Sydney Clark, of Utica, N.Y., trains yesterday for a job at the Hampton Inn & Suites in downtown Providence, which opens in December. At left is fellow employee Nichole Garnetto, of Providence.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

With 5,000 people to pick from, Michael Buddemeyer could afford to be choosy.

He is regional director of hotel operations for First Bristol Corp., of Fall River, the company building a Hampton Inn & Suites in downtown Providence. The 110-room hotel, at 58 Weybosset St. on the site of the former St. Francis Chapel, is scheduled to open in December. Since First Bristol began recruiting last summer for 50 to 55 new jobs, the company has received about 5,000 applications.

Buddemeyer said the large number of applicants reflects a state where a lot of people are looking for work. According to the state Department of Labor and Training, unemployment in Rhode Island was 8.8 percent last month, the highest level in 16 years. Just over 50,000 people are unemployed in the state.

Buddemeyer said about 45 of the jobs will be full-time, the rest part-time. He said hotel jobs in the Rhode Island market pay between $9 and $15 an hour, with the Hampton Inn jobs falling in the middle of that range. Hampton is part of Hilton Hotels Corp.

According to the labor department, as of last month, about 4,200 people were working in the accommodations sector of the state economy, compared with 4,100 in September of last year.

Buddemeyer said he had expected a lot of interest in the jobs, but not 5,000 applicants. “That was overwhelming,” he said.

Job candidates who had made the cut were training on Monday on computers in a small room on the second floor of The Arcade in downtown Providence, not far from where the hotel is being built. The hotel will use about a dozen employees for its front desk, and some of them were familiarizing themselves with the computer software they’ll be using. Because there were only four computer stations available, the training was being conducted in two-hour shifts.

As part of their education, new employees check mythical guests in and out of the hotel. The training also throws a few problems their way, such as a credit card being denied or three friends who share a suite wanting the bill divided among them.

Buddemeyer said he selected slightly more people than he needed to account for the inevitable attrition during the 2½-to-3-month training. So he hired 16 to work the front desk, even though he will need only about a dozen. (That number is already down to 14, he said.)

Because so many people applied for the hotel jobs, Buddemeyer said, his first steps were to reduce the numbers to a manageable level. He began by eliminating anyone without previous hotel experience, which cut the applicant pool in half. Then he looked for candidates with experience in larger, full-service hotels, which cut the number in half again.

Even so, he said, he ended up interviewing about 1,200 people. At this point, he said, personality came into play. He was looking for people with “hospitable” personalities — outgoing, eager to “wow” the guests. Buddemeyer said he started his own hotel career as a teenager, working as a dishwasher at a Howard Johnson’s in Swansea. He went to college to be a lawyer, but decided he didn’t particularly want a legal career, and went back to hotels. Now he supervises hotel operations at Hampton Inn & Suites in Middletown and Raynham, Mass., in addition to the new one downtown.

The training includes videos on the Hampton Inn philosophy of hospitality and sessions with a big vinyl “map” that shows the layout of a hotel in the middle, and written information about Hampton service along the perimeter.

Because front-desk personnel at the hotel will also act as concierges, part of the training is to have them become familiar with Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts. That means driving the streets so they’ll be able to give directions to the airport and other area destinations — and not in the classic Rhode Island style that relies on landmarks that no longer exist. Trainees are also expected to be knowledgeable about services that guests might need, such as tailors, shoe repair, movies, shopping, florists and transportation.

The most common question desk personnel get asked, Buddemeyer said, is where to eat. (The hotel will not have its own restaurant.) That means Hampton employees must be familiar with the local restaurant scene. “I don’t want them to tell guests to just go to the mall and you’ll find these restaurant chains,” Buddemeyer said.

Another part of the training is having new employees sleep in the hotel for a night or two, once it’s up and operational. That way, when guests call to ask about ordering a movie or using the phone system, they will get some firsthand answers. “Because they will get those questions more often than you think,” Buddemeyer said.

The new trainees include Paul Lee, 23, of La Crescenta, Calif. A graduate of Johnson & Wales, he has worked at the Providence Marriott Downtown hotel and the Omni Parker House in Boston. Lee said one of his career goals is to be part of a team that opens a new hotel, which is what attracted him to the Hampton Inn opportunity.

Lee, 23, whose family owns restaurants in Korea and California, said the hospitality business is in his genes. “It’s about dealing with people,” he said. “My nature is to be nice to people, to serve the guests.”

Michelle Morris, 37, of Warwick, said she saw an ad for the new hotel in the newspaper. She has six years of hotel experience, including a stint at the Hampton Inn & Suites in Warwick. At the time she applied for the downtown job, she was working third shift (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.) at another area hotel, and wanted to go back to working days.

“I like hotel work. It’s the interaction with people,” she said. “Sometimes you can change someone’s entire day just by doing a little thing for them. And you’d be surprised what stories you hear when you’re working the [front] desk.”

asmith@projo.com