Sarah Smart talks about the hardest thing she has ever had to do as a leader, what her team went through and lessons learned during the pandemic

Announcer 0:00Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for talent acquisition and talent management. Listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting, engaging and retaining the best talent. We're glad you're here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:16Well, hello, everybody. I'm Chris white president of CareerXroads and I'm bringing to you a new segment of our podcast that sits us down for just a few minutes with industry leaders, to hear them share a quick hit lessons learned in their careers and within the talent industry. Now, the segment interview is no more than 10 to 15 minutes and can be found on our website, podcast YouTube channel. And as the fast pace would indicate, we're calling this series of eXpert Tease. Now, each of these has a focused topic that might include talent development, mobility, sourcing, ethics, or any number of other items of focus that we're hearing from the industry at large are items of concern or that warrant some attention and dialogue. So if you're with us live, we're encouraging everyone to post questions within the chat area of the broadcast window. And if we've time at the end of the discussion, we'll see how many we can squeeze it in now. The rest of the conversation or follow ups can be found within the public and open exchange hosted by Careerxroads at www.cxr.org/talenttalks. Now today's chat is one related to countless conversations that we at CXR I've had with numerous leaders over the last year, working through unavoidable team furloughs as a talent leader and taking on the challenge, emotional challenge of trying to place as many of your team as possible, and the toll that takes on us as leaders. So with me today is Sarah Smart. She's the VP of global recruitment at Hilton. I Sarah.

Sarah Smart, Hilton 1:39Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:41Thanks, Sarah, you and the team at Hilton have really worked tirelessly to help not only your own people by partnering with other global companies, but the entire recruiting industry through work with recruiters recruiting recruiters calm during a time when as a result of the pandemic and the impact on our economies. keeping people employed recruiters employee has really been difficult for many. So I want to jump right in and ask you to share a little bit about that experience. And what I'm really interested in hearing is how you dealt with those challenges, and maybe even heartbreaks, as a true people leader. So can you share kind of the biggest challenge or a little bit of that story with everybody kind of what's been going on in your world for the last few months?

Sarah Smart, Hilton 2:23Sure. And and thanks, again, everyone for our joining and the opportunity to talk about this. This has been, for me personally, probably the biggest challenge that I have lived through as a leader and in many ways, almost not quite as a human being children become first. But it the past eight to nine months have been exceptionally challenging to lead in any industry, no matter where you sit, no matter what kind of role you're sitting in. So just want to acknowledge that Hilton has, like many in the hospitality industry faced a, you know, a unique set of challenges as it relates to the pandemic. And, you know, in in March of 2021, it became very clear that not only would we not be recruiting, but that we would need to be putting out a large portion of our corporate workforce onto furlough and potentially our property workforce and for around the world. I was asked to make some really hard decisions to make decisions around people, I had to make decisions around potential needs, but I had no idea what they would be so operating in complete ambiguity around what the future state needs of the organization would be much less than near term or the short term.