The rookie GM who crushed a hyper-competitive talent market

Good morning. If you’ve struggled with hiring (as many have), you’ll appreciate our feature story today with a first-time hotel GM who grew her team from 12 to 130 in the hyper-competitive Silicon Valley market - and earned the best retention rate from those hires - by following an unconventional playbook.

Talent Strategies for Competitive Markets

with Lauren Phelps

Today we're learning from Lauren Phelps about hiring and retaining talented people. A few excerpts from our conversation:

Danny Meyer had it right: “If your employees are happy, everything goes from there.”

Question everything: “Do we need this position? Is there a way to combine these positions? Can we create a new position?”

Look for alignment: “Creating that sense of impact and finding people who were energetic about the things we were energetic about.”

Autonomy, mastery, and purpose: “We found that people that were excited by those things in the interview stage tended to become full-time employees and stay with us.”

Recruiting is sales: “I was a full-time salesperson. That was my job.”

If you’re looking to hire (and keep) talented people on your team, I highly recommend you listen to Lauren today.

Listen to our conversation now

From our community

Hospitality Daily is a community of creators and doers. (And we just passed 3,000!) Some cool things for today:

• From Chris Cano: Creating a culture of empathy and active listening can increase your chance of success by 200%.

• From Zach Busekrus: How Devon Loerop built the world's most-followed Airbnb on social media all by himself.

Stories I’m reading

• Trends: It’s A New Era For All-Inclusive Resorts (by Nicole Kliest for thezoereport)

• Commercial: Accor’s Ennismore Reveals No-points, Paid Membership Called ‘Dis-loyalty’ (by Selene Brophy for Skift)

• Tech: INDIE Cultivate Conference Round-Up: Exploring Technology Adoption and Acquisition in the Hospitality Industry (by Alan Young for hospitalitynet)

• Investment: Empty spaces and hybrid places: The pandemic’s lasting impact on real estate (by multiple authors for McKinsey & Company)