A personal take on hospitality
Last week, David shared
his takeaways from the Unreasonable Hospitality conference. Today, I'm adding my perspective because this was personal for me.
I am a bit of a fangirl when it comes to Will Guidara. I read what he writes. I follow what he is doing. I am fascinated by the way he thinks and the way he lives service.
Part of the reason this resonates so much with me is that building a high-service, high-value company has been one of my core goals for nearly 30 years.
That has always mattered to me at Haley Marketing Group.
So while I enjoyed the conference itself, what stayed with me most was not the story from the book or the energy in the room. It was how practical the ideas were once they were broken down.
Hospitality is not over-servicing
Many staffing professionals equate hospitality with being friendly, giving gifts, or creating big memorable moments. While these elements matter, relying on such a narrow definition can lead firms into strategic service traps.
Years ago at Haley Marketing, as we grew, we felt some of our service becoming more transactional than it should have been. In response, we tried to reinforce a core value around creating more “wow” for clients.
The intention was right.
The problem was that many people interpreted “deliver a wow” to mean doing extra work for free.
That is where things start to break.
Because hospitality is not over-servicing. It is not giving away work in unsustainable ways. It's not creating inconsistent service where one client gets extras simply because a team member was being generous in the moment, while another client gets the actual contracted experience.
That may feel good in the short term, but over time, it creates confusion, inconsistency, margin erosion, and inhospitable moments.
A client gets used to something that was never actually included. A team member leaves. The extra work stops. And now the client feels like something was taken away, even though it was never part of the agreement to begin with.
That is not great hospitality. It is poor expectation-setting.
One of my biggest takeaways from this conference was this:
Hospitality is not about giving more away. It is about delivering consistently and with excellence, while looking for thoughtful, human ways to improve the experience.
Often, the best moments of hospitality cost little or nothing at all:
That is the part I think staffing firms need to get right; after all, staffing is ultimately a people business.
Here are three practical hospitality improvements you can implement this week.
1. Pick one journey and look for friction
Most companies know their internal process. That is not the same as understanding the actual experience your client or candidate is having.
Pick one journey:
client onboarding candidate interview prep first day on assignment issue resolution billing communication
Then walk through it step by step and ask:
Do not make this complicated. Just pick one and look at it honestly.
Friction points that seem minor to your internal team can feel much bigger to your clients and candidates.
If you want to create a better experience, start there.
2. Define what “right” looks like before your team invents their own version of hospitality
This was one of the strongest takeaways for me from the event, and it connects directly to the lesson above.
When leaders do not clearly define what good looks like, people fill in the blanks for themselves.
Sometimes that leads to great judgment. Sometimes it leads to over-servicing, inconsistency, and blurred boundaries.
If your team wants to do right by the client, but you have not clearly defined:
what is included what great communication looks like when to make an exception when to escalate how to recover from a mistake where flexibility is encouraged and where consistency matters
…then you are leaving too much to interpretation.
That does not create hospitality. It creates variability.
Hospitality works best when the service is consistent, and the team is empowered to add humanity on top of that foundation.
A strong experience is built when the basics are delivered well every time, and then the team is thoughtful about the moments that matter.
3. Change one team rhythm so people talk about hospitality the right way
If you say hospitality matters, but your team mostly experiences urgency, exceptions, and heroic saves, they may start to believe that hospitality means overextending themselves.
That is not sustainable for the business, and it is not fair to clients either.
One of the smartest ideas from the conference was that the things that get talked about are the things people believe matter.
So, change one rhythm this week.
Maybe in your daily huddle or team meeting, you ask:
Where did we reduce friction for someone this week? Where did we make something clearer or easier? Where did we recover well when something went wrong? Where did we personalize the experience without creating inconsistency?
That last part matters.
Because I think many companies need to teach this distinction more clearly:
Hospitality is not doing more and more and more.
It is delivering what you promised well, and then being intentional about the human experience around it.
That is a much healthier standard.
One final point
One of the things I appreciated most about the conference was that it did not frame AI as the opposite of hospitality.
I think that is exactly right.
AI should not replace the human parts of service that matter most. It should remove the work that gets in the way.
Used badly, AI makes communication feel generic.
Used well, it creates more time for better conversations, better preparation, better follow-up, and more thoughtful service.
That is the opportunity.
Not less human. More human, supported by better systems and clearer standards.
So, if I were leading this inside a staffing firm this week, I would keep it simple:
Pick one journey. Define one standard. Change one team rhythm.
And make sure your team understands this:
Hospitality is not over-servicing. It is not giving away work in ways that create confusion later. It is not being inconsistent in the name of care.
It is delivering a strong, consistent experience and then creating thoughtful, human moments that make people feel valued.
That is sustainable. That is teachable. And that is a much better place to build from. |
