Why Hire a Hospitality Grad? by Joel Feigeheimer, Ph.D

Why Hire a Hospitality Grad?

By Joel Feigeheimer Ph.D., Assistant Professor The Chaplin School of Hospitality Florida International University

How does one build a high performing team of employees? Well, it certainly helps to have a great pool of applicants to start from and move forward from there. I am from the school of hiring for “attitude versus experience.” Hospitality school graduates are already invested into our industry. While most of our employees work in hospitality on their way to some other career path, hospitality grads have already been working for years in our industry learning how to develop their own hospitality career path. Hospitality graduates, by their sheer commitment to earning that degree, have shown that they want to be in our industry. They have slogged through at least four years of courses ranging from cooking and accounting to basic management skills. In the better universities, such as Florida international University, they are taught critical thinking skills where they are pushed to make decisions that mimic real life scenarios. In addition, most schools require hundreds of hours of internships where the student is required to work in the hotel or restaurant field. These internships often shake out those students who are not dedicated to the industry. When they realize the commitment required to succeed, those students who are not totally convinced that this is their career path often decide to move elsewhere.

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That gives employers their choice of individuals who have devoted four years to both schoolwork and industry work as employee candidates. Compare that to most of the applicants walking through your door who have their priorities focused on another direction. In addition, most of these graduates are looking at the hospitality industry as their long-term career path. They have the “want to” gene, and that desire to succeed in our industry is more valuable than someone working for you but keeping their eyes on a career path in engineering, acting or any other non-hospitality path. As a former boss used to say, “It’s easier to train a dog to take food to a table, than training an employee to be gracious, warm and hospitable who is not already that way.” As with any new hire, it is still incumbent upon us as employers to vet any applicant. Hiring hospitality graduates is not an absolute slam dunk. However, it does give us great insight into the background of these future employees. In an industry where pennies count and we want to maximize our chances of success, there is no doubt that hiring the hospitality graduate increases those chances. Desire, work ethic, history of interest in our industry and the wish to be part of hospitality all combine to make hospitality graduates a great choice when hiring for your business.