Ritz Carlton HR Analysis Company Overview Human

Ritz Carlton HR Analysis

Company Overview

Human Resources Decision Criteria

Recruitment and Selection

Policy on Diversity

Training and Development

Company Overview

The Ritz Carlton is a high end hotel chain that operates in locations around the globe. Hotel locations reside in over twenty four different countries in over seventy different locations. The organizations current staff consists of rough forty thousand employees. The organization is structured so that it operates as a completely independent division of the Marriott International parent company. The hotels are often coupled with kinds of facilities that provide amenities such as spa treatments, golf facilities, as well as luxury condominiums.

The Ritz Carlton's mission and vision both include providing their customers the highest quality service in the industry as its core competency. Additionally, the class of consumers it serves has rather high expectations for what top quality service might entail and is extremely high compared to other market niches. The Ritz Carlton had to invent a new model of human resource management since there were not any ready-made industry examples available. The Ritz Carlton designed a unique human resources and operating procedures which were developed with total quality management (TQM) ideas (Partlow, 1993).

Human Resources Decision Criteria

The Ritz Carlton's business model is focused on a narrow target market that expects luxury accommodations as well as top notch service by the hotels staff. While erecting quality facilities is an issue in the realm of real estate development, maintaining a staff that consistently provides quality service is not an easy proposition. To maintain this level of service it requires an elite human resource program that can attract and train some of the best in the industry. In order to meet this challenge the Ritz Carlton has implemented many of the concepts embodied in the TQM body of research. This method first identifies and quality issues and continually works to improve any weak links in service. TQM never has a stopping point and is more of a perpetual process that requires that the organization continues learning perpetually.

Under this model, the Ritz Carlton must not only attract the top talent in the industry but they must also provide their staff both the training and the resources to service clients effectively. The Ritz Carlton realized that if they had a talented and dedicated staff, they needed to also empower them to maintain quality standards without having to navigate layers of organizational bureaucracy that is found in many organizations. The staff at the Ritz Carlton is given much room to make decisions on their own and the entire are encouraged to make any decision that requires less than a couple thousand dollars of the company's resources. Since the staff is given such a high level of trust, human resources must ensure that these individuals are of sufficient character to act responsibly.

Recruitment and Selection

The human resources department at the Ritz Carlton has a unique approach to recruitment and selection of staff members. The organization states that they do not "hire" employees (Lampton, 2003). Instead they "select" employees based on the top talent that applies for employment with the firm. Furthermore, the Ritz Carlton generally attracts some of the top talent in the talent pool because of their notoriety and reputation. Therefore, the selection process entails management constructing an ideal candidate profile based on the position that they are looking to fill. This generally is constructed using either internal or external best practices.

To maintain a level of objectivity in the hiring process and eliminate potential bias, the Ritz Carlton hires an outside partner select the ideal employee based on the ideal employee profile that management has crafted for the position. One result of this method is that the organization has reported a decrease in employee turnover. Employee turnover can be an expensive issue for organizations if employees leave for better offers from competing firms. Not only do they lose talent but they have to restart the recruitment process and then train new employees. Keeping trained employees is also an important factor for being able to provide a high level of service and maintain quality standards that the Ritz Carlton requires.

Policy on Diversity

The Ritz Carlton's policy on diversity reads as follows:

"With The Employee Promise comes our commitment that The Ritz-Carlton work environment will be one in which every employee feels valued, motivated and well-prepared to support the goals of the company. In keeping with this promise and the value we place on every Lady and Gentleman, it is our standard to recruit, select, train and promote individuals in all job classifications without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status or any other unlawful consideration." (The Ritz Carlton, 2012)

Since the Ritz Carlton is truly a multinational company, the organization must adopt diversity on many different levels and throughout many different cultures. Thus their acceptance of diversity is really a naturally developed phenomenon. A brief search provided no evidence of an major breaches of their diversity policy other than two housecleaners in the Bahamas that filed a claim based on nationality.

Training and Development