Background

Our Senior LAB Profiling Consultant undertook an extensive project to streamline recruitment processes, reduce recruitment spend and reduce staff turnover for a global travel & tourism organisation. The company has UK-based travel agencies and tourism operations in every continent of the world. Each holiday resort is staffed by a resort manager and a team of holiday representatives.

Issues

The company recruits thousands of overseas holiday representatives every year, requiring a large recruitment budget. The overseas representatives are trained in the UK and then posted at a holiday resort overseas. A large number of new employees failed to arrive in their resort, having dropped out during or after the training. Even more left the company within three months of arriving in their resort as they find it difficult to cope with life overseas. There was, therefore a huge amount of money spent on recruiting people who added no significant value to the company.

Traditionally, recruitment had been done through application form and assessment centre; initial screening was based purely upon the information contained in the application form. The assessment centres were expensive and high volume.

 Consultancy Activities

i. LAB Profile-Based Job Analysis

LAB motivation profiles are one of the best indicators of both suitability for a role and long term motivation within the role. Our LAB consultant interviewed holiday resort managers to identify the key skills and requirements of the holiday representative role. She then interviewed a cross section of role holders including: excellent performers, average performers and under performers. During the interviews, she identified each role holder’s LAB motivation preferences to build up a detailed profile of the motivation preferences that were essential to high performance and motivation levels in the role.

This profile of desirable LAB motivators was then used to redesign recruitment processes to ensure that applicants who were invited to assessment centres had the requisite motivation patterns.

ii.) On-line selection processes

Using the information collated in the LAB profile for the holiday representative job role, our consultant developed an online first-stage interview process. The online interview form was structured to test the applicants’ motivation preferences and provide feedback about how their LAB motivation profile compared to the ideal profile for the role. Applicants with LAB motivation profiles which did not match the profile of high performing holiday representatives were rejected from the process, therefore ensuring that applicants put forward to assessment centres were more likely to be a good match for the role.

Outcomes

Three months after the interviews had taken place and the holiday representatives had been placed in resort, the company reported a reduction in turnover of holiday representatives of approximately 30%. Anecdotal evidence suggests that turnover went down still further as the holiday season progressed.