Being a resort operator is like being a baseball player. You may have hit a home run in your last at bat (had a record February), or set hitting records last season (set skier visit records), but next year is a new season, and you’re facing a new pitcher named Lefty Recession with a relief fellow named Dizzy Drought waiting in the pen. Prudence suggests keeping a lid on fixed expenses. The staffing question becomes, what adjustments will ski areas make to meet the staffing challenges of the 2009-10 season?

In the current environment, developing a versatile core of year-round or multi-season employees is a key strategy. How resorts are pursuing that strategy, though, varies widely, depending on size, reputation and geography.

There was a time when the pool of available domestic employees was tight and international employees provided source of quality employees who eagerly fit seasonal staffing needs. A couple years ago, one could ski up to a six-pack chairlift in Colorado and find each maze line monitored by a happy Australian or Kiwi. A mountain restaurant in Tahoe or New England might have been staffed with Brazilian or Chilean youth.

The recession, especially, has changed this dynamic. As job layoffs had not begun in earnest going into the 2008-09 ski season, many operators were in a “keep things tight,” and “wait and see” mode, with the goal to assemble the best and most flexible staff possible. Efficient staffing, always a goal, now became the overriding aim. The absence of advertised job openings at many areas was noticeable.

And many areas learned they could operate quite well with a lean staff. The result is that most areas plan to operate in much the same way again for the coming season. Here’s how a few areas are putting these ideas into practice.


A Growing Labor Pool . . .
A trump card, at least for resorts near larger populations, was the increasing quality of the labor pool, due to an increase in the recently unemployed--many of whom had (or have) both a good work history and references. According to Mark Paterson, HR director at Snowbird, Utah, if he posts a job on the Snowbird website, he has 15 or so applications by the next morning.

Snowbird management also cross-trained salaried employees and put them into various frontline positions as needed, filling some voids and reducing labor costs while revenues or skier numbers were down. “It’s amazing what you can do to reduce staff,” Paterson says. Some intrinsic or cultural benefits can be realized with such programs, as customers appreciate seeing management on the front lines, and working there can be an eye-opener. “A lot of people from the offices worked as ticket checkers,” says Eddie Nakada, lift operations manager, “and they were blown away by what the ticket checkers have to put up with.”

Larger areas have more departments and employees to tap into, especially when a slowdown may idle some systems, but what about the smaller or more rural based resorts?

Jean Irvine modestly says she is lucky. As the human resource director at Gunstock Mountain Resort, N.H., she has a 75 percent retention rate for employees. That, combined with a healthy local labor pool, allowed Irvine to go without any international employees a few years ago. “We found that we just didn’t need them,” she says.

Gunstock, though not as close to a major urban center as Snowbird (Boston is 1.5 hours away), nonetheless has a strong local labor pool. The resort is situated in “The Lakes Region,” which hosts an abundance of summer recreational opportunities. So there is a good-sized labor pool from which to draw come winter. In fact, Gunstock didn’t even hold a job fair going into last season.

Like many resorts, Gunstock entered the past season very cautiously from a labor standpoint, but the nature of the resort meant it already had a system in place to utilize every employee efficiently. For one thing, Gunstock employs a significant number of part-timers who have other, full-time jobs. These employees help out on weekends and holidays—the precise times the extra help is needed. Some of this group even take vacations from their full-time jobs and work at Gunstock. The recession has also freed up time for Gunstock’s workforce. Some of the formerly seasonal staff are now looking for year-round employment.

It’s now possible to have too many people available to work, which creates its own issues. For one, there is a new willingness on the part of existing staff to take on more hours, so labor creep must be closely watched.

In order to keep existing staff happy, without doling out overtime hours, Gunstock also employs several employee retention strategies. “We do a lot of different types of things, but it really all comes down to how we treat people,” says Irvine. That includes hosting 10 employee social events over the short 16-week season. The company also makes sure that employees receive the cool t-shirt that accompanies every public event.

The perks of resort employment also matter more in a tough economy. Those perks are perhaps nowhere as important as they are at Jackson Hole, Wyo. Famous for expert terrain combined with a genuine western flair, Jackson Hole’s reputation brings in college kids looking for a cool place to work, says Scott Horn, chief administrative officer.

“College kids are savvy, they know about the ‘steep and deep’ and the western experience here,” says Horn, who says he sees a glut of this type of potential employee coming out of college facing a down-sized mainstream job market. A downturn in the local housing construction boom also has contributed to the labor pool. These factors have allowed Horn to make adjustments to recruiting strategies and budgets. The area has been able to cut back on local recruiting at the nearby national parks. JHMR will still hold a fall job fair and expects those who attend should be more than adequate to meet the upcoming season’s staffing numbers. As a result, Jackson Hole is not recruiting internationally this year.


. . . But It Won’t Last
But Horn is also keeping an eye on the future. He expects the current glut of available employees will dry up once the recession breaks, and both mainstream career jobs for college grads and positions for those temporarily phased out of the building trades will return—and with that, the need for international recruiting. This thought is backed by a graph that Horn keeps on his wall. Produced by the Economic Policy Foundation the graph shows we are just now at a point where labor supply meets demand, but indicates the available labor pool nationwide will increasingly fall below the level needed to keep up with demand.

So he hasn’t taken international recruiting out of the long-term mix, and he hopes that the Congress can resolve immigration issues and return H-2B visas to the adequate levels. “We are continuing to keep our relationships with the international recruiting agencies because I have no doubt we are going to need the internationals again in two or three years,” he says.