Hospitality Recruitment – 5 Useful Tips for Staff Retention

The past few years have been nothing if not challenging for hospitality recruitment. Whether you run a small café in Spain, a restaurant in Italy, or a hotel in Greece, hospitality staff recruitment is a time-consuming, delicate process.

You need to be mindful of which people you hire to service your guests because they’ll effectively represent your business to everyone else. Once you find the right people, however, hospitality recruitment becomes a matter of staff retention. The UK-based Office for National Statistics reported interesting findings in September of 2021 regarding hospitality staffing:

• 30% of hospitality businesses had trouble filling vacancies and retaining staff in 2021
• 41% of hospitality businesses with 10+ staff members struggled to find talented job candidates
• 25% of hospitality businesses faced challenges attracting EU applicants to their vacancies
• Hospitality in the UK had 59.1% of total job positions vacant in 2021 due to the pandemic
  
  

The situation in the UK is also indicative of how the rest of the world is recovering from the global pandemic. Just as hospitality businesses need job candidates, hospitality professionals are also in need of new employment. Let’s discuss hospitality staffing and retention, as well as how you can find the best candidates for your vacancies using Jobs OneGlobe as a recruitment platform.

Hospitality Recruitment with Jobs OneGlobe

Before you can devote your attention to hospitality staff retention, you need to develop a stable recruitment pipeline. This is easily done with a reliable recruitment platform like Jobs OneGlobe which will allow you to find great candidates from around the world, in hospitality or otherwise.

Creating an employer’s account on Jobs OneGlobe will give you access to a range of features designed for smooth and streamlined recruitment. All you’ll need to do is create your listings under your company’s profile and wait for candidates to come to you.

If you’re on short notice, however, the platform also features custom packages like Job Listing Promotion, Company Promotion, and CV Visibility packages. These are designed to facilitate even more efficient recruitment if you’re on short notice and need to fill critical hospitality vacancies. Here is a small snippet of some of the candidate profiles you can cover by using Jobs OneGlobe:

• Hotel clerks and receptionists
• Front desk managers
• Event managers
• Wedding planners
• Chefs and cooks
• Baristas and sommeliers
• Restaurant managers
• Lodging managers
• Maids and housekeepers
• Servers and waiters
  
  

Every type of hospitality specialist will require you to devote certain resources to keep them on your payroll. Despite their need for stable employment, professionals will quickly jump ship and look for work elsewhere if your job conditions aren’t what they expected. Let’s talk about how to follow up on hospitality recruitment with employee-friendly retention efforts.

Useful Hospitality Recruitment Staff Retention Tips

1. Retention Starts from the Interview Phase

Whether or not someone will stay with your company for an extended period is decided much earlier than many employers might assume. Job candidates will vet your company just as much as you’ll vet them. It’s why asking the right questions can be crucial to your candidates’ long-term company loyalty. Create a two-way conversation in your job interviews instead of simply asking questions without letting them open up.

While it’s important to go through a list of mandatory hospitality recruitment questions, you should also find out more about your candidates’ personalities. How well will each person fit into your existing business culture? Do they have any leadership potential and are they prepared for long-term employment or only for a short-term gig? Be respectful, professional, and open with your candidates from day one of your hospitality recruitment and you won’t have problems with engagement from the start.

2. Facilitate Professional Training & Development

Employee engagement is an essential element of retaining your staff for extended periods. Based on recent reports from the UK, 73% of employees there are satisfied with their employment, while only 50% feel engaged by their employers. Happy employees are 12% more productive, with burned-out ones being 2.5 times more likely to look for employment elsewhere. The best way to engage your staff once you’re done with hospitality recruitment is to provide them with L&D opportunities.

Learning and development will stimulate your employees and enable them to learn new skills or gain valuable certification or expertise in hospitality. Doing this will earn you their trust and they’ll be more content with their employment prospects in your hospitality business. Failing to provide your employees with some form of L&D will cause them to become disengaged, unproductive, and demoralized over time. Everyone wants to continue learning and developing, and the same applies to hospitality professionals.

3. Create an Inviting Business Culture

Working in an inviting environment is at the top of the list for many job candidates. People simply want to feel safe and welcomed in the companies and businesses they work with. This is why cultivating a healthy business culture can go a long way in helping you retain professional staff members. Based on Business 2 Community, 82% of companies believe that positive business culture is a competitive advantage – and that’s entirely true.

Hospitality recruitment is that much easier if your business has a good reputation and people apply for your listings based on your renown. Work on creating an inclusive environment without any discrimination or friction within your staff and you’ll never have to think about hospitality recruitment worries again.

4. Encourage your Staff to Take Up Leadership Roles

As an employer, you should always be on the lookout for job candidates with leadership potential. Hospitality recruitment is so much easier if you have valuable managers and staff members who can help train and onboard new employees. This is why you shouldn’t discourage your staff or new employees from expressing themselves and developing their managerial skills. You never know when someone might take days off due to illness, go on an unexpected trip, or have a family emergency.

Shifting your staff roster around might be impossible if you only rely on a select few employees for leadership. Instead, you should try rotating your staff in and out of management roles so that everyone can get a taste for it. This will give you a good indication of how to handle future hospitality recruitment cycles, as well as which traits to look out for in new candidates. Letting people advance through the ranks of your hospitality business if they prove themselves as professionals will also add to their retention factor.

5. Work on Providing Staff with Competitive Compensation

While monetary income isn’t at the top of everyone’s list when looking for employment, it’s still a very relevant topic. If your employees feel as if they’re doing too much for the pay they’re given, you’ll have retention problems on your hands. Hospitality recruitment is much easier if you’re upfront about how you’ll compensate your employees for their time and dedication to the business. Here are some of the compensations types you should think about:

• Competitive salary
• Salary bonuses
• Performance bonuses
• Private health insurance
• Paid vacation days
  
  

What you can provide your employees with will depend entirely on the scale of your hospitality business and what you can afford to invest in at the moment. However, entering hospitality recruitment with a minimum wage mindset will make it very difficult for you to hire professional candidates. Consider how much you can invest into employees’ compensation and employment bonuses before hiring so you have a clear idea of what to pitch to candidates.

Taking Control of your Hospitality Recruitment

With 2022 underway, now’s the time to start thinking about your hospitality staffing and retention solutions. You can use Jobs OneGlobe to hire professional staff either locally or internationally for a start. This will enable you to assemble a reliable team of hospitality specialists whether you need cooks, baristas, clerks, maintenance experts, or cleaners.

Every hospitality business is only as good as the people who work there, and your visitors and clients know this. Once you find great staff that you can rely on, you should do everything in your power to retain them. Treat them with respect, provide them with professional development opportunities, and give them full-time contracts.

This will encourage everyone on your team to give it their all and provide your customers with the best possible hospitality experience they can. It all starts with hospitality recruitment, so start looking for talented candidates today and reap the rewards of doing so in 2022 and beyond.