What’s the secret to cutting your time to hire by 13%?

A certain maître d’ can make or break a guest’s experience; detail-obsessed heads of housekeeping are hard to come by.

So when a rather sophisticated hotel group asked us for help getting their job adverts to stand out from the crowd, we wanted to craft their words with the same precision.

Now, job ads for these roles tend to sound much-a-muchness.

Go to the hospitality section of Caterer.com and you’ll find a hundred ads looking for ‘detail-oriented individuals with a passion for great service’.

But the moment we set foot in the hotel, we knew stale language wouldn’t work. Attracting the best people was going to be about getting candidates to feel the spirit of the hotel – marble columns, a reverent hush, the scent of orchids – through words.

We started by hearing the HR team’s best tales.

Over petits fours, we talked about the hotel’s history and what that meant for the teams working there today. Here’s an amuse-bouche of what we came up with.

Picture this: it’s a Tuesday morning. Sunlight streams through the window. You’re preparing a room and looking out over the park. This is what your mornings look like when you’re a Room Attendant in our hotel.

And another:

To do this job well, you’ll be a stickler for detail: someone who walks into a room and takes a second to spot a curtain that needs straightening or a bedsheet that needs smoothing.

Next, we sat back and watched the applications roll in.

Over 20% more candidates applied for the newly-worded roles. And because more of them were of the right calibre, they were able to fill those jobs 13% faster than before.