International Hotel Jobs Ltd
International Hotel Jobs Ltd, a specialist hospitality recruitment company. It may only be six years old but the company has already found employment for 8,000 Europeans in Scotland and the UK.
International Hotel Jobs Ltd is a specialist hospitality recruitment company. It may only be six years old but the company has already found employment for some 8,000 Europeans in Scotland and the UK.
TalentScotland spoke to Managing Director George Chalmers, about the company’s area of expertise and future projects in the pipeline.
Talk us through what International Hotel Jobs Ltd do
We’re based in Alloa, in Clackmannanshire, and cover all the UK. There are two staff in the office plus other agency staff.
As an ex-hotel manager I wanted to use Eastern European staff to fill the skills gaps. This was about seven years ago. We use a large pool of European staff which allows us to react quickly to the demands of our clients and be cost effective. We also take our clients on European trips, which a lot of other recruitment firms don’t do. We’ve done about 20 of these so far and they’re proving successful.
Do you employ many graduates?
We take on a lot of Eastern European staff, with good degrees, along with international staff studying for degrees at Scottish universities. We recruit of lot of people through the Fresh Talent initiative too.
We place a lot of post graduate students, from India and Dubai, as chefs and kitchen staff at Scottish hotels. We also employ postgraduate students from Stirling University as catering workers. They are mainly Chinese and have either graduated or are staying in Scotland for their two years postgraduate work experience.
What do you see for the future?
In the future the most important this for us is staying stable in a tough recruitment market. Over the coming weeks we will be building on our relationship with the Barcelona Hotel School, bringing some of their students over for work experience in the summer at a large hotel in the Highlands. We hope to bring around 25 over and hopefully, when they graduate, they’ll come to Scotland to work on a more permanent basis.
I’ve done this type of trip about 20 times previously, with the big hotel groups like Hilton, Skibo Castle, Dunblane Hydro and Gleneagles, for their hotels all over the UK and Ireland and they have ended up being very successful.
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