Hiring a hotel receptionist
A hundred and forty applications for a desk that is staffed twenty-four hours — which means one advert is quietly recruiting for two jobs with very little in common.
Days and nights need different people, and nobody says so. A daytime receptionist works alongside colleagues, in a busy lobby, mostly on check-in and guest requests. A night receptionist is frequently the only member of staff in the building, running the audit, handling a fire alarm, a locked-out guest, or someone who has had too much to drink at two in the morning with nobody to escalate to. The competence overlaps; the temperament does not. Yet both are recruited with one advert and screened on the same criteria, and the CVs say nothing about which someone can do. Add systems experience, which people list without ever having used the module that matters, and languages, which are genuinely valuable and self-assessed with wild generosity.
Which shift, and what happens at 2am
Selene splits day from night before writing anything, because these are two roles inside one advert.
Cover pattern, systems, and who else is in the building
The decisive question is whether this role includes nights, and if so whether the person is alone. That single answer changes the criteria more than the property size or the star rating ever will.
One sentence changes the guide
The phrase “without ringing me” is doing the work. Every duty manager expects to be called for genuine emergencies; the difference is the receptionist who calls about a broken television and the one who solves it, and that distinction is entirely invisible on a CV describing check-in volumes and system familiarity.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The one who handles the complaint at two in the morning without ringing me.”
→ Resolving something alone became a must-have, ranked above systems experience and front-desk tenure.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria weighted for the night half of the role, because that is the half that is hard to staff and hard to recover from. The property management system — the thing most hotel adverts lead on — sits at the bottom.
Two facts, and the night question is the one that matters
Right to work is standard. The night-shift question is the important one here and is asked as a plain fact rather than folded into a general flexibility question: a great many applicants for hotel reception will not work nights, that is entirely reasonable, and it is the single largest determinant of whether they can take this job.
Scored for the shift that is hard to fill
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
She reads for described incidents handled alone, which is the part of this job that the day-shift half of the pile has genuinely never had to do.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Splitting the day role from the night role before either criterion is written
- Reading all 140 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist for the shift that is actually hard to fill
- Drafting the declines, so applicants hear back quickly
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or sourcing sites
- Right-to-work checks before anyone starts; she records what candidates state, she doesn’t verify it
- The interview, and any language check, with her brief in hand
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Nearby roles
Where the CV barely matters and the rota decides almost everything.
The first supervisory step, where the skill is authority over people you were serving beside last week.
The largest pile on the site, where eligibility questions resolve most of it before scoring starts.
Say whether nights are alone
One answer splits this advert into two guides — and fills the rota that is actually short.