By Jennifer Tierney, Director of Hospitality Recruitment, Xclusive Services
When an important permanent position is open, generating applicants is rarely the goal. The goal is getting the right candidates in front of the right decision-makers, moving the process efficiently, and making a hire the organization can feel confident about.
That distinction matters in hospitality, where a vacant General Manager, Executive Chef, Director of Operations, or corporate leader can affect far more than an org chart. It can place additional demands on existing leadership, slow decision-making, and leave an important part of the operation without the expertise it needs.
At Xclusive Services, we call our permanent-placement recruiting service Direct Hire. For customers who know Xclusive primarily for contingent staffing, outsourcing, or janitorial services, it may be a part of the company they know less about. Direct Hire extends Xclusive’s hospitality specialization into permanent recruiting, from property-level operations and leadership to corporate functions including finance, HR, marketing, and training.
The value goes well beyond access to another recruiting resource. A strong recruiting process should save leadership time, reduce hiring risk, and help an organization move from an open position to the right hire with greater confidence. The way Xclusive does that starts long before an offer is made.
Most companies don’t need more résumés. Between job boards, LinkedIn, internal recruiting resources, and increasingly sophisticated sourcing tools, organizations have more ways than ever to generate candidates. The harder job is determining which candidates deserve the client’s time.
Xclusive’s Direct Hire service is led by Jennifer Tierney, who brings 25 years of hospitality recruiting experience as well as an operations background to the role. Her approach is intentionally selective.
“I usually send my top two or three,” Tierney says. “I don’t waste the client’s time with résumés that aren’t going to fit. Out of those top three, personally, I would hire every single one of them.”
That means qualification has to go beyond whether someone’s experience matches the bullet points in a job description. A finance leader supporting multiple hotels needs to understand hospitality P&Ls and know how to communicate with operators. A General Manager may have the necessary operational experience but still need the right leadership style for a particular ownership group. An Executive Chef can have an impressive résumé without being the right person for a specific concept, team, or culture.
The objective is to do more of that evaluation before the client ever sees the candidate. Xclusive saves clients time by curating rather than inundating.
Finding the right candidate also requires being certain that everyone agrees about what “right” means.
Tierney recently worked with a family that owns several resorts. The original assignment appeared straightforward: recruit a leader who could oversee the properties. As the search progressed, however, the position began to change. Multiple members of the family were involved, and each appeared to have different expectations for the person they wanted to hire.
Rather than continuing to source against an increasingly unclear specification, Tierney stopped the process and asked each decision-maker to identify the three qualities that mattered most to them.
“They were all on the same page,” she says. “They just didn’t know it.”
The issue was not candidate supply. The organization first needed clarity about the position it was asking someone to fill. Once that became clear, Xclusive could help move the search forward against a better-defined target.
Sometimes a search needs a broader candidate profile. Sometimes decision-makers need to align around priorities. Sometimes a company isn’t ready to hire and should wait rather than putting candidates through a process without a clear destination. Identifying those issues early can reduce false starts, wasted interviews, and time spent recruiting against the wrong target.
A permanent hire represents a significant investment. Recruiting, onboarding, training, relocation, and the time internal leaders devote to the process all carry costs. For leadership positions, the consequences of the wrong hire can extend into team performance, guest experience, and the operation itself.
No recruiting process can eliminate that risk. It can, however, be designed to reduce it.
For Xclusive, that means looking beyond what appears on a résumé.
“If there are red flags, I’m the first person to point them out,” Tierney says. “Nobody is perfect.”
Rather than presenting every candidate as an ideal fit, Tierney identifies areas a client may want to explore more deeply during an interview. That might be a missing skill, a question about leadership style, or something in the candidate’s employment history that warrants further discussion.
Reference checking is another part of that process. When possible, Tierney goes beyond the references supplied by the candidate and uses her hospitality network to speak with people who have worked with them. The goal is to give the client a more complete picture before making an important decision.
That judgment works in the other direction, too. Sometimes a résumé contains an apparent weakness while the candidate behind it is unusually strong. In those cases, experience can identify someone who does not perfectly fit the original profile but deserves serious consideration.
Both are important parts of reducing risk: knowing when to raise a concern and knowing when the original requirements may be screening out a strong candidate.
The recruiter’s role continues after candidates reach the client.
Strong candidates are often involved in multiple conversations, particularly when they are not actively looking for a new job. An unnecessarily long interview process can turn a successful search into a lost candidate.
Tierney sees that happen when organizations add interview after interview without a clear decision-making structure.
“Some companies I work with lose candidates because the candidates simply get interview fatigue,” she says.
Because Xclusive remains in communication with both sides, it can tell a client when a candidate is moving closer to another opportunity or when timing is becoming a concern. That does not mean rushing an important hiring decision. It means recognizing when additional process is improving the decision and when it is simply delaying one.
The same outside perspective can help identify another common problem. The people involved in the hiring process may not all feel the operational urgency created by the vacancy. The department head covering an open position experiences that pressure every day, while someone participating in a fifth-round interview may not.
Keeping the search moving requires communication, clear decision-making, and sometimes a recruiting partner willing to tell the client when its own process has become an obstacle.
Hospitality organizations operate differently from businesses in other industries, and even within hospitality, the requirements of a resort, hotel, restaurant company, or private club can vary considerably. The same is true across functions.
Direct Hire draws on two complementary sources of expertise. Through its work across more than 60 markets and across staffing, outsourcing, and janitorial services, Xclusive has broad exposure to hospitality operations across properties and departments. Those relationships provide insight into how hotels operate, where workforce challenges emerge, and what different organizations require from their people.
Direct Hire adds specialized depth to that breadth. Tierney spent years in hospitality operations before moving into recruiting and has spent the past 25 years recruiting within the industry. Over that time, she has also built an extensive network of hospitality professionals and relationships that can help Xclusive reach candidates beyond those actively responding to a job posting.
Together, that experience allows the recruiting conversation to move beyond job titles and keywords to how a candidate will actually function within a particular operation.
It also allows Direct Hire to support a wider range of permanent positions than some Xclusive customers may realize. In addition to General Managers, Executive Chefs, Directors of Operations, and other property-level leaders, Xclusive recruits for corporate functions including finance, HR, marketing, and training. Tierney has recruited senior executives as well, including a CMO who later became CEO.
The positions may be different, but the same principle applies across them: success depends on understanding both the candidate and the hospitality organization that is hiring them.
For customers already using Xclusive for contingent staffing, outsourcing, or janitorial services, Direct Hire provides another way to address workforce needs through the same hospitality-focused organization.
“All three of our divisions are on the same team,” Tierney says. “We have the same values and the same integrity. We work in the same way, and we work together.”
Permanent recruiting ultimately requires trust. A client is relying on its recruiting partner to understand the position, represent the organization accurately in the market, evaluate candidates carefully, raise concerns candidly, and keep an important search moving toward a decision.
For Xclusive, success means doing the work that gives clients greater confidence at each stage of that process, from defining the search to evaluating the candidates to making the hire. The goal is not more résumés. It is getting the right person into the right position and getting the hire right.
Learn how Xclusive Services can bring the X Factor to your property today!
Contact Our Sales Team