Running an events venue can be extremely challenging. Putting on well organized events that run smoothly and deliver a great experience for guests takes hard work, meticulous planning and careful execution. However, these factors often aren’t enough to ensure success. You also need the right staff.
More than any other factor, the quality of your staff plays the largest role in the success of your events. Whether they have a behind-the-scenes or guest-facing role, your staff is responsible for making sure the event goes as planned, the client is happy and the guests have a memorable experience (for the right reasons).
Finding and retaining quality events staff has been a challenge for many venues in recent years. In fact, the hospitality industry was hit harder by the Great Resignation during the pandemic than most other industries, and staffing shortages have been the norm ever since. If you’ve been struggling with staffing issues at your events venue, the following tips will help you find quality staff that will set your business up for success.
Before you can start your hiring process, you must first have a clear understanding of your staffing needs. There are many different aspects of running an event, and you’ll need staff for each role involved in the process. Make sure you identify all the roles you need to fill, estimate how many people you will need to fully staff each role, and assess the specific skills and qualifications required for each role. This should include both hard skills and desired personality traits, such as:
Once you’ve defined your roles and identified the qualifications necessary for success, you can create detailed job descriptions that target the right candidates.
If you’re ramping up your staffing for busy season well ahead of time and/or you have team members with the bandwidth to run the hiring process, you can handle it in-house. The best way to hire events staff is to post your open job positions online. This will help you reach the largest audience of potential staff members.
Keep in mind that handling your hiring in-house can take time. Therefore, it’s important to plan ahead and place your online ads well before you need to be fully staffed for events season.
Sometimes, it’s just easier and more effective to outsource the hiring process to a staffing agency. This may be the ideal approach if:
Working with a staffing agency provides several important benefits:
Make sure to work with an agency that specializes in event staffing. This will ensure they have the skills and experience necessary to identify the right candidates for your needs.
If you decide to keep your hiring in-house, you’ll need to thoroughly screen all candidates to identify the right fit for your team. When evaluating events staff candidates, it’s important to go beyond a basic resume review. Conduct comprehensive interviews to assess each candidate’s qualifications, experience and interpersonal skills. Pay attention to their ability to handle stressful situations, their flexibility and their problem solving skills.
Your ability to identify the best candidates during the interview process will require you to ask the right questions. You should create a list of questions you feel will help you evaluate whether a candidate has the skills to perform the role being filled and the personality to fit in with your culture.
Some questions you may want to consider asking include:
You may also want to come up with additional questions to learn more about their general availability and flexibility, their willingness to do what it takes to ensure events are successful, and their work ethic.
When you contact these references, ask specific questions about the candidate’s work ethiec, ability to meet deadlines, work well within a team and handle unexpected challenges.
It’s important that your new staff will work well with your existing staff and fit in with your culture. This is critical since your new staff will be working closely with existing employees. If your team members don’t see eye to eye, it can result in conflict that will negatively impact the success of events.
One way to ensure your new hires will fit in well with your existing team is to involve some of your longest tenured and most experienced team members in the hiring process. Ideally, you should include staff members who perform the same role as you are trying to fill.
Even when you take all of the steps discussed above, identifying quality events staff can be challenging. If you want to ensure you get these important hiring decisions right, Xclusive Services has you covered.
At Xclusive, we can provide high quality events staff for just about any role you may need to fill. This may include front-of-house team members, back-of-house workers, event planners, or any other role on your team. We even supply experienced events team managers who can come in on short notice and run your events smoothly without direction.
We can supply a few workers if you recently experienced staff turnover or several employees called out sick, or we can staff an entire team for a large event when you’re understaffed. We can also supply you with long-term events staff that will fill these roles on a more permanent basis.
You’ll benefit from our Xclusive Excellence™ commitment, which ensures you:
To learn more about how Xclusive Services can help address your event staffing needs, please request a quote or call a local office for immediate staffing needs.
