The hospitality industry thrives on exceptional service, but behind every smooth-running restaurant, hotel, or travel experience is a team of dedicated hospitality employees. Recruiting and retaining these employees is an ongoing challenge that pretty much every hospitality business faces—whether they’re looking for talented chefs, back-of-house (BOH) and front-of-house (BOH) staff, or experienced head office teams and holiday reps.
Let’s take a look at some of the biggest challenges hospitality people teams have to deal with and, more importantly, how to overcome them.
High Turnover and Job Instability
If there’s one challenge of hospitality recruitment we’ve run into more than any other here at Chezz, it’s the high turnover rate. Unsurprising though. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts attrition at 70%-80% in the US, which is atrocious—much higher than the UK’s 37.6% every year, which is also considered abysmal.
Thing is, a lot of workers see hospitality roles as stepping stones rather than long-term careers, which leads to a continuous cycle of hiring and training new staff. Seasonal employment, especially for holiday reps and resort staff, worsens this instability. You’ll see a lot of employees leaving once the peak period ends, only for businesses to struggle when rebuilding their teams in the next season.
As if that weren’t enough, the demanding work environment—long hours, weekend shifts, and high-pressure situations—regularly leads to burnout. Employees leave in search of jobs that offer better work-life balance, taking their experience with them. Many also feel that career progression opportunities are limited, prompting them to move into other industries that promise greater stability and advancement.
How to combat this?
To get over this perennial challenge, businesses need to shift perceptions about hospitality careers. That starts by building a powerful employer brand that establishes your hospitality business as one with professional development at its core.
Promoting early careers with clear career progression paths—and an openness about where they end—is also absolutely vital. If Gen Z is becoming more sceptical of the hospitality sector for long-term progression—as the Foodservice Equipment Journal says it is—you need to nip that in the bud at the earliest possible stage.
Deliver clear communications about what the future could hold. Offer more robust mentorship programmes and buddy systems. Establish diversity networks internally to build safe spaces that encourage retention, and make sure you promote them. And, don’t forget to promote every last flexible working opportunity you have—whether it’s shift rotation or job sharing—to make sure no one feels stuck at work or ready to burn out.
Skills Shortages and Training Gaps
Finding brilliantly trained chefs, bar managers, and experienced FOH and BOH staff is more difficult than ever, according to Statista.
Thing is, most hospitality roles don’t require formal education, so you end up with inconsistencies in training and experience levels among candidates. On top of that, hospitality competes with industries like retail and corporate services, where the salaries and working conditions are often, well, simply better.
This challenge is particularly evident in the kitchen, where chefs with specialised skills are in high demand. The rigorous nature of kitchen work means that the most talented individuals will either leave the profession entirely or move abroad in search of better pay and working conditions.
What to do about this?
Externalise your Learning & Development solutions via content marketing. Make sure that you build a reputation outside the business for giving people all the skills they need to be brilliant at their jobs—by actually publishing that content on your careers website.
Think of it like this. This very article you’re reading now is all about helping you to do your job better—you need to do the same for your people. If you’re building partnerships with colleges and culinary schools, get their teaching staff to prepare guest blog posts for you.
Just make sure your content marketing agency oversees it so that your articles are keyword-rich and easily visible when hospitality professionals look for professional development on search engines.
The solution lies in proactive talent development. Make your in-house training initiatives and cross-training opportunities a core part of your communication strategy. It won’t only help you retain the people you do have, but also attract the best people away from competitors.
Attracting the Right Talent
Hospitality is your classic “bums-on-seats” industry. In other words, a desperate industry that ends up having to take on whoever will accept the job, just because there’s no one else to do it. Hospitality recruiters will often find themselves wondering how they’ll ever fill all their open roles.
Traditional job boards tend to be oversaturated, so standing out there to the best candidates is an uphill struggle. Plus, you know, hospitality jobs are stressful, low-paying, and lacking long-term prospects a lot of the time. So even those potential candidates who might be perfect for you end up thinking they’d rather do something else entirely.
