5/19/2016
Dear Candidate Review/To Whom it May Concern,
I am excited to present my application for The Director - Hotel Openings Sales & Marketing position I found recently posted on your careers platform. I believe I came across this posting at just the right time in my career. I am at the threshold of 6 years in my current role, and embarking on the process of finding a new, challenging and personally fulfilling opportunity. While financial services has been my home, I am particularly interested in changing industries to one about which I am passionate and will allow to me attain a new set of skills and experiences. The position as described, appears to be just that. At the highest level I believe that it offers both the opportunity to make a complete change of course from a business sector perspective, at the same time allowing and in fact requiring me to leverage the skills I have acquired in financial services in diverse, yet analogous hospitality and lodging functions. In looking at the expected contributions and attributes in the ideal candidate, I can immediately identify those qualities in myself and draw corollaries that demonstrate those characteristics and experience in my current role.
For the past three years I have been leading an effort to deploy a client service operations function from a nearshore location to an offshore vendor site. Immediately, this speaks to the requirement to be able to manage a team remotely. Not only have I managed a diverse and multi-functional team in Mexico, both locally and from Baltimore, but I designed the role, hired and developed the talent, structured the management and escalation lines, delivered the training, and managed the legal and compliance, vendor and client relationships across a wide and globally disparate internal and external stakeholder map that spanned cultural, language, and organizational boundaries. I was tasked with the origination, design, planning, execution and maintenance of the multifaceted project, through which I developed the strategic, collaborative, dynamic and long term (wc) attributes the Director role requires. Managing this project, in addition to my people, change initiative and client relationship responsibilities on shore, was not short of challenges. It tested my resolve and creativity but in the end I was successful and rewarded with increased scope and responsibility. The process required, and therefore taught me how to develop flexible communication styles and plans for audiences with diverse knowledge bases and needs as well as gain buy-in and collaboration from counterparts across the global organization. I was also given an incredible degree of autonomy, which in turn imparted a sense of accountability to deliver successfully to my many and varied stakeholders. All of these challenges, and my experience rising to them speak directly to my fit within the management execution and relationship building requirements of this prospective role.
I will conclude this letter with mention of something you will not see on my resume, but I think speaks volumes to by my motivational and practical fit for the position. Prior to joining my current firm, I worked for over 10 years in the hospitality industry. I have a passion for it, but that is not my most persuasive argument. From serving at a Michelin 3 star fine dining restaurant, to managing a 2 star enoteca with a renowned wine list, from implementing a restaurant group’s social media presence to managing another group’s marketing and private dining program, from menu design to inventory line item budget management, I can say that I am intimately aware of the many and varied moving parts (and people) that go into making a hospitality endeavor a success.
I close by simply saying that both my time in financial services and my years in hospitality have prepared me professionally and personally to be the ideal candidate for the Director role.
Thank you for your consideration.
Chris
