An ongoing challenge continues to hinder the UK hospitality sector's recovery in a post-pandemic world - talent scarcity. With nearly 65% more vacancies than pre-pandemic levels, pubs, restaurants, hotels, and resorts struggle to find experienced chