Engaging The Next Generation of Hospitality Talent - Michael Pace, The Intercontinental Mark Hopkins Hotel (IHG)

Josiah: 0:00

Michael Pace is the general manager of the iconic Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. In this episode, you'll learn how he thinks about recruiting, the perceptions we need to change, the global opportunities and diverse career paths available in hospitality, and strategies for attracting talent. What would be your message for people who are outside the industry as you communicate the benefits of a career in hospitality, because it feels like a lot of people are just unaware of how you can build a career here. What, as an industry, do we need to be talking more about, as maybe some of the overlooked benefits of a career here?

Michael: 0:56

I would start by saying that the biggest issue that we've had for years is the reputation that in hotels you work really hard, really long hours, you're underpaid, you're overworked. You're always working on the weekends when your friends are off. It's pretty tough and it used to be that way. I remember when I was starting off. The expectation was we will work here as hard as we can. You're going to work six days a week. You're going to always 10, 12 of our days is a minimum. It was exhausting and it was a slog. Now it's different, but I don't think we've done enough on the marketing side. We need to promote ourselves realistically, to share the benefits of what we do and how we do it. Yes, there are long hours and yes, there is stress, but that happens in any job, even in tech. You're working hard and you got stress, or in finance and so on. It's just different. We pay a lot better. We have huge advantages for growth opportunities. People forget that when you're in hospitality, you can be an expert in tech and have a career in hospitality. You can be an expert in finance and have a career in hospitality. Because we're finance departments, marketing operations, you could be an engineer and work in hotels, it's not just people in the lobby greeting each other. We get to travel, like I did, and I work for IHG, one of the larger companies in the world. We've got over 4,000 hotels worldwide. You can get transferred. I could be working in America today and in Holland Tomorrow. I could be working for intercontinental today or marry it tomorrow. I mean there's a huge opportunities and we don't tell the world enough and we need to because it's amazing. I mean I'm still. I'm doing it for 30 years now. I can't believe how lucky I am. And when I hear that people don't want to join hospitality, I get really Sad and I'm like what are we doing wrong? How we're not portraying this message of this amazing job. You know this amazing career.

Josiah: 2:56

What starts with conversations like this, and that's why I appreciate you taking time to tell your story, because I think that's where people can start to understand this worked. I heard Michael's story and I could see myself one day maybe following a similar journey. But there was actually a career fair here at this hotel about a month or two ago and I attended and I asked a lot of people about their perspective on hospitality and people had no clue that they could pursue a career in technology or some of these areas, and so I feel like I'm trying to do everything I can right now to Amplify stories like yours and do almost a little bit of a marketing role here. I guess I'd be curious is you think about recruiting for yourself and for your hotel. How are you thinking about recruiting and what's working for you these days?

Michael: 3:42

So the biggest shift I've seen, especially for myself, is that we need to hire people who have the right attitude. Hire for attitude, train for skill - which I've always done. But I think before covid we were looking at, I'd look at people's resumes and see if they had, you know, good history behind them. You know X number of years in a job and they didn't jump around too much. Well, that's changed, right? People move around a lot. People want to be more nimble in their career path and not wait a year or two years to get a promotion, and so the biggest change for me has been to acknowledge and accept it, to let go of this feeling that I had of like, well, I went through that, so Everybody else should, you know, and I think as managers, we subconsciously I want people to go through what we went through because we slogged it out and we had those long nights, underpaid, you know, in the old days, and we survived. So that'll help everybody else get along. And I'm like, no, no, that's not the way it works. I got a 25-year-old daughter. She thinks about careers differently and I've learned a lot through her. Actually, talk about networking.

Josiah: 4:44

What have you learned?

Michael: 4:45

I have learned that the way they you know, 20 year olds interact and think about career is very different to me. Definitely, there's more of a blending of what we used to call work-life balance. But this whole, you know, work from home and work in the evenings and not have this defined eight to five A Monday through Friday mentality, it's interesting, it makes you think different, you know, and for me, it was like I come to work and I work and I'm in my suit. When I go home, I'm not working anymore, whilst, you know, now it's more blended. We work from home, we might be in our sweats sending very important emails up, but nobody knows. So, yeah, I think we were adapting to that. So, long story short, let me get back to the point you asked Students. I really believe, more than ever we're trying to get students to come in. I am trusting students to come in fresh out of college, no management experience, and I'm putting them in a management position, which I never did before because I knew they could burn out real fast and they didn't have the experience to handle all the challenges of being a leader. But I'm realizing now, if you hire the right people and you give them the right support and help them, don't just throw them out there. They can be really successful and I got quite a few students who are working with us right now here that have told us doing really well and I hope they say the same thing. But my goal is that we develop them and we train them when we move them around every at least six to nine months before they get bored because they actually want to be stimulated. My goal is that we develop them and we train them when we move them around every at least six to nine months before they get bored because they actually want to be stimulated and challenged.

Josiah: 6:17

Can you tell me a little bit more about that training process, because it feels that is key, not only for helping them succeed, but for retention right in engagement. What is, what does training and development look like for someone who's joining you at this hotel?

Michael: 6:29

So one of the things that we came up with post-covid was that every leader should have a one page document of their career path and the training needs. So the top section is what do I need to do to be an expert in my job? And the second part is what do I need to do to become an expert for my next job? So if I am a front desk manager, what are the things I need to still learn to become even better in my job? Might be things like resolution, you know, dealing with union issues, handling a diverse workforce, whatever it is that you need or maybe a technical skill on a computer Okay, I need to nail that to be really good in my job. But then in the background, I'm also getting ready at a slower pace for the next job. When I get my boss's job, there's a higher level of training needed. So we try and plot that and it changes all the time. But the idea is that they know and they believe that we have their back and when we say stick with us, we're going to help you, we're going to train you, we're going to develop you. That it's a partnership and a process, that it's not just you know we're talking and then after a year they're like well, yeah, they keep saying they're going to promote me, but nobody ever talks about it anymore, except when I got hired. We're going to change that. The conversation has to be real. You know you asked me about recruitment and that's a really big thing for me now and this development of students. You know I'm part of an organization called the Hospitality Foundation for CHLA. We've got students scholarships every year about 200,000 a year and again, our outreach is getting better, but the amount of students who are even getting into hospitality is diminishing in the last few years. So I think we need to be having more discussions like this, whether it's you and I or with our companies, or even maybe the hotel management companies working even more closely with the hotel schools, to maybe peel it back. Maybe we need to go to the high schools and say, hey, have you guys considered, do you know what hospitality is? Do you know what a hotel job is? Do you know you can earn X amount of money if you were a chef in a hotel kitchen and get them to be excited, put on their radar. I learned this from my daughter when she was in high school and she's like dad, nobody. If it wasn't for you working in a hotel, I wouldn't even know what hospitality means. And you're really passionate about your job. Dad, why don't you come and speak to our career counselors? And I was like are you right? Nobody talks about hospitality. You just do the basic classes to get your exams right, to get to college. So it was about college ready. It's not really about real life ready, unfortunately, and so, yes, so we need to have those discussions. How can the hospitality industry get involved at the high school level and start looking at trade schools again that we have lost over the years in the US, which is the biggest challenge that we have as well? Nobody's being trade trained to have pride in a trade. You know we need people who say I want to be a sommelier, I want to be a front desk manager, I want to be a pastry chef, and that is my goal and I will do it with pride. Not everybody has to be to GM or the director of sales. There's only one of me - I have 300 people working in this hotel and I need all of them to be passionate and excited and proud so we can all do our jobs well. So I think the conversation has to be let's get more people to be excited about hospitality. Let's get the high school students excited by it. Let's keep the ones who do go to hotel school engaged, not let them fall off because they're already getting while they're studying. So, yeah, let's hire them, let's train them, let's embrace them at the beginning of their studies, not when they're graduated.