Marriott targets millennials through social-media game

Potential employees experience the thrills and spills of kitchen work

guest staying at the JW Marriott hotel on Juhu beach, Mumbai, was struck when he saw a line of people just looking at the hotel from the beach.

He began to ask questions that ultimately led him to design an employee-engagement social-media game that is helping to make Marriott Group a less forbidding place for local people to apply to work. The guest was Dr David Kippen, chief executive of employer-branding and employee-engagement specialist Evviva Brands. On asking an hotel employee why these people were just looking at the building, he was told: They have no idea what goes on here. On the street, they pay 7 rupees for a tea; in Marriott, they would have to spend 270 rupees. They just cannot understand this place. That stuck with me, commented David Kippen. From focus-group research, he learned that:
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virtually every employee had been referred in by someone else, usually a relative, and nobody simply came through the door and said that they thought they would like to work there; virtually everyone had come to Mumbai from a small town; and virtually everyone, when arriving in the big city, reported spending the lions share of their time on social media.

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When he asked them what they did, he was told, Work on building my network. When he responded that they surely could not do that for hours on end, he was told, No; then I play games.

Hotels were on high alert

It wasnt until I went out on to the beach that everything came into focus for me, David Kippen continued. In Mumbai, the Taj Hotel had been attacked just a year or so earlier, so all hotels were on high alert. Entering any hotel, particularly a Marriott, your car is greeted by a bomb-snifng dog, a mirror is run along the underside of the car. Your boot and engine are checked, then you go through two metal detectors. Somehow, I hadnt keyed in on how high a barrier that created to the smart, ambitious, but probably poor and put in their place by the world talent that Marriott counts on to be the associates of tomorrow.

DOI 10.1108/09670731111175506

VOL. 19 NO. 7 2011, pp. 9-11, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 0967-0734

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL DIGEST

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When he decided to go out the beach by the rear exit, he realized that the hotel was protected by a blast wall. If you want to walk out to the beach they issue you with ID, you sign a little clipboard and you walk through a massive blast door that an associate opens for you, he explained. To the left as you walk out is a machine gunner surrounded by sand-bags. Walk a few more paces and you are at the sea. Turn around and the view is suddenly very different. Instead of a somewhat posh but sincerely warm, friendly place, you see machine guns, blast wall and a distant view of reective glass. Hotel associates told me that people sit there for hours, just looking and wondering. Seeing this made me realize that we had to nd a way to tear down this proverbial wall or nobody would ever have the courage to cross without an uncle, cousin, brother or friends invitation. So my goal in building the My Marriott Hotel game was to create a footbridge from the s tomorrows talent was sitting in today to the warm, friendly, welcoming reality I cyber-cafe knew Marriott would offer them.

Business game set in the kitchen

Marriott was delighted with the idea when Evviva Brands pitched it to them. Their rst question was, What part of the hotel should we feature? Because there are so many ways into the culinary love of food, family, love of cooking, recipes, precision, craft and so on it was decided to begin with the kitchen. My Marriott Hotel provides insight into what it might be like to work in a kitchen at Marriott, while capitalizing on the benets of social-media platforms. The key to the game is that its not a kitchen game: its a business game with the rst module set in a kitchen, said David Kippen. Subsequent modules may explore housekeeping, reception, grounds, facility management and so on. The game addresses Marriotts desire to be an employer of choice and although designed to be enjoyed by a wide audience, My Marriott Hotel is a key part of Marriotts strategically important plan to help to drive global-talent acquisition. At the same time, the game will help to introduce Marriott into far-reaching, emerging markets through global social-media platforms. Players of My Marriott Hotel run and ne tune a successful kitchen that services an invisible but implied dining room. This entails balancing such elements as hiring staff, equipment acquisition, ingredient sourcing, customer satisfaction and quality control; creating a game concept that appeals to a broad audience of users who enjoy the slower measured construction aspects of game play as well as the faster, more spontaneous and dynamic elements associated with power gaming. The game is divided into: 1. the prep phase, which is more measured and strategic; and 2. the service phase, which is faster and more pressurized. Together, they aim to give as faithful a depiction of the working of a busy hotel kitchen as possible within the connes of a game.

My Marriott Hotel is a key part of Marriotts strategically important plan to help to drive global-talent acquisition. At the same time, the game will help to introduce Marriott into far-reaching, emerging markets through global social-media platforms.

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Said David Kippen: We have been delighted to help Marriott in raising awareness of its brand in global growth markets and to assist in improving overall talent-acquisition goals.

Drawing back the curtain

This game is the rst branded game on a social medium. Many of Marriotts staff are hired via referral, with social networking coming into play in a big way. We also based the game on Evvivas inside insight approach, where we approached the best experts at Marriott the cooks who have years of experience and culinary passion at various stages of the games development. So while we would never say that the game trains you for kitchen work, if you nd yourself obsessed by it, you would probably enjoy the real thing even more. Our goal in developing My Marriott Hotel was to draw back the curtain and give people the opportunity to see the various skills needed to run a busy hotel, starting with the kitchen. David Rodriguez, executive vice-president of global human resources at Marriott International, commented: As Marriott expands in growth markets outside the US and as we seek to attract more millennials those between the ages 18 and 27 to our workforce, we must nd new ways to interest them in hospitality careers. This game allows us to showcase the world of opportunities and the growth potential attainable in hospitality careers, especially in cultures where the service industry might be less established or prestigious. Keywords: Hotels, Recruitment, Computer games, Multinational companies Evviva Brands, which has ofces across the world, has worked with businesses ranging from Bain & Company, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and E.ON. Marriott International has more than 3,600 hotels in 71 countries. Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, it has around 129,000 employees. Fortune magazine ranks it the hotel industrys most admired company.

Note
David Pollitt, Human Resource Management International Digest editor, wrote this article.

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