Protected: How Belmond Unified Global Hiring Across 8,000 Annual Hires with Workable

Who is Belmond?

Belmond is a global luxury hospitality company with a portfolio of iconic hotels, lodges, river cruises, and safari properties spanning continents. The brand is defined by a philosophy of slow luxury: curated, unhurried experiences that set a standard few competitors can match.

Belmond operates as a deliberately decentralized business. While a central team sets strategic vision and standards, the delivery of great guest experiences, and the hiring that enables them, happens at the property level. At any given time, Belmond employs roughly 5,500 to 6,000 permanent staff, with headcount rising to approximately 8,000 during peak season across regions like Southern Europe. Roles span guest services, rooms division, food and beverage, and the full range of hospitality operations.

What Hiring Looked Like Before Workable

Before 2017, Belmond had no applicant tracking system. Hiring was managed through a shared email inbox, subdivided into property-specific folders. For HR managers at each property, this meant navigating an unstructured, high-volume inbox to find, sort, and respond to candidates across every open role.

The approach created real operational strain. Most property-level HR teams hold 360-degree HR responsibilities; recruiting is one part of a broad mandate, not a dedicated function. A system that demanded manual oversight of every candidate interaction was not sustainable at Belmond’s scale.

The structural challenge ran deeper than workflow. Because hiring was so decentralized and untracked, there was no way to develop a coherent global picture of talent acquisition. What was working, what was not, and where support was needed, these were questions leadership simply could not answer with confidence.

“Prior to 2017, it was one very large email inbox. If you were an HR manager at one of our properties, you would have a designated inbox with all of the submissions for all of your jobs. It was difficult.”

Why Workable

Belmond’s requirements were specific. Any system would need to serve property teams that are geographically dispersed, organizationally autonomous, and not necessarily recruiting specialists. Ease of use was non-negotiable.

Equally important was flexibility. Each property operates within its own community, culture, and candidate market. A rigid, one-size-fits-all system would undermine the localized approach that defines Belmond’s hiring. The platform needed to centralize without homogenizing.

Workable met both requirements: a system that HR managers could use efficiently without deep recruiting expertise, and one that allowed meaningful customization at the property level.

How Workable Changed Hiring at Belmond

1. A Unified System Across a Decentralized Business

Implementing Workable gave Belmond something it had never had before: a single source of truth for talent acquisition across the entire organization. Every property now operates within the same system, which created the conditions for genuine global visibility, not just within a region or a cluster of properties, but across the full portfolio.

That visibility has changed how the central team operates. Rather than relying on anecdotal updates from property HR managers, leadership can now see hiring activity, pipeline status, and role duration data in real time across every location.

2. Efficiency That Serves Non-Specialist Recruiters

Because property HR teams are generalists managing the full employee lifecycle, any recruiting tool needs to reduce friction rather than add to it. Workable’s pipeline management and automated candidate communications have done exactly that.

Property teams can now configure their pipelines and email templates to reflect how they prefer to engage candidates, then let the system handle the operational follow-through. Invitations, status updates, and next-step communications no longer require manual intervention at every stage.

“We get very positive reports from our properties that the efficiency Workable supports them with in terms of processing candidates and inviting them for interviews has really helped improve their day to day.”

3. Reporting That Drives Smarter Support

One of the most consequential changes has been access to data. Workable’s reporting tools allow the central team to track hiring volume, pipeline health, and role tenure across regions, giving them the insight they need to allocate support where it matters most.

If a role has been open too long in a particular market, the team can identify it and step in. If a property is managing an unusual surge in candidates, that’s visible too. The data makes proactive partnership possible in a way that was simply not achievable before.

• Track peaks and troughs in hiring demand by region
• Identify roles that have been live beyond expected timelines
• Monitor candidate pipeline health across locations
• Prioritize support for properties that need it most

4. Customization That Respects Property Autonomy

Belmond’s decentralized model is not a structural inefficiency. It is a deliberate reflection of the brand’s commitment to locally rooted, property-specific hospitality. A central system that tried to standardize everything would work against that ethos.

Workable allows each property to configure its own pipeline stages, candidate communications, and workflows. Global consistency in the platform. Local flexibility in practice. That balance has driven adoption and sustained it.

5. A Partnership Built for Complexity

Operating in markets across Brazil, Italy, Botswana, and beyond means Belmond regularly encounters region-specific data protection requirements and employment regulations. Navigating those requirements through an ATS requires a responsive, knowledgeable partner, not just a platform.

The Workable account team and technical support team have consistently engaged with Belmond on these challenges, working through compliance requirements collaboratively and building policy features into the system as needs evolve.

“The support we get has always been really positive, and we’ve achieved some really good results. Workable comes along on the journey with us.”

Business Impact

Since implementing Workable, Belmond has moved from fragmented, inbox-based hiring to a globally connected recruiting operation. The change is not just operational. It has enabled a fundamentally different relationship between the central HR function and the properties it supports.

Property teams have more confidence in their recruiting tools, more control over their processes, and less administrative burden. The central team has, for the first time, the data it needs to understand what is happening across the full business and act on it.

For a hospitality company built on the idea that every detail matters, having a hiring process that reflects that standard is not a minor improvement. It is a strategic one.