What does a hotel HR department do? Hiring, the seasonal cycle and who does it in a small hotel

A hotel human resources (HR) department owns the employment relationship rather than the work itself: it prepares the contract, keeps the personnel file, arranges the social security entry, records training and leave, and closes the file at exit. Department heads own the shift, the standard and daily performance; the owner sets headcount and pay.

The season opens in six weeks. The front office needs four people, housekeeping needs six, and the owner asks a simple question: who is actually doing this? In many small hotels the honest answer is nobody in particular, and that is where the trouble starts. After reading this you will be able to say who owns which part of the employment relationship, run the seasonal year as five gated phases, and put a monthly HR page in front of the general manager.

What does a hotel HR department actually own?#

HR owns the employment relationship, not the work. It holds the contract, the file, the social security entry, the training record, the leave balance and the exit, while the department head owns the shift, the standard and the day-to-day performance.

Use one test to split the two: if the item would still matter after the person has left, it belongs to HR; if it disappears when the shift ends, it belongs to the department head. The roster is gone at midnight; the contract is not. This test settles most arguments before they start.

Concretely, HR owns the job description approved before the post opens, the contract and its annexes, the personnel file, the social security entry and exit notifications prepared with the payroll adviser, the leave ledger, the training record and the exit checklist. Department heads own how many people the section needs on a given day, the weekly roster, the standard of work, the first-week buddy and the performance conversation. The owner or general manager owns headcount and the payroll budget, the pay scale, the decision to end an employment, and the approval of the seasonal staffing plan.

HR prepares the record and the sequence for a disciplinary case or a dismissal, but the decision sits with the manager who holds that authority in the organisation chart. In a hotel with no HR title, the same three lists still exist; they are simply held by different people, and one of them is usually nobody. If you have not mapped who holds what, a hotel organisation chart is the place to start.

How does the seasonal year run through HR?#

As five phases with a gate between each: plan, hire, start, run and close. Every phase produces the document the next phase needs, and skipping a gate is what turns the high season into an emergency.

Plan. Build the staffing plan from workload rather than from last year's headcount: rooms to be sold, covers to be served and cleaning minutes per room. The plan then sets how many contracts must be prepared, which is why it comes first. Our article on building a staffing plan from the workload covers this in detail.

Hire. Write the job description before the advert, use one interview guide for every interviewer, and check references. Then choose the contract type with the payroll adviser and write the end date into a fixed-term seasonal contract. The specifics of contracts and social security entry are covered in hiring seasonal staff at a hotel.

Start. Before the first shift the file is complete, the social security entry has been made, the uniform and locker exist, and the first three days have a named trainer and a written checklist. Onboarding is a schedule, not a speech.

Run. Plan leave instead of letting it accumulate, and name the cover for each likely absence in advance. Hold a short review at the end of the first month and at the end of the season, and record overtime where it happens rather than reconstructing it later.

Close. Give notice as the contract requires, hold an exit conversation, and collect uniform, keys and equipment. Prepare the final settlement with the payroll adviser, then close and store the file.

Two gate rules keep the year honest: no contract is signed before the staffing plan names the post, and nobody starts a shift before the file is complete.

What is different in a city hotel that hires all year?#

There is no wave, so there is no natural moment to do the work. The city hotel replaces the seasonal gate with a monthly rhythm: a rolling vacancy list, turnover measured by department, and an exit conversation every time someone leaves.

Hiring is continuous, so the job description and the interview guide must exist before the vacancy does. Writing them during the vacancy is how a bad hire gets made quickly. Keep the templates ready and reviewed, not improvised under pressure.

Turnover is the main number to watch, and it has to be read by department and by length of service, because a front-office rate and a housekeeping rate are different problems with different fixes. Where people leave tells you what to repair: leavers in the first month point at hiring and onboarding; leavers after a year point at the roster, the manager or the career path. Our article on staff turnover in hotels shows how to calculate and read the rate.

Keep a rehire list. A former employee who left well is the cheapest and fastest hire available, and the exit conversation is where you earn the right to call them. Training runs on a rolling calendar rather than a pre-season burst, because there is no quiet month in which to catch up. Open-ended contracts are more common, but the file needs exactly the same documents, and the review dates now have to be created by hand.

Which records does HR keep, and who checks them?#

HR keeps one file per person and one calendar per year, and an inspection asks for the file rather than for the story. The file proves the employment relationship; the calendar proves the training, the leave and the dates that are coming.

The personnel file holds the contract and its annexes, identity and qualification documents, the job description the employee signed, training records with dates and signatures, leave records, overtime records, any disciplinary record and the exit documents. The calendar holds contract end dates, review dates, planned leave, training dates, and the expiry of any permit or certificate a role requires.

A file that exists but cannot be produced in a day has the same effect as a missing one, so name one person who can retrieve it and one place where it lives. How long each document must be kept is a legal question that depends on the document and on the taxpayer's situation; confirm it with an accountant or legal adviser rather than copying a number from another hotel. The file is personal data, so who may open it, what gets copied, and what may be shared with another property in the same group are questions for counsel under the personal data protection law (KVKK), not for the front office to decide.

Keep one format, paper or digital, and never both for the same document. Two partial files are worse than one complete one.

Who does this work in a small hotel?#

In a 30-room hotel the work is real but small: one internal owner holds the calendar and the files, the payroll adviser prepares the payroll and the social security declarations, and a safety professional is appointed separately.

Three roles share the work. The internal owner is usually the general manager or the front office manager. The payroll adviser calculates and files. The occupational safety professional is a separate appointment with duties of their own. The hotel stays responsible throughout: outsourcing the calculation does not outsource the duty, and the file still has to be complete inside the building.

Give it one fixed afternoon a week: update the calendar, review open positions, check the month's starters and leavers, and test that one file can be found on request. Templates beat memory: one contract template checked by the adviser, one file checklist, one onboarding schedule and one exit checklist, all reused without rewriting.

The usual failure is not laziness but split ownership. The owner signs the contracts, the adviser files them, and nobody holds the calendar, so contract end dates and training dates are discovered late. Be clear about where the general manager's authority ends and the owner's begins, because hiring and dismissal decisions stall when that line is unspoken. The owner's side of that line is covered in what a hotel general manager does.

What should the general manager see each month?#

One page, seven lines, each with a number, a source and a decision attached. Anything that cannot be traced to a source is a story, not a report.

Headcount against the approved staffing plan, by department, so that a gap is visible before the roster breaks. Open positions and how long each has been open, because a vacancy that is three weeks old is already a service problem. Starters and leavers this month, with the reason for each exit recorded in one line. Overtime hours by department, which is the earliest signal that the plan and the workload have separated.

Then leave owed now and leave that will be owed at the end of the season, so it is paid or taken deliberately rather than by surprise. Training completed against the calendar, and contract end dates falling in the next two months. The rule for the meeting: if a line has moved and nobody can explain why, that line is the item for the coming week.

What to do next#

Pick the owner this week and put the calendar in place before the next hiring decision: one person, one file per employee, one calendar per year and one page a month for the general manager. The rest of this series fills in the parts, from the staffing plan to the seasonal contract to the turnover number, but none of them work until someone holds the calendar.