Hiring foreign workers? Do it yourself!

Don Sroka

While Don Sroka runs restaurants, not hotels, his experience in hiring foreign workers will resonate with hotel owners, particularly those in Western Canada.

Sroka and his son Rob recently returned from their second trip to the Philippines in less than a year, and they have had great success by interviewing and hiring workers there for their 11 Alberta Smitty’s restaurants.

During the first trip in October 2007, they interviewed 800 people in 10 days using offices and ads in the paper arranged by friends of theirs who live in Manila.  They started interviews at 8 a.m. and sometimes stayed as late as 9 p.m., and ended up hiring 78 people. The Canadian government in the Philippines rejected a few of those candidates, and others decided not to come.  But 72 of those workers are now employed by The Sroka Group’s Smitty’s restaurants.

During the recent trip, in late April and early May, they interviewed 1,200 people and hired 101.  By Christmas, close to 100 people should be in Canada, in time to meet the requirements of the three new Edmonton-area restaurants Sroka plans to open next spring.

Children in the Philippines are raised knowing that moving to countries such as Canada is a viable option.  Of 90 million Filipinos, a ballpark of 10-15 million work abroad, says Sroka.  
Contrast this with the situation in Alberta.  Sroka closed down a money-losing Smitty’s in Fort Saskatchewan, 20 minutes outside of Edmonton, two years ago.  “There are two or three petroleum plants and everybody can work for $30 an hour.  If we paid staff that much at Smitty’s we’d have to charge $25 for a pancake.”

It’s easy to see why there’s a fit for Filipino workers in Alberta.

But the process can be fraught with difficulties. A few years back, Sroka went through an agency and ordered 30 staff “just like you’d order supplies”.
 
“But it became obvious that these workers didn’t even know what Canada was like when they applied.  I had workers from Morocco, who had no idea that it snows in Canada.  Others were disgruntled, saying they had worked in five star hotels in Casablanca and didn’t know they’d be coming to a restaurant to cook hamburgers.”

Go talk to them eye to eye and orient them to Canada, your city, the type of work they will be doing, how much it costs to live, how much they will earn and how much they will end up clearing, Sroka recommends.

“Flying to the Philippines and doing all those interviews was not easy, but it saved the day.  Every morning, everyone showed up at 7 a.m. – even when their interviews were much later in the day.  We’d have an orientation each morning, showing photos of the restaurant, interviews with staff and management. We put together a 27-minute DVD and got the Edmonton Tourism commercial DVD as well.

“Then we started talking about what life is like in Canada. We made sure they knew what to expect.  For example, I told them that it gets so cold we have to open up our refrigerators to warm up our living rooms…”

At the end of the interview, 90 per cent said they were interested in coming to Canada.
For the 2008 trip, the Srokas refined the process, adding comments from the first group of employees who had come to Canada, in English and Tagalog.  They showed videos of employees arriving in Canada and having the Srokas meet them at the airport.  
“For 90 per cent of the 72 people we hired, we went to the airport and met the plane.  It was very important that they saw us there. ”

Sroka stresses that hiring workers from the Philippines is only part of the hiring mix, that Smitty’s has many Canadian, Moroccan and other employees.
 
“I believe we’re helping the Canadian economy, and all of the sudden we’re having enough workers.”