Not to be the angels of doom, but according to CGA Strategy. 42% of hospitality professionals are considering changing career, in fact. That’s an alarming amount, right?
So now what?
Two glorious words—social media. It’s the go-to format for all the most successful hospitality companies because it helps them show off their culture and values, with genuine, testimonial content from real people working there. This makes them feel like a fun places where talent goes to thrive.
The best thing about social media, is it’s employee driven. You just need to set up a content gathering system with your agency so that they can take the best employee-generated content and turn it into branded social media posts that potential employees love to watch.
And if your people aren’t naturally great at producing high-value social content, a great content agency will help you establish internal influencer groups and brief them on how to get other employees involved. They’ll even conceptualise branded dance routines and songs and scripts for them to act out.
Just be mindful that pretty much every hospitality brand is doing social-first employer branding, so you should also incorporate some of the other recommendations here if you want to get ahead of your competitors. Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok are amazing, but they’re not the whole picture.
Targeted digital advertising is also going to be really important in finding the right people to work for you. Great paid media campaigns will target not only things like location and interests, but experience and skill sets too. You should also put some budget into search engine marketing so that skilled people looking for career development content find you when they look on Google.
Finally, don’t forget good old-fashioned referral programmes, which incentivise current employees to recommend their most talented friends or former colleagues.
Economic and Global Factors
Beyond industry-specific challenges to hospitality recruitment, there are—of course—those pesky economic and global factors contend with.
Labour shortages, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, are still impacting the industry, even now. And a lot of former hospitality workers have simply transitioned into other sectors. Brexit and stricter immigration policies in places like the USA have also made it more difficult to hire international workers, who previously made up a significant portion of hospitality staff.
Then there are issues like the rising cost of living, which add another layer of complexity to the whole situation. Many hospitality employees, particularly those in lower-paid roles, are forced to look for higher wages to cope with growing expenses.
How to rise to the challenge
OK, so beyond competitive salaries and benefits, which are the obvious responses here—but which can put severe stress on companies—there are some strategies for dealing with this.
Promote your progression opportunities hard. Make a song and dance about meal allowances, transport benefits, and other cost-of-living offsets. Make your roles more attractive by highlighting your community impact, and creating content that demonstrates your commitment to social causes. If you sponsor visas, make it a reason to believe in your commitment to great people.
Also, invest in a content backlinks strategy to help build good PR with local community training programmes so you can develop homegrown skills over the long term.
Effective Recruitment Strategies
Recruiting hospitality staff effectively—because it’s such a competitive space—is going to demand a mix of organic and paid marketing strategies if you want to reach and attract the right candidates.
So, here’s a quick checklist for you
- Get a strong employer brand to build your reputation with top hospitality talent
- Actively showcase your work culture, values, and employee success stories through your website and social media
- Maintain your careers site with SEO-optimised job descriptions—including keywords such as “chefs,” “front of house,” “back of house,” and “holiday reps”—and blog posts to target passive candidates
- Network at hospitality job fairs and push your brand out in exciting, engaging ways at them
- Get your people involved in content creation, curation, and sharing to boost your visibility on socials
- Sponsor job postings on industry-specific job boards
- Target digital campaigns on Facebook, Google Ads, LinkedIn, and TikTok
- Use retargeting to digitally track candidates who drop off and increase the likelihood of their conversion
- Break out the old “refer a friend” campaign strategy—it’s not dead yet!
- Invest in a proper Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) strategy that makes sure you appeal to all social sectors and make them feel welcomed into your business
Oh, we know it’s a lot. But recruiting hospitality employees is one of the most challenging aspects of running a hospitality business—so it’s worth it, and we take our hats off to you for taking on the challenge.
The great thing is that, today, there are so many options you can tap into, you don’t have to break the bank with your budget. You can trial different strategies and see which ones work for you in terms of ROI (though beware some—like SEO—are medium-term before ROI kicks in).
Ultimately, it’s all about strategy—balancing out the organic and paid recruitment tactics so that you have a steady talent pipeline to draw on and don’t find yourself holding out seats for the proverbial bums of just any old hospitality pro. Reach out if you want to discuss, and best of luck!