New Jobs Attract a Huge Number of Applicants
When it gets harder to find a new job, competition for existing positions gets stronger. Employers often find themselves swamped with resumes, despite only have a limited number of openings to fill. This is what happened recently in Providence, Rhode Island when one hotel announced 50 something new jobs.
The downtown Providence Hampton Inn & Suites, which is expected to open in December, received approximately 5,000 applications for 50 to 55 new jobs. With unemployment in the state reaching 8.8 percent last month, many drastically need work.
These new jobs will pay anywhere from $9 to $15 an hour. If the state’s economy was better, positions such as the ones with this hotel would not draw as much attention. In order to be able to pay their bills, many will take whatever work they can get, which means that Rhode Island probably has a huge portion of its population that would qualify as underemployed. Out of the 5,000 people who applied, the Hampton Inn & Suites interviewed around 1,200.
According to Michael Buddenmeyer, the regional director of hotel operations for Fall River’s First Bristol Corp., 45 of the new jobs will be full-time positions. The other 5 to 10 will be part-time jobs. All will offer what is considered to be mid-level pay for positions in hotel operations in Rhode Island.
Buddenmeyer said that, given the state of the economy, he had expected to receive a large number of resumes, but had no idea he would be sifting through 5,000 applications. In order to make to be able to even manage such a huge number of applicants, he said that he started by eliminating everyone that did not have previous experience working in a hotel.
Instead of hiring the exact number of people he needed, Buddenmeyer said that he selected a few extra individuals to make up for those that would decide to quit sometime during the several month long training sessions. For example, he hired 16 individuals to work the front desk, even though he only expects to need somewhere around 12. Already, he says, the number of workers training for the front desk positions has dropped to 14.