The recession is often given as a reason for companies not taking a punt on new jobs, but at London & Home Counties pub chain Geronimo Inns, it actually did just the opposite, the firm’s recruitment chief Ria Dannan has told Recruiter.

It was a question of “almost going to the front door [of the pubs] and saying what can we get excited about at a time of doom and gloom”, she told Recruiter. “Looking at our pubs we discovered we under used or under sold our function spaces… With the recession hitting, we had customers who still had money, we just had to give them an extra excuse to come into the pub.”

Marketing these rooms and booking them out were “really the sort of things within the pub initially always deemed to be the general manager’s role”, she said. 

The company hired its first sales and events manager in April 2010, and then started hiring events co-ordinators internally that summer, with Dannan saying: “In some establishment that might have been the head waitress that had shown an interest and then taken that on as a role.”

The company recruited externally for some of these roles from 2011, especially “when the style of role became bigger and needed more sales-led experience”. For example, for the Geronimo property The Cow at Stratford, located less than a mile as the crow flies from the Olympic Stadium, where broadcast teams from major outlets such as the BBC and Sky converged during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Dannan said that the innovation of the new role has seen events sales turnover increase by 50%.

The firm, which was acquired by Young and Co’s Brewery in December 2010, now has 16 sales and events co-ordinators working across its 35 pubs.