Our people

How do you go about recruiting enough people to staff more than 1,700 new hotels? As Tracy Robbins explains, clearly setting out the Group’s commitment to employees is vital to win the 'war for talent'.

People are at the heart of our core purpose, Great Hotels Guests Love.

We treat our people as individuals, want them to feel valued for their contribution and ask everyone to live our Winning Ways (the behaviours everyone at IHG can buy into every day).

A lot of organisations talk about the war for talent, but for us it’s very real. We plan to open more than 1,700 hotels in the next few years and almost 140,000 people will need to be found to work in them. We can’t rely on traditional methods to recruit this number of people, so we’re getting creative. We use our own people to tell the story of who we are: our recruitment advertisements are fronted by our employees showcasing their hobbies. We wanted them to share something that inspires them, excites them and shows them as individuals because that’s how we want them to feel when they are working with us. Our careers website was relaunched in December with new information and insight into what it’s really like to work for us. Just over one million people visited the site in 2008 and we now have more than 380,000 CVs that have been submitted online.

Careers beckon for 4,200 every year

We are also developing the talent we need ourselves. Around 4,200 people a year will graduate from our Academies in China after we stepped up the IHG Academy programme. These Academies operate in 10 locations, from Shanghai to Shenzhen, and are supported by 24 partners, offering hospitality courses that we’ve helped to develop. Students are then given jobs with IHG when they successfully complete their courses, ranging from positions in maintenance to revenue management and front office.

The next generation of general managers

General managers need to be financially savvy, understand brands, deliver a great guest experience and get the best out of people. We have launched a selection tool to help our owners find those managers with the skills to deliver Great Hotels Guests Love. We also conducted a talent review of over 1,100 senior managers to help us develop effective succession plans. Our new Learning Management System gives general managers and front line employees a suite of online learning tools to prepare them for their next role.

Employees love working here

We’ve been measuring employee engagement in our owned and managed estate for two years. We received a record 90,000 responses – representing about 90 per cent of employees – to the latest survey in November.

During 2008, employee engagement improved by 3 per cent to 68 per cent. Nine out of 10 people told us they’re proud to work for IHG.

87 per cent of employees would recommend IHG as a good place to work (27 per cent higher than external benchmark data) and we see the results of that every day. In our Americas region almost half of our vacancies are filled by employee referrals.