According to recent data, only about one in ten people have natural leadership ability. An additional 20% of individuals possess some of the basic qualities of a great manager and can become leaders with training and guidance. While hiring individuals with management potential is essential to the success of any business, it is particularly important in the hospitality sector.
Restaurants and hotels are customer-facing businesses expected to provide exceptional service when clients step into the building. However, many interactions with hospitality service providers fall short of consumer expectations. Poor customer service costs businesses over $1.6 trillion in lost profits annually.
Although some of the responsibility for these negative interactions falls on the line-level staff, managers and other organizational leaders are expected to bridge the gap and salvage client relationships.
By hiring great leaders, business owners and stakeholders can better serve clients, enhance staff morale, and improve profitability. However, before owners can hire better leaders, they must understand the skills needed for hospitality management.
With that in mind, we have created this guide. Below, we explore the skills needed to be a hospitality manager and restaurant owner. Our experts also identify an effective way to measure applicants’ skills and abilities to make smarter hiring decisions.
Essential Hospitality Management Skills
Hospitality managers must possess a dynamic range of skills, including the following:
Conflict Resolution: Working in the hospitality industry can be stressful. Between interacting with disgruntled customers, juggling a broad range of responsibilities, and working under tight deadlines, friction between employees is inevitable. Therefore, hospitality managers must be able to help employees sort out their differences and effectively work together as a team.
Communication Skills: Hospitality managers must be skilled communicators. They are the point of contact for maintenance personnel, front desk employees, housekeeping staff, high-priority customers, and others. Effective managers are able to communicate their expectations to subordinates, smooth things over with dissatisfied customers, and provide regular status reports to stakeholders.
Multitasking: Hospitality managers wear many different hats during any given workday. They might establish employee schedules, fill in when a staff member calls in sick, interact with customers, and take on other varied responsibilities. A great manager can transition seamlessly between activities while demonstrating good time management skills.
The abilities outlined above are just a few of the skills needed for hospitality management. When screening for hospitality management skills, make sure to modify your testing process to align with your unique organizational needs.
Skills Needed to Be a Restaurant Owner
While there is some overlap between the skills needed to be a restaurant owner and those required for hospitality management, the former typically need to possess abilities such as:
Attention to Detail: Restaurant owners and managers must ensure that the dining environment is perfect every day. Floors must be spotless, tables should be precisely arranged, and all staff should be ready and willing to greet customers as they enter.
Food Safety: Mishandling food can have severe consequences for a restaurant. Poor food safety practices will endanger patrons and expose the restaurant to severe civil liability. If even a handful of customers are made ill by mishandled food products, it may damage the establishment’s reputation.
Inventory Management: Restaurant managers ensure that the establishment has enough inventory to effectively serve its guests. While occasionally running out of supplies to prepare a signature dish is unavoidable, this cannot become a common occurrence.
When running a successful restaurant, skilled owners and managers are essential. Poor leadership will drive away quality employees and negatively impact the patron experience. Conversely, great leaders will help your business retain talent and earn the repeat business of your customers.
Other Must-Have Hospitality Skills and Attributes
The exact hospitality skills and attributes that your staff should possess will vary depending on their responsibilities. However, virtually every hospitality professional needs good communication skills, multitasking ability, a strong work ethic, and attention to detail. These attributes will put them in a good position to succeed and effectively serve your clients.
How to Measure Skills Needed for Hospitality Management
Skills tests offer the most pragmatic solution for measuring a candidate’s attributes and learned abilities. You can administer these skills tests to applicants during pre-employment screening.
Your team can also administer them to current employees to determine whether they possess key leadership abilities. While there are many skills tests available for screening hospitality professionals, some of the most popular include:
You can use a combination of various pre-built skills tests or create a custom screening test based on your organization’s needs. Once a candidate completes their assigned skills tests, your hiring team will have access to quantifiable data on the candidate’s abilities and talents. This information will guide hiring decisions and help you find the best candidates from each applicant pool.
Testing Solutions from eSkill
Using skills assessments helps you ensure candidates have the hospitality skills and attributes that are needed to be successful in all your jobs. Contact us to request a demo.