Sue Chatfield

09 June 2010 | By Colin Cottell

There are few airs and graces about Sue Chatfield, head of resourcing and HR services at TUI UK & Ireland. Despite being responsible for recruitment at one of UK’s best-known travel companies, Chatfield recently found herself organising water, food and nappies for stranded passengers.

“It was all hands on deck,” she says, explaining how she and her team had gone to the aid of customers at Dover, caught up in the aftermath of the eruption in March of Eyjafjallajokull, the Icelandic volcano.

“We organised 2,500 food parcels within three hours,” says Chatfield proudly.

Perhaps this willingness to get her hands dirty shouldn’t come as a surprise in someone who began in the travel industry 25 years ago as an overseas tour rep.

She even had to overcome misgivings by her family who didn’t really see it “as a proper job”.

“I still love working in travel. It can be quite infectious,” she says.

It is just such enthusiasm that has undoubtedly helped Chatfield, not only to cope with the fallout from the ash cloud, but also to rise through the ranks to become head of resourcing of an 18,000-strong business.

It also helped her through when First Choice and Thomson, two of the UK’s biggest travel operators, merged in 2007. While the company went through a degree of pain with some job losses, it also led to the new company taking on 500 staff at its head office in Luton.

And this year, in time for the summer season, TUI hired 1,000 people to work overseas as holiday reps, children’s reps and entertainers, as well as nearly 400 staff at its call centres in Coventry and Luton.

TUI also plans to take on 10 graduate trainees in October. On top of this, Chatfield and her 50-strong team are responsible for recruiting cabin crew and retail staff. Oh, and not forgetting head office. All in all, Chatfield says the company recruits 2,000-3,000 staff a year.

However, the modest and self-effacing Chatfield brushes aside any thoughts about the complexity of her job. “It may sound complex, but it’s not actually - perhaps because it’s my job,” she says.

“We think of it as customer facing and non-customer-facing, and for customer-facing there should be consistency in the way we approach recruitment activity.

“It’s about ’winning behaviours’,” she adds as she outlines what TUI looks for it in its customer-facing staff. “We recruit people against our core skills: fantastic customer service, team work, and the commercial side.”

Attitude also plays a key part, she says, something that the company tests using a situational judgement questionnaire. A typical example might be “you are at the airport, and a customer comes through without their luggage. What do you do?” she says. Role-plays involving customer-situational scenarios are also used.

While for some the travel industry has a reputation for low pay, it clearly doesn’t put people off. Chatfield says TUI receives around 100,000 applications a year, including 17,000 applications to work abroad. Around 97,000 are likely to be unsuccessful, says Chatfield.

Where there are no vacancies, the company uses email to keep people on its candidate database informed of potentially suitable vacancies, or simply remind them to keep an eye on TUI’s website. “The key is keeping in communication with these people,” Chatfield adds.

However, she is well aware that with the high volume of applications TUI gets, and a recruitment process that is highly automated, it is vital to keep the human touch.

“As our company vision is to make our customers feel special, it’s important that we make people feel special through the recruitment process. We don’t want to lose that personal touch,” she says.

The result is personal phone calls to candidates before interviews, and job offers within 48 hours of a decision. Successful candidates are also invited in to meet their colleagues before their induction.

“It’s more than recruitment. It’s about building your talent pool, and your talent database, and making sure you hold onto your key players.”

Maintaining the human touch throughout the process seems entirely appropriate in an organisation that lives and dies on looking after its customers. And equally, it is no surprise that the company’s huge choice of holidays - from the youth end of the market right up to 5-star luxury, and sumptuous villas - is mirrored in the profile of its staff.

“A holiday rep in Madeira would be very different from a holiday rep in Ibiza. If you have a 5-star hotel in Madeira and you put in someone who is used to dealing with the youth market, the customer may not be too happy,” she says.

Achieving the right profile has a number of facets. This includes “tapping into different demographics” - for example by using social networking sites to attract people who might be better suited to the youth market.

There is also a key role for TUI’s 20 area managers, who cover the firm’s more than 100 overseas destinations and provide the resourcing team with “a shopping list”.

A typical list might say, “we need 50 people, 20 youth-oriented, 20 family-oriented, two more villa/concierge people, and two back office and admin,” says Chatfield.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all. Our holidays are very different, our product is diverse, so it’s about making sure we get the right people in the right place.”

Similarly, the seasonal nature of TUI’s business dictates much of Chatfield’s work, with around 2,500 of the company’s overseas staff finding their work drying up at the end of the summer season.

Chatfield acknowledges that TUI can’t afford to see its investment in recruiting and training staff being lost. And she says it is especially important that the company retains key talent such as qualified children’s reps. Because such people are difficult to find, TUI also helps children’s reps become qualified.

One feature of TUI’s “flexible resourcing strategy” that aids retention of such staff is providing them with opportunities in other parts of the company, she says.
For example, some may go and work in the Maldives, or Mexico, while others - between 200 and 400 - transfer to the company’s UK travel shops. This helps the company because the staff selling holidays often have direct experience of being a rep in that country or resort.

While Chatfield is clearly never shy of mucking in with her staff - indeed, this year she has plans to spend a week as a tour rep - she acknowledges that with staff in places as geographically spread as the Maldives and Manhattan, there is only so much she and her team can do.

And whereas in the past she says that in some areas of the business people “didn’t really see it [recruitment] as part of their job”, that is changing. For example, retail managers can load job vacancies onto the online system, with applications going directly to that shop.

Similarly, after training in selection and interview techniques by Chatfield’s team in the UK, overseas area managers and supervisors are responsible for running the assessment centres, and conducting interviews.

In some of its travel shops, TUI uses ’recruitment champions’, recruiters who advise shop managers on how to interview and select. “By empowering managers it’s giving them responsibility for their own recruitment. We just keep an eye out in the background,” adds Chatfield.

I spend so much time in work that you have to love your job. I do love my job, and I am always up for a challenge, I always make sure I have a great team in place. I can’t do this single handedly

In particular, Chatfield’s team carry out the initial screening to ensure only quality candidates get through, and check that standards of service are achieved - for example that CVs don’t sit on the system too long.

“We are here to help with an overall strategy, with guidelines and training on how to recruit and spot the best talent, but you [the local managers] are here to recruit the best people for your area of the business.”

TUI’s recruitment champions also keep an eye on whether the right type of people are being recruited.

However, Chatfield says much of her work involves looking at the bigger picture. “It is important to link with my HR colleagues to make sure we are in tune with where the business needs to be,” she says.

As part of TUI’s five-year HR strategy, much of this involves looking ahead. Currently in year one of the strategy - making sure the post-merger recruitment processes, including the introduction of an online recruitment system in 2008, are working properly - Chatfield is already looking to years two and three: preparing for TUI’s expected growth.

And beyond that she is already asking questions such as “What kind of people will we be recruiting in five years’ time?” Perhaps one answer, she says, are the 16-year old apprentices now working in TUI’s shops.

It seems somehow appropriate that someone who has worked their way up through the company is now exploring ways for others to follow in her footsteps.

Curriculum Vitae
1989-1992 Area manager Algarve (for First Choice, then known as Owners Abroad)
1992-1994 HR recruitment officer, First Choice
1995-2001 HR recruitment manager, First Choice
2002-2005 Head of HR retail, First Choice
2006-2008 Head of resourcing and HR services for First Choice
2009 to present head of HR services and resourcing for TUI UK and Ireland