Associate Director, College Recruitment, Starwood Hotels and Resorts

>> Oh yeah, my name is Jason Biona. And for a living, I am the Associate Director of College Recruitment for Starboard Hotels and Resorts. I've been with the company for about 11 years, and my responsibilities are really to kind of come up with strategies and programs, like build a town pipeline for our hotels, and about five programs. Some of them also are pipeline our corporate divisional offices, as well. And we have a team of about three recruiters that, it is our responsibility to figure out how to stay relevant and sort of an employer brand perspective on campus. And how do we sell our company to students and get them to join us? So again, I can have that pipeline, but simultaneously, we are also building strong relationships with universities. So we can together work on developing your students into the future leaders of the industry. So throughout the year, we've worked on a couple of things. My whole philosophy when it comes to talent is, when you see it, make sure you take action and you can try to get them within your organization. We have a lot of different programs. Our initial one is just typically freshmen or sophomores, one week over the winter, spring break, called an Externship. We try and get them back for an internship. We try and get evaluations. So our philosophy is if you've already been engaged with our program, we've had some good evaluations, we try not to wait too long, and we are able to sign individuals up before the traditional campus recruiting process. So in essence, just a smart, agile recruiting process. And then also speaking and reaching out to students in kind of the medium that they're used to today, and that is social media. We are focused on having some social media that targets them and gets them engaged and involved, and keeping up to date with what is happening in our company, but also knowing where our team is going to be next.