How to Streamline Your New Hire Process

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Lets rock the hotel

4 min readJul 4, 2018

I like to think that the hotel industry is very unique. I’m sure there are some inherent biases in my thinking, as I’ve been in the hotel industry for over 15 years now. Having worked in hotels all my life, I have never found a reliable process when hiring new front desk agents. Having been doing this for a while now, I knew there had to be a better way to onboard my new hires.

The focus is on front desk agents because the process I’m about to share with you involves using an online tool.

Meet Trello! A simple, free productivity tool with endless possibilities. I find Trello to be very effective and efficient for the team. The user interface is super simple and it serves a very specific purpose. Did I mention that it’s FREE!!

The first thing you want to do is head on over to trello.com. Here you can create a free account. You might already have a Gmail account for your hotel. That’s what I’d use for registration. A shared email account will help with guest requests as well.

My Hotel’s Trello Board

Trello is a free productivity tool based on a method called “KanBan”. In the traditional KanBan method, cards (the little white rectangles) move from left to right in different lists. At my hotel we like to use Trello for new hire onboarding, maintaining checklists, etc.

I’ve highlighted some quick steps below on how to get started with Trello and organize the chaos!

Step 1: Create free account on Trello.com

Once you have created your free account on Trello you will see a login screen similar to this one.

Step 2: Rename Your Lists

You can rename the vertical columns i.e. “Lists” by simply clicking on them. Similarly you can also add the white rectangle “Cards” by pressing on the green (Add Card) button. If a list has no cards in it then you will see the “+” sign next to Add a card.

Step 3: Changing the Board Background

The background of your Trello is called a “Board”. You can check the background color/image of your board by selecting the Show Menu in the top right corner.

Step 1

Click on Show Menu in top right corner

Step 2

You can select between solid colors and/or pictures.

Step 4: Setting Your Board Visibility

Setting your board visibility is an important aspect of using Trello. Every board can have a different level of visibility. Private boards are only visible to you. Team boards are visible to everyone on your team. Within a team you can select whether team members can comment on cards or not. And a public board is visible to anyone with a URL to that board. Which brings me to the final step.

Set your boards visibility by clicking on the Private button

Step 5: Copying a Board

Trello.com has ton’s of inspirational boards for you to get started. They can all be found here. I have created an inspiration board for hoteliers. Below you will find a screenshot of that board along with the link. You can simply copy the board and start using it for your hotel. See directions on how to copy a board.

Step 1

From the menu click on the More

Step 2

Select the “Copy Board” option. Then fill in the details on within the highlighted green box and click “Create”

Conclusion

Trello is an amazingly powerful tool. We’ve just scratched the surface on how to use it. There is so much more to Trello that I simply cannot cover in this blog post. I’m sure you will tinker around and find all the cool things it can do. I’m looking forward to the comments on how this will help you!