Next Please

               Recruitment at the semi-finished hotel has been particularly thrilling. The sheer number of odd balls that have come out of the woodwork is something to behold. Highlights include…

• A man who sent a picture of himself posing by a flowerbed outside a terraced house as an answer to the question ‘what makes you suitable for the role’.
• A lady describing herself as an influencer who only wanted the job if she could ‘create content’ during work time.
• The man who answered ‘what does customer service mean to you’ with ‘I spent the last sixteen years arguing with my ex-wife, so I am used to putting people in their place’
• The woman who ‘doesn’t use computers’ so will work for a lower wage as she ‘won’t do the computer work’.
• Someone who started their cover letter with the phrase ‘since my most recent conviction for attacking a police officer’.

While these were the highlights, a huge number of candidates presented CVs that were badly written, incomplete or contained spelling mistakes. There were also a couple that seemed like they were entirely created by AI, people who admitted not having the right to work in the UK and others who had been fired from the company on previous occasions (in one case for stealing money from the till). The bin became very full, very quickly.

Then I invited people to interview, easily half of them didn’t respond and a load more did book an interview but didn’t actually show up, wasting hours of my time. Actually, getting to interview anyone at all felt like a rare event. Sadly, many of the interviews that happened were not too inspirational either.

• The candidate who opened with the line ‘I will need a lot of time off as the doctor won’t let me have my gastric band until my hernia has cleared’.
• A man who when asked ‘can you tell me a time you have made a difference’ replied with ‘no, I don’t really ever make a difference’.
• Someone who left their last job because they were not allowed to take the entire school summer holiday as annual leave.
• A lady who spent the last eight years doing product campaigns for a supermarket, I asked her to tell me about one of them, she said she couldn’t remember any.
• A man who arrived with a lot of make up and as he began to sweat, a huge tattoo across his entire face was revealed, including a revolver and skulls.

Our recruitment tactics evolved into going to other hotels and giving business cards to anyone who seemed able to carry a tray without dropping it or bursting into tears when a customer asks where the toilets are, so we gradually started to put a team together. Now we just need a functioning hotel for them to work in…