another challenge to hospitality recruitment is the short employee lifecycle. Recruiters invest an extraordinary amount of time and effort into finding and hiring the best people, only to lose them shortly after and restart the process all over again. Several factors have contributed to this level of attrition, but the irregular working hours, relatively low wages, and physically demanding nature of most jobs in the industry top the list.

• Embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion

The hospitality industry serves a wide range of global clientele. So it’s only right that the workforce within it reflects the same degree of cultural diversity. Building a diverse team also means successfully sourcing and attracting diverse candidates and sustaining team cohesion.

This raises an important question: how can talent leaders hire hospitality and travel workers when the available pool is shrinking?

Luckily, the right recruitment partner deployed at the right times can help talent leaders source, attract, and screen candidates to find the best talent more efficiently and effectively.

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Recruitment Partners as a Catalyst for Growth

For years, staffing agencies have helped businesses connect the right talent with the right opportunities. However, as the shelf life of skills shortens, staffing agencies have evolved into strategic partners executing more than just matchmaking.

Three ways a staffing agency steps up to close the talent gap.

• Data-driven workforce solutions

Hiring talent in the travel and tourism industry doesn’t follow a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, finding a chef for a luxury property differs from recruiting for a housekeeping staff in a family hotel.

This narrow talent market requires a focus on passive talent. Sourcing and attracting passive talent requires a  specialized hiring methodology. Specialized hiring agencies achieve this by sending content-rich materials to passive job seekers and analysing the response. Analytics then assist the recruiting team in deriving insights about candidates who are more willing to discuss new job opportunities and those who are not, as well as which marketing campaigns are effective and which are not.

• Enhanced candidate experience.

While the majority of hospitality organizations effectively showcase their diversity and inclusion efforts on their career sites, only half succeed in creating an inclusive candidate experience. This is where a recruitment agency helps businesses truly embrace diversity and inclusion. From creating inclusive job descriptions and sourcing diverse candidates, to an inclusive onboarding process, it works to provide each candidate the opportunity to register their interest.

• Holistic Candidate Assessment

Guest experience and services play a pivotal role in differentiating a good hotel from others. Restaurants and hotels differentiate themselves through the experience and the service they offer to the guests. Thus, talent leaders should look for potential candidates who not only possess the right skills and experience but also have unmatched knowledge of the brand and understand how this should be reflected in the service they offer.

With a comprehensive candidate assessment approach, recruiting companies can go beyond the competencies and behaviors of an applicant and determine whether the candidate shares the client’s vision.

Oman Agencies boasts an extensive experience in recruiting foreign manpower in Thessaloniki. Our hiring team strives to enhance the quality of hires by leveraging advanced and professionally developed recruitment practices and appropriate talent assessment methodology.

Conclusion

The world of tourism is becoming more immersive, and Greece is well-positioned to lead. Partnering with established staffing services can enable the country’s tourism sector leaders to not only keep booming but also provide travelers with an ultimate experience of tradition, innovation, and unmatched adventures.

At Oman Agencies, we have learned that a talented and motivated workforce is the backbone of the business. This is why we offer end-to-end hospitality staffing services in Greece tailored to your business needs.