Executives get involved in recruiting students

HOSPITABLE ENVIRONMENT: Candace Grist, right, coordinator for the Community College of Rhode Island’s travel, tourism and hospitality certificate program, works with JWU student Julie King. / COURTESY DAVE FISCHBACH
HOSPITABLE ENVIRONMENT: Candace Grist, right, coordinator for the Community College of Rhode Island’s travel, tourism and hospitality certificate program, works with JWU student Julie King. / COURTESY DAVE FISCHBACH

In hospitality, as in any field, the job hunt takes many forms. Just ask Courtney Lowenstein.
The New Providence, N.J., resident and Johnson & Wales University 2013 graduate landed a job in March with FLIK International – a process that began with a career fair in October and ended with a job offer through a dinner at Providence’s Al Forno restaurant with 14 other prospective employees from JWU, and the company president.
The traditional route of submitting resumes and attending job fairs were paths Lowenstein, 22, followed, but now that she’s moving to Rhode Island to take a job through FLIK International as assistant dining-services manager at Fidelity Investments in Smithfield, she looks back on her meeting with FLIK International executives with something like awe.
“It was a very different interviewing process than I’ve ever seen before,” said Lowenstein. “It was very social. I got to interact with a lot of vice presidents and even the president of the company in a very different way. Instead of [answering questions like] ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘When did you graduate?’ the conversation was more social and informal.
“[The executives] are very much into the company,” she said. “They love it and they’re all about promoting it, and that’s something I was looking for.”
Hospitality jobs, whether in food service or hotels, and whether entry level or managerial, have rebounded since the recession, according to faculty at JWU and the Community College of Rhode Island, which offers a culinary-management certificate and certificates in travel/tourism and hospitality.
In fact, the Hyatt Regency Newport held a job fair on March 20, and the Rhode Island Hospitality Association is hosting one at the Roger Williams Park Casino in Providence on May 14 with five other partners, including the cities of Cranston and Providence, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, the R.I. Department of Labor and Training’s Business Workforce Center and Workforce Solutions of Providence/Cranston.
Evidence of demand is anecdotal, but Candace Grist, associate professor and coordinator for the travel/tourism and hospitality program at CCRI, said the industry had been taking a hit since the recession in 2008, when students “had to claw their way into jobs,” but now the economy is improving. “These job fairs are a great indication to me that things are picking up in Rhode Island, and I think we will see more opportunities for certificate graduates and more companies actively recruiting qualified employees,” Grist said.
In seeking students who have “hospitality in their blood,” FLIK International President Scott Davis, a JWU alumnus, deliberately structured the Al Forno dinner to be very social, he said. The unusual arrangement, now in its eighth or ninth year, is tied to the Compass Group in London, his parent company, which has a covenant agreement with JWU to hire students and helped establish a curriculum for those choosing to come into the management side of the business, he said.
“My firm is a hospitality firm and we always like to treat people that work in our company just like we treat our guests,” Davis said of the dining that included pizza, salad, entrees and dessert. “I always think it’s great to have meetings over a meal. It’s less about an interview and recruitment and more about providing contacts and industry leaders with the folks coming out of the university to make good decisions about their future.”
Another form of recruitment used at both CCRI and JWU is cooperative educational placement.
“Cooperative education placement is built into the programming in the final semester so the lead faculty member is constantly calling on employers and placing students in internship and co-op positions,” said Peter Woodberry, CCRI’s dean of business, science and technology. “Often times, there’s a perfect match, and when the student completes the internship, the hotel chain hires them because it’s a great way to get to know them.” Maureen Dumas, JWU’s vice president of experiential education and career services, confirmed that.
“We don’t have a name for it, but we absolutely are connected to faculty with recruitment,” Dumas said in an email. “We just did an event for all accounting and finance students and we worked with a faculty member and his team to have industry present for a networking session. His entire faculty showed up for the event and assisted us greatly.”
Michael Petrillose, dean of JWU’s College of Management, added that competition is fierce for hospitality jobs and employers are “only hiring for exactly what they need.” In addition, executives are taking more of a hands-on role in connecting to students by coming to the school to lecture and meet students, he said. “By the end of this term we’ll have had eight CEOs of hospitality companies in our classes … talking with our students,” Petrillose said. “The companies that ‘get it’ make the time to come here, go into the classes, give a keynote lecture – those are the ones who get their brand out to the students and get the students talking. There’s no flier or TV ad they could put together that could rival that presence.”
The Crowne Plaza Providence-Warwick uses a variety of tools for hiring – everything from JWU’s website and CCRI’s job posting to Craigslist and, occasionally, recruiters, said Liz Pelopida, the hotel’s operations coordinator.
“We are gearing up for our busy season, have been actively hiring for the last several weeks and will continue to hire in the foreseeable future,” she said in an email.
And often, students get jobs simply by using the tried and true methods of actively seeking them out on their own. Two CCRI students who are graduating in May, Chris Hughes, 22, of Middletown, and Julie King, 22, of Boxborough, Mass., are both working in hospitality already.
Hughes was promoted from part time to full time in the past year at the front desk and guest services at Homewood Suites. King is a part-time banquet server at the Holiday Inn in Boxborough. Both describe themselves as outgoing.
“I want to go into hotels maybe as a general manager down the line one day,” Hughes said, “but I like to be out with the guests because I love talking to people. I’m always open to networking and looking for something new – a new adventure.”
Grist said Hughes in particular has “a passion for helping people, and that’s really what hospitality is all about.”
As for the executives doing the hiring, they are looking for that eagerness and engagement. For Davis, the dinner is just a culmination of a lot of the behind-the-scenes research his executives do when selecting who will be invited. And that has resulted in retention of many of the JWU graduates that have been hired and been promoted to senior-level posts, Davis said.
“I tell my people the most important decision they’ll make,” he said, “is who to surround themselves with.”

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