How Hotels Can Use LinkedIn to Attract Talent and Keep Them

Seasonal fluctuations, demanding work conditions, and limited career growth all make it difficult for hotels to hold onto great employees. Providing excellent service and keeping hotel operations efficient requires a skilled team. Yet an average turnover rate of 74% for the hospitality industry creates operational issues and drives up hiring costs. So, how do you attract and retain talent for your hotel properties?

In this article, we’ll cover how a thoughtful LinkedIn strategy can help you find employees who are a great fit and who are likely to stay long-term. Implementing a LinkedIn strategy doesn’t have to be difficult. Agorapulse’s publishing, engagement, reporting, and employee advocacy tools make it easy to manage LinkedIn and coordinate with your team.

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Why LinkedIn Is So Important for Hospitality

With more than 1 billion members across the globe, LinkedIn is easily the largest professional networking platform. It gives hospitality teams unparalleled access to potential candidates, making it easy to find qualified professionals in specific regions or with certain skill sets.

However, talent acquisition is just one reason LinkedIn is so useful for hotels. Between the platform’s company pages and its personal profiles, hospitality businesses can create strong brands and share company culture, positioning themselves as more desirable employers.

Hotel marketing teams can also engage with potential candidates by commenting on LinkedIn posts or sending DMs and InMail. This approach is particularly helpful for establishing relationships with qualified candidates and encouraging them to join the team.

Whether your team plans to focus on LinkedIn’s organic features or paid tools, this platform is a worthwhile investment for businesses in the hospitality space. Below, we’ll walk through how to approach each of these elements, including how Agorapulse can simplify the process.

Build a Strong Employer Brand for Staff Retention on LinkedIn

The first step to developing a successful LinkedIn strategy is establishing your brand. Use your company page to share your brand and mission with potential candidates.

1. Tell your hotel brand’s story

Start by introducing your brand. Along with your logo, upload a cover image that summarizes your brand in a single message. For example, Accor uses a cover image that says “hospitality is a work of heart” to capture the brand’s approach to creating guest experiences.

Then tell your brand’s story in an ongoing series of LinkedIn posts. For example, Accor produces a video series that tells the story behind the various brands in the hotel group’s portfolio.

Plus, each hotel chain in the portfolio has its own linked page where candidates can dive deeper. For example, the MGallery company page highlights the luxury chain’s unique guest experiences, while the Novotel company page explores the modern design throughout the chain’s properties.

2. Share your brand’s mission

For many top hotels, attracting skilled employees isn’t enough. Instead, the ultimate goal is building a hospitality team that can truly get behind your company’s mission.

Start by sharing your mission front and center on your company page. For instance, Accor details the company’s mission in the page’s About section.

Here, the hotel brand explores multiple aspects of its mission:

• First, it highlights a passion for service and a drive to create innovative guest experiences.
• Then it details the importance of making a positive impact on both local and global communities.

You don’t have to let your about section do all the heavy lifting. Create a steady stream of LinkedIn posts that show candidates how your team lives this mission.

For example, this Accor LinkedIn carousel details the hotel group’s commitment to sustainability. It details how the company pursues ethical sourcing and waste reduction while still offering elevated guest experiences.

3. Showcase your company culture

Next, showcase the values that your team shares. In other words, highlight your company culture.

LinkedIn gives you a couple of ways to do this. Start by using the life section of your company page to share videos and other media exploring your company culture.

For example, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts features multiple videos that explore the hotel group’s guiding principle and the employee experience.

Marriott International uses this section to share information about how the hotel group fosters belonging and creates a community of respect among team members.

4. Announce career development opportunities

Your hotel’s LinkedIn page is also the ideal place to tell candidates how your brand invests in employees. Use your page to announce professional development opportunities, including training and certification programs.

Here, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts shares a training program for students and graduates. The video explores how the program helps new team members learn new skills and thrive in their careers.

This IHG Hotels & Resorts post highlights a recent graduate of the hotel group’s Journey to GM program. The LinkedIn carousel details how the program and a mentor helped the team member take a proactive approach to advancing his career.

LinkedIn’s Native Tools for Quality Talent and Staff Retention

Once you’ve set up a compelling company page, you’re ready to use LinkedIn’s built-in talent acquisition tools. From posting jobs to connecting with qualified candidates, these tools are designed to attract talent.

LinkedIn Recruiter

LinkedIn Recruiter is the platform’s premier tool for hiring teams. You can use it to search for candidates based on industry, experience, job titles, skills, locations, and other factors. LinkedIn can also recommend candidates automatically based on your hiring goals.

Then, you can use InMail to message candidates directly and start conversations in DMs. InMail is ideal for engaging candidates, generating interest in your brand, and encouraging them to apply to relevant roles. Plus, you can save time by automating follow-ups and sending messages in bulk.

Since LinkedIn Recruiter integrates with ATS and CRM systems, it can help you manage your candidate pipeline without creating extra work. And because it supports teams, you can easily coordinate recruiting efforts with coworkers.

LinkedIn job postings for staff retention

You always have the option to post links to job descriptions on LinkedIn. But with LinkedIn job listings, you can attract candidates and encourage them to apply directly from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn automatically targets qualified candidates using location, industry, and skills data. Plus, you can add screening questions to job posts to vet candidates efficiently.

Active job listings appear on your company page, where interested candidates can easily find them and apply. For instance, Hilton has thousands of active job openings.

Note that you can post occasional openings on LinkedIn at no cost. But if you’re hiring frequently or if you want to promote listings to targeted audiences, you’ll have to pay.

LinkedIn Talent Insights

For more hiring and workforce management data, use LinkedIn Talent Insights. This paid product provides real-time hiring data, market insights, and candidate insights. It’s ideal for assessing workforce investments, improving hiring practices, and analyzing skill gaps.

How to Create a Strategy to Engage Potential Candidates

For many hotel brands, actively recruiting candidates is an effective way to build a team. But you can also attract candidates to your company via organic content and comments.

Develop a LinkedIn strategy for hotel staff retention

Getting your brand on candidates’ radar and attracting followers for your page is just the beginning. To keep your company top of mind, you need a LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Create a content calendar and plan to publish posts regularly. Share content with a mix of topics, from employee highlights to hotel awards to industry trends. Here are a few examples to use as inspiration.

Show off your hotel’s accolades. This Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts post features several hotels that won places on the prestigious World’s 50 Best Hotels list.

This Design Hotels post uses a LinkedIn carousel to profile and tag several hotels that earned honors from the Michelin Guide.

Make hiring announcements. This Marriott International post keeps it short and sweet by encouraging job seekers to visit the hotel group’s careers page.

Looking for a specific candidate for a management role? This Design Hotels post shares a hiring announcement for a mid-career role.

Introduce model employees. This Accor post profiles a hotel employee and shares his approach to wellbeing, a key element of the hotel group’s culture.

Here, this Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts post celebrates International Housekeeping Appreciation Week by showcasing the hard work of several members of the group’s housekeeping team.

Showcase new properties to get potential candidates excited about working for your hotel group. This IHG Hotels & Resorts post announces several new openings across the group’s portfolio.

With Agorapulse, creating a consistent publishing schedule is easy. Add ideas to your publishing calendar, collaborate on drafts, and produce posts with text, images, videos, or carousels.

Assign posts to stakeholders for a final review before scheduling posts to publish. Need to make a last-minute change? With Agorapulse, you can easily adjust schedules or fine-tune posts before they go live.

Host LinkedIn Live events and webinars

To connect with talent in real time, use LinkedIn Live. With this built-in live-streaming platform, you can:

• Host Q&A sessions to answer common questions and give candidates the information they need to apply
• Run panel discussions with conversations between hotel employees and members of the management team
• Offer webinars that walk talent through some of your hotel’s most popular training programs and certifications

These live events give candidates a clearer understanding of your hotel’s culture and work environment. They also provide talent with an opportunity to connect with human resources, which may simplify the hiring process.

Engage with potential candidates for better staff retention

As important as it is to create original content, you shouldn’t ignore the power of engagement. Creating a commenting strategy can help your team build connections and foster relationships with candidates.

Make a point of responding to every comment on your posts and videos. While LinkedIn doesn’t make comment management particularly easy, Agorapulse can help.

Once you connect your company page or your LinkedIn profile to Agorapulse, you can respond to every comment from a single social inbox. Go through all comments in chronological order or view them by profile post to get a look at the larger conversation.

Keep your social inbox organized by labeling important items for future follow-ups or top candidates. Or assign certain items to specific team members for more specialized responses.

You don’t necessarily have to manage your social inbox manually. If your brand receives a lot of engagement, Agorapulse’s automated moderation tools can label, assign, or even remove inbox items instantly.

With Agorapulse, you can also set up saved replies to use again and again. Saved replies are great for quickly responding to common questions and comments, and you can customize them to avoid repeating yourself.

To create deeper connections with candidates, comment on their LinkedIn posts as your company page. Just make sure to focus on content that’s relevant to their hospitality career. For example, consider adding a congratulatory note when a top candidate shares an educational or training milestone.

Tap Into Your Team’s Power with Advocacy

Publishing original content to a company page is the cornerstone of many hotel brands’ LinkedIn strategies. However, employee content can connect with candidates in different ways. Here’s what you should know about the power of employee advocacy within the hospitality industry.

Designate employee brand ambassadors

Recruit existing employees to serve as brand ambassadors.

Have them create content featuring:

• A day in their life as they work at a hotel property or corporate office
• Behind-the-scenes content from major hotel events
• Glimpses of employee outings to give employees an idea of extra perks
• Updates and news from an employee’s point of view

Have them submit the content to your social media team to publish directly to the company page. Or have them post it to their personal profile—and then repost it from the company page.

For example, Marriott International reposted this post from the hotel group’s president and CEO, Anthony Capuano.

Spotlight great employee content on your company page to give it more visibility. For example, Hyatt features trending employee content on the hotel group’s page.

Encourage employees to share branded content

Employee advocacy can also go the other way. In addition to asking employees to create original content, invite them to share important content from the company account. Encourage them to add their own commentary so the posts reflect their voices.

Manually managing an employee advocacy program can be time-consuming, especially if you have a lot of content to share. With Agorapulse’s advocacy feature, you can simplify the process.

When you have great content to share, create a new advocacy campaign from your Agorapulse dashboard. Add the link or media you want to share, along with caption suggestions.

Choose the group of employees you’d like to include in the campaign. For example, you can create separate groups for executives, guest service team members, restaurant employees, or housekeeping team members.

Once you send the campaign, you can keep track of who shares the content and how it performs. The more campaigns you create, the more you’ll know about your top employee ambassadors.

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Train staff on LinkedIn engagement

When you involve employees in your LinkedIn strategy, it’s essential to give them a primer on how to use the platform effectively. In addition to showing them how the platform works, offer guidance on which content to share and how to speak about the brand.

Consider offering incentives to increase participation and better staff retention. For example, you might offer referral bonuses to employees who recruit talent from their personal LinkedIn networks.

Measure Outcomes and Adjust Your Strategy for Staff Retention

When you invest marketing resources in LinkedIn, you need to know if your strategy is working. Use the tips below to monitor outcomes and use the insights to adjust your strategy.

Track recruitment metrics

If you use native LinkedIn tools to post jobs and recruit candidates, monitor metrics like:

• Application rates for LinkedIn job postings
• Candidate qualification ratings
• Interview, shortlist, and hiring rates

Monitor LinkedIn analytics

When you post content to your company page or personal profile, track LinkedIn metrics like:

• Post impressions
• Likes, comments, and shares
• Clicks to a landing page

Agorapulse automatically tracks the metrics above for company pages. From your reporting dashboard, you can also spot top content and order top-performing posts by the metrics that matter most to you.

Adjust your LinkedIn strategy

Compare the results of your LinkedIn strategy to what you aim to achieve. If you’re meeting or exceeding key performance indicators (KPIs), you’ll likely want to keep moving forward with your existing strategy.

But if you’re falling short of important goals, make a few changes. Use Agorapulse’s top content report to see what resonates with your audience and decide on topics to prioritize.

And use our timing data to determine when to post content. After all, posting when your audience is online and active is more likely to generate engagement.

Wrapping Up How Hotels Can Use LinkedIn for Staff Retention

For the hospitality sector, LinkedIn is a crucial resource for attracting talent that aligns with your mission, values, and company culture. By using LinkedIn’s recruiting and job posting tools and building your brand via content and engagement, you can find candidates who are likely to stick around.

With Agorapulse, implementing a LinkedIn strategy is so much simpler. From creating LinkedIn content and managing engagement to setting up advocacy campaigns and tracking metrics, you can do it all from one dashboard.

Sign up for a free trial of Agorapulse and test our social media solution for 30 days at no cost. Connect your LinkedIn page, onboard your team, and start creating content in minutes.