Convention centres host events almost every week, each needing a different setup. HR work is facilities crews, hall turnarounds, hospitality staff and managing contractor labour on busy days.
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Share your requirementsA convention centre rents halls, meeting rooms, exhibition space and catering to organisers of conferences, weddings, trade shows and large gatherings. It employs sales and booking staff, an events and operations team, facilities engineers for power, air-conditioning and water, housekeeping staff, security and parking staff, front-of-house and hospitality teams, and often relies on outside caterers, decorators and AV vendors. Each event needs a different layout, and halls are turned around overnight. Weekends and festival dates are fully booked, then weekdays go quiet. Staff must handle large crowds, tight handovers and many outside people on site. See also HR for professional services.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in convention centres. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Halls are cleared, cleaned and reset for the next day, and crews work late on short rest.
Several halls running at once stretch every department, then quiet weekdays leave staff underused.
Caterers, decorators and AV teams bring their own labour, and conduct, safety and access rules are tough to enforce.
A power cut or air-conditioning fault in front of a crowd lands on the engineers who may be off duty.
Cleaning crews with high turnover are asked to deliver perfection quickly.
Organisers ask for last-minute changes and staff must say yes or no without clear authority.
Gates, parking and fire exits need trained staff, and a lapse is serious.
Weekend work and festival peaks need fair overtime and time off, which are often handled informally.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; HR Operations and Governance. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a convention centres business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Crews planned from the booking calendar, with a named lead per hall.
Crews planned from the booking calendar, with a named lead per hall. See attendance, shift and leave process.
ID passes, entry briefings, safety rules and incident reporting for outside labour, agreed in the booking contract.
ID passes, entry briefings, safety rules and incident reporting for outside labour, agreed in the booking contract.
An on-call roster for electrical and air-conditioning staff with rest rules and pay.
An on-call roster for electrical and air-conditioning staff with rest rules and pay.
A standard for each hall type, tools and a supervisor check, taught in the first week.
A standard for each hall type, tools and a supervisor check, taught in the first week. The employee onboarding can hold it.
A written list of what the coordinator can approve in the moment and what needs a manager.
A written list of what the coordinator can approve in the moment and what needs a manager.
Evacuation, fire and crowd drills for staff and key vendors.
Evacuation, fire and crowd drills for staff and key vendors. See workplace health, safety and wellbeing.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Event-day rosters, overnight turnarounds and on-call rules.
Fire, crowd and technician safety.
Quick, standard training for housekeeping and front-of-house.
Rules for vendors and contractor labour.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in professional services, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
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A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
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Roster from the booking calendar, build a core team plus approved extra hands for peaks and use quiet days for training and maintenance.
Include conduct and safety rules in the booking terms, issue passes and brief vendors' supervisors on arrival.
Agree a clear rule on standby, call-out and rest in advance, and apply it equally.
Fair pay, a sensible turnaround plan, proper tools and a supervisor who treats the crew with respect.
As often as you can reasonably manage, and always with new staff. Record who attended.
We would look at the booking calendar against rosters, vendor rules and on-call arrangements. An event-day roster approach and a vendor conduct note are a sensible first job. After we talk it through, scope and deliverables are put in writing.
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