Hospitality  Recruiting at Scale

Travelodge Recruitment Case Study

Travelodge is one of the UK's largest, fastest growing and most highly recognised budget hotel brands, offering great value for money hotel rooms and service to their customers across the country from leisure to  business travellers alike.

Background

Travelodge came to Criterion because they were facing a number of challenges around their recruitment process: firstly in implementing the recent redesign of their Team Member roles, and secondly they needed to ensure that role responsibilities and company values were built into their recruitment process, allowing them to sift large volumes of candidates for their roles across the whole of their UK.

They chose to work with us based on our expertise in high volume online assessments to develop an innovative recruitment process fit for their multi-functional Team Members.

Aims

We worked with the Travelodge recruitment team to help fulfil the following objectives:

• Reflect the changing requirements and expectations of Team Members within Travelodge.
• Communicate a positive candidate experience whilst reflecting the demands and attraction to the team member role.
• Facilitate a reliable screening process to increase calibre of applicants selected for the interview stage.
• Accommodate high volumes of candidates to access the online recruitment process.

Our Approach

Criterion Partnership worked in partnership with the Travelodge recruitment team and external stakeholders throughout the process to design a fully bespoke online assessments journey to meet the following critical success factors:

Design new Team Member assessments which had to measure job-critical skills and attributes and future potential, including:

• Design a focused, short assessment journey which communicates the roles demands, values and culture of the business to deliver a positive candidate experience and facilitate self-selection to the recruitment process.
• Results would be reported as a sifting score to enable quicker sifting decisions.
• The candidate's profile would be provided in a bespoke report to enable follow-up during the interview

In order to meet these requirements, our business consultants spent time in Travelodge hotels across the UK and spoke to key stakeholders to understand the new Team Member requirements, and how this translated into the demands and rewards of the role.

In parallel, Criterion Partnership worked closely with key stakeholders to develop a seamlessly integrated candidate journey between the Travelodge applicant platform and Psycruit which holds candidate assessments.

The Results

The consultation insights built the basis for the design of bespoke assessments, including a personality questionnaire and situational judgement test; a combination of assessments, which communicate the demands and rewards of the Team Member role and measure candidate fit with Travelodge culture and values:

Travelodge situational judgement test
Based on real customer and team member interactions and situations across Receptionist, Cleaner and Bar Café roles.

Travelodge personality questionnaire
Measures values & culture-fit, and behavioural and emotional style in relation to job critical attributes.

These assessments were mapped onto the Travelodge values around teamwork, customer focus and continuous improvement. The candidate results would be reported against these values, as well as an overall value-fit score and profile specific interview questions.

The Psycruit system was integrated with the Travelodge online recruitment system, which provided a seamless candidate journey from application form through to online assessments.

A Travelodge web-skin was created for the candidate pages. It also enabled ease of administration management with candidate results and reports passed automatically from Psycruit to the online recruitment system to minimise response times and effectively manage the high volume recruitment of candidates.

In total over 76,000 candidates completed the Travelodge Team Member assessment as part of the pre-selection process.