Premier people in India

20-January-2010 | By Graham Simons

Campus auditions, recruitment fairs, talent spotter cards, newspaper and billboard advertising, as well as its own intranet, are just some of the ways hotel chain Premier Inn has recruited staff for its new hotel in Bangalore, India.

The challenge for the hotel, located in India’s IT hub, was to hire staff for housekeeping, front of house, food and drink, management and production. The hotel general manager was appointed six months before the hotel opened.

To spread awareness among locals in India’s garden city, Premier Inn hired a bill board that travelled around Bangalore announcing the hotel’s opening and recruitment plans giving details on how to apply.

In addition, a recruitment fair was held in July at White Fields, Bangalore, where the site is located, attracting 300 people resulting in 20 job offers.

Casting their net further afield to attract India’s student population, the hotel chain carried out campus auditions at three campuses: Bangalore, Hyderabad and the Chandigarh Institute of Hotel Management. Students were asked to take part in role plays and group discussions as well as behavioural interviews. Fifteen job offers were made out of the 300 people that attended.

And Premier Inn has also looked within its own ranks to staff the hotel with talent spotter or ‘star in the making’ cards handed out internally to people thought to be suitable to work at the new Premier Inn hotel in Bangalore. The chain’s own intranet has also seen 15 applications to work in the hotel from the UK, resulting in three placements.

In all between 8,000 to 9,000 people applied to be part of the Premier Inn India team.

Jaspreet Khurana, HR manager at Premier Inn India, says: “What sets us apart from others is that we are a start-up organisation in India where people can learn a lot from the variety of jobs we had to offer. We have a flat structure that isn’t hierarchal and we were lucky enough to offer those who had the Premier Inn DNA their dream job.”