When people are not very honest

The recruitment of human resources is increasingly becoming a critical factor in the management of tourist businesses. This consideration, together with young people’s growing estrangement from jobs that involve a great amount of availability, have made personnel recruitment a booming endeavour, and – as often happens – this has in turn aroused the interest of business people at various levels of competence and seriousness , who cunningly leap at the perceived opportunity to make easy money with little work. Reality is different, though. In this, like in every other field, the system develops towards a state of equilibrium, where only the most competent and the best projects do achieve success. Job in Tourism was created five years ago as a serious publishing project, based on a study of comparable experiences in other countries close to ours, where similar publications have been existing sometimes for a century (as in Switzerland and Germany), and it has kept abreast with technological development by activating both a website, jobintourism.it (where the number of pageviews is in excess of 300,000 a month) and a newsletter which has collected 12,000 registrations in a few months. After Job in Tourism, several other publications have attempted to replicate our offer – some in print, others in the Internet – with results that are for anybody to see. In an open market, however, it is only fair that similar and parallel initiatives develop, acting as a stimulus towards improvement. The irritating thing is when you come across dishonest behaviour. I received a phone call from an important hotel manager from Geneva, who had placed an advertisement on Job, and told me he was concerned with the fact that although the number of planned issues had long been completed, for some reason he was unexpectedly receiving resumés again, after more than a month. The letters received, it turned out, were referring to the classified ad the hotel had placed with us two months before, which had been published by another newspaper a few days earlier. I had a difficult job explaining that in Italy there are print and Internet publishers who – in a dishonest (and prosecutable) way – make up a façade of being active by copying classified ads that have already been published elsewhere. In one blow, they get three negative results: the fist and most serious one is that they create false expectations in people who are looking for a job, who will apply for positions that are no longer vacant; secondly, it is a nuisance for the advertiser, who – as a matter of politeness – will have to reply to applications he or she is not interested in; and thirdly, it reflects badly on Job in Tourism, which has unwittingly disappointed everybody.