Assignment Requirements
Top Travel is a travel agency specialising in arranging itineraries for, and selling
travel tickets to, the ‘independent traveller’. Many of the customers are students and
young people embarking on round-the-world trips, but the agency also specialises in
package holidays to ‘exotic’ locations, and selling long-haul flight tickets to leisure and
business travellers. The business was set up in 1988 by Alex Katsouros, a Cypriot who
had moved to Birmingham when his wife took a post as teacher at a local university.
Using a small family nest-egg, Alex – who had some experience in the travel industry in
his native Cyprus – opened a small store near the university campus. Initially, the agency
sold train and coach tickets to students and was staffed by Alex and one or two part-time
staff who were often, but not always, recruited by word of mouth from the local Cypriot
community.
The business developed quickly and diversified, selling travel and accommodation to
university staff travelling abroad, and Alex subsequently landed a contract with the
university to provide this service. With this security Alex was able to invest in the
business and opened new stores in Manchester and Leeds in the mid-1990s. Alex’s next
stroke of genius was to tap into the market for long-haul independent travel. This was an
expanding niche market with no specialist provider on the high street. Alex realised that
his stores were well placed to tap into this market and in the early 2000s began to refocus
his business around this activity. It was again a resounding success, and Top Travel opened
six new stores, making a total of nine, each employing a manager and around 10 travel
clerks.
In the mid-2000s, the major high street chains, which had been a little slow to catch on,
finally entered the long-haul independent travel market. With their greater access to
investment capital, their purchasing power with airlines and their higher profile, both on
the high street and through marketing and advertising, they were able to make inroads
into Top Travel’s markets. Alex realised that he was unable to compete with the major
companies on these terms but that he could maintain his market share if he could
provide a higher quality of service at the counter. If they could be guaranteed a high quality
personal service and specialist advice, customers would still come to Top Travel.
However, Alex realised that this depended on employing high-quality staff. In particular,
he needed staff with a commitment to customer service in all its aspects together with a
detailed knowledge of the specialist service being provided. Furthermore, staff had to
have a good general knowledge of the destinations involved – if possible, personal
experience of some of them – and an understanding of the pitfalls and challenges of
independent travel (ideally gained through personal experience). Moreover, staff had to
be intelligent enough to work out the best available deals from the myriad information
sources and manuals . . . and above all be able to ‘sell’.
The days of recruiting mainly from the expatriate community were long gone, and
Top Travel now tended to draw on experienced travel clerks from a range of smaller local
outlets and, occasionally, bright school-leavers who could be taken on as trainees.
Top Travel was a good payer and had a good reputation in the industry, so there was never
a shortage of experienced applicants, but Alex was struck on his visits to the stores that
the quality of people taken on was somewhat variable. Because he wished to develop his
business strategy around face-to-face customer service this worried him, even though he
was prepared make up some of the ground through an increased investment in the
training and development of staff. As a result, he called in a firm of management
consultants to examine the processes of selecting staff and to make some
recommendations.
The consultants found that the selection process was fairly standard across all nine
stores, although this seemed to be more by accident than design in that there were no
company-wide guidelines. Alex himself did not get involved in selection, except in the
case of the store managers, and was happy for the managers to take responsibility for
recruiting and selecting staff in their own stores. There was still some word-of-mouth
recruitment, but jobs tended to be advertised in the local paper and applicants invited to
send in a CV. Store managers then shortlisted candidates for interview. In most cases
around 12 applicants were shortlisted – ‘about enough for a day’s interviewing’, in the
words of one manager. Short-listing was done mostly via a sifting process, the managers
putting the CVs into piles of ‘definites’, ‘possibles’ and ‘rejects’. The managers seemed
pretty clear about what they were looking for – in the case of the travel clerks some good
experience with a reputable agent, not too old, and in the case of the trainees a good
education at one of the better local schools, a well-presented CV and an interest in travel.
Short-listed candidates were invited for interview and references were requested.
Interviews were conducted by the store managers, who had no formal interview training.
They typically lasted 20 minutes, were informal and unstructured, and largely focused
around gathering information about the candidates’ previous experience. Managers were
quite explicit and consistent in reporting the things that they were looking for, namely
technical experience (for example, in international ticketing, except in the case of the
trainees), a committed attitude, an outgoing personality, someone they could get on with,
and very importantly, first-class references. The managers were quite confident that they
had an accurate instinct at spotting the right people, although they did admit that the
occasional candidate did not live up to expectations. Labour turnover, performance and
disciplinary records suggested to the management consultants that failures of selection
were rather more frequent than that.
Your task
You are asked to adopt the role of the management consultants. Consider and respond
to the following points.
(1). Outline to Alex Katsouros the likely reasons why Top Travel Travel Travel’s store managers are not consistently successful in selecting suitable travel clerks and trainees. (25 marks)
(2). Addressing those issues that you have identified, recommend a strategy for
improving the selection process, for both travel clerks and trainees. (35 marks)
(3) Due to continued growth of the business, Alex has decided to appoint a HR manager. Prepare a Job Description for the new position (20 marks)
(4) Prepare a Person Specification for the HR Manager position. This should include key competencies for the role with relevant explanatory text to accompany it (20 marks)
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