ABSTRACT
A defining characteristic of the hospitality industry is the crucial role played by employees during the service encounter with customers. It is largely the behaviour of customercontact employees that creates impressions of high or poor service quality. Furthermore, employees are the personification of the hospitality brand. Although recruiting, training and rewarding employees is a human resource management function, marketers need to understand and influence employment strategies to ensure that employees are able to represent brand values and deliver the service experience promised by marketers to customers. At the same time, human resource managers have increasingly adopted a marketing-like approach to employee recruitment and retention. This type of human resource management strategy is called internal marketing.
