Focus on The Empress & Series Wrap Up
 |
My final article in this series on Victoria’s Biggest Employers is a more indepth look at the venerable Empress Hotel which has presided over the city’s Inner Harbour for more than 100 years. But, as I have mentioned in earlier postings, despite its age, there is absolutely nothing stuffy or laggardly about the hotel itself or its parent company – Fairmont Hotels and Resorts.
Fairmont has over 56 hotels worldwide and more in development. Their locations include not only the ‘Fairmont brand’ but also Swissotels and Raffles. They are also branching out into real estate in various locations including the Middle East and the Americas. The company was founded in 1907 and opened its first hotel that year in San Francisco. The Empress opened January 20, 1908 and is famous for afternoon tea, celebrity guests and extensive, frequent renovations.
The Empress publicizes its jobs widely. You can find postings on craigslist as well as various other online job boards and on Fairmont’s own site. And just today, June 15, 2012, The Empress announced on Facebook that its postings will now be on LinkedIn as well.
All the postings have something in common though – none of them talk about wages. Despite this I am pretty certain that the pay you’d receive working for The Empress would be at the high-end of what you can expect to make in any given job. And the additional perks available are considerable. Perusing the careers website you can learn about internship programs, leadership development and on-campus recruitment. There are also a load of other benefits including an employee travel program, medical and dental coverage and various employee discount offers.
It also seems that The Empress is hiring on a greater level than other similarly sized establishments in Victoria (for example the hotel has 21 openings while Thrifty Foods – with more than four times as many employees – has less than 15). It also seems to me that it would be relatively easy to find out much more about working for The Empress than it would be to learn about working for other establishments. Firstly, the Fairmont career site has an extensive selection of employee experience profiles and secondly many of its top level employees are social media mavens.
For example, Angela Rafuse-Tahir, the hotel’s Director of Sales and Marketing, is very active on Facebook (both as herself and as the ‘voice’ of the hotel) and Twitter. General Manager Martin LeClerc often tweets and both have fully fleshed out LinkedIn profiles. I am sure that if you follow these folks on social media, watch the hotel’s press room and do some research using LinkedIn and other toolsyou’ll get some good insights on how you might make your application to work for the hotel a successful one.
This is the last article in my series on Victoria’s Biggest Employers. I am not sure what I am going to focus on next week. Perhaps I will talk again about what is happening in my own life – after all by next week I will less than two weeks from my departure for Europe and my new life in Sweden. I hope to keep updating and expanding this blog from there and in fact it will be a good proof of the principle that you can compile information of this nature and keep it relevant and timely from anywhere in the world.
|
Comments