chosen on the basis of exam results in foreign languages. Not surprisingly these candidates sometimes fail to possess other characteristics which might equip them better for the job content of the posts to which they are recruited. Once recruited, candidates tend to be given permanent contracts rather than trial period or short-term contracts, as is more common in the U.K.
In recent years the British hotel companies have moved towards more flexible human resource policies, using both functional and numerical flexibility (Atkinson, 1984; Guer- rier and Lockwood, 1989) to take account of different demand over the working day, week and year: thus, to have been increasingly pursuing 'hard' HRM policies. The survey and interviews with general managers of British hotels also reveal that the bigger independent hotels and chain hotels are increasingly employing permanent part-time staff who are part of the establishment and are provided with similar benefits to full-time staff. A very few companies claimed to be beginning to experiment with job share schemes and the provision of workplace creches to attract and retain married women employees. The Bulgarian employers in the hospitality industry have considerably less flexible policies. The percentage of establishments which employ part-time employees is four times lower (23% as opposed to 93% in the U.K.) and the proportion of hotels employing casual employees is infinitely smaller (5% rather than 56%). At the same time, nearly 80% of employers in the resort hotels are temporary staff, employed for the season as they are required. As the empirical evidence confirms, this limited numerical flexibility is not reinforced by functional flexibility. The overwhelming majority of employees are full-time and have narrowly-defined jobs, both in terms of job satisfaction and custom and practice, which do not allow for interchangeability of personnel or flexible work practices.
There is very little evidence of induction training in the Bulgarian hotel industry and indeed very little evidence of investment in training and development generally, largely because of the recession throughout the last 3 years which has curtained investment in such activity. In comparison with the British sample (whose own record is very poor by national cross-sectional comparison) the Bulgarian respondents invested very little in human resources training. For instance, only 6% provide training in 'supervisory skills' although they had said that supervisors tended to be recruited in the internal labour market. The survey information indicates that only one-fifth of the establishments invest any money at all in training of their operatives. The same pattern is replicated in relation to employee appraisal practices, with British hotels not substantially likely to have appraisal pro- grammes, although 65% claimed to appraise employees at least every 2 years. The comparable figure for Bulgarian respondents was substantially lower and while nearly half claimed to appraise employees regularly, at intervals ranging between 1 and 2 years, the notion of employee appraisal was foreign to most of the Bulgarian managers interviewed. The question is consequently likely to have been misunderstood by many of those who completed the postal survey, and thus to reflect an overestimated incidence of appraisal. In addition, the answers given verbally and pattern of response on the questionnaires suggest that the Bulgarian managers tended to implement a 'telling' or 'dominating' style of appraisal rather than an 'advising' style which concentrates on counselling and problem- solving. Without an appraisal system, staff development tends to be ad hoc and infrequent in the Bulgarian industry, with promotion and mobility between establishments relatively rare. The payment of service increments in recognition of seniority is, however, more widespread in the Bulgarian than the U.K. industry. In all Bulgarian hotels the employees