How The Hotel Maria recruited 120 people in record time
A search for more than 100 top hospitality professionals
The Hotel Maria in the heart of Helsinki is a luxury hotel that opened its doors to a discerning international clientele in December 2023. The Hotel Maria employs almost double the staff of a regular hotel and has a huge range of job titles: the establishment has its own pianist, its own a florist and an Experience Manager who designs unique experiences for the hotel’s guests.
The Hotel Maria reached out to Accountor in August 2023: the hotel was due to open in less than four months and urgently needed help with recruitment. In addition to the tight schedule and the large number of staff that were needed, the hotel was struggling with the significant labour shortage that was affecting the entire hospitality and tourism sector. The coronavirus pandemic and lack of work had forced many hospitality professionals to change industries.
‘We had three months to fill every position on the hotel’s operations team. People kept telling us that recruiting so many staff in such a short amount of time was not realistic’, says Hotel Manager Katriina Moksi, reminiscing about the situation in August.
A professional recruitment consultant joins the team
Accountor’s Senior Recruitment Consultant Ilona Järventaus-Kiiski accepted the challenge and started work at The Hotel Maria in August. Ilona’s role as the hotel’s outsourced recruitment consultant effectively made her a member of the in-house team for the autumn.
‘There was a lot of enthusiasm when our recruitment process began in August: Ilona quickly took charge of the process and became an independent yet fully immersed member of our team. Working with her felt very natural’, says Katriina Moksi (pictured).
‘We worked extremely hard all autumn to prepare for the opening of the hotel. This was a completely unique project for me, and I gave it my everything. I felt that my expertise and help were genuinely appreciated, and our team spirit was great despite all the pressure – we just focused on working together’, says Ilona Järventaus-Kiiski.
The hotel’s management had already chosen and deployed a recruitment system and the main priorities of the recruitment process had been agreed ahead of time, which made it possible to start the ball rolling quickly. The plan was to recruit staff in three stages: the first stage was about filling managerial positions, and the second stage focused on mid-level roles. The third stage was the most labour-intensive, as it involved recruiting the entire operations staff.
A well executed recruitment campaign bears fruit
Ilona got straight to work with project planning and scheduling. No recruitment budget had yet been set when the process began.
‘I started by formulating a few different scenarios and costing them out. The traditional route of posting job advertisements would have cost tens of thousands of euros because we had dozens of vacancies of different descriptions to fill. What we needed was a big marketing campaign to make the applicant pool aware of and excited about this unique new employer.
I ended up suggesting that we use a digital platform to maximise the visibility of our campaign and to attract the right kind of applicants without breaking the bank’, Ilona Järventaus-Kiiski explains.
The hotel’s management ultimately decided to run the campaign on the Finnish job search and recruitment site Duunitori and to focus on brand awareness and social media visibility.
‘There was no time to relocate talent from abroad, as staff training had to get under way at the start of November. Thankfully the campaign was an instant success, and it turns out that there are plenty of people in Finland with a background in international luxury hospitality’, says Järventaus-Kiiski.
‘We received a lot of feedback about how professional and applicant-friendly our recruitment process was. For a brand-new hotel that was not even open yet, coming across well to the applicant pool was obviously a huge reputational win’, says Katriina Moksi.
A luxury hotel invests in applicant experience and good communication
When the first enquiries and applications started to come in, the recruitment team was already busy setting up the subsequent stages of the process.
Ilona had her plate full coordinating the recruitment process, training line managers, planning the onboarding process, scheduling training events and advising the hotel’s existing staff.
She also had regular meetings with the hotel’s management, who wanted to make the most of her expertise in recruitment and onboarding in the midst of everything else that was going on.
‘One of the biggest benefits of this partnership was the training that Ilona gave to our in-house team and the lessons that we learned from her’, says Katriina Moksi.
By November 2023, the hotel had signed employment contracts with more than 120 top hospitality professionals and the new hires were ready to start the onboarding process.
‘In addition to basic onboarding, all members of staff underwent a two-day course focusing on the intricacies of luxury hospitality. With the finer details ironed out, the hotel was ready for its grand opening’, says Järventaus-Kiiski.
An outsourced recruitment consultant is a brilliant solution when time is of the essence
‘A hotel is like a small town with a variety of jobs for many kinds of people. Hiring an external recruitment consultant is an excellent solution when lots of different positions need to be filled all at once: the pressure is on to recruit a large number of staff in a short space of time, but eases as soon as the right people are found’, Katriina Moksi explains.
Accountor was an easy choice of partner for The Hotel Maria, as the two had already successfully worked together in the spring of 2023. According to Katriina Moksi, using an outsourced recruitment consultant was a way to ensure that no damage would be done to the hotel’s brand before it had even opened.
‘We felt that it was important from the perspective of the budget as well as our brand not to outsource the whole of the recruitment process. Ilona was an excellent project manager who allowed our team to have an input in both the planning and the implementation’, Moksi says.
‘Accountor are extremely easy to work with. The results, of course, speak for themselves: if it were not for Ilona, we would not have been able to open the hotel on time.’
The Hotel Maria is a 5-star luxury hotel and a member of Preferred Hotels & Resorts’ Legend Collection. The hotel is located in the heart of the historic Kruununhaka neighbourhood of Helsinki. The Hotel Maria is all about the experience of luxury and 5-star customer service.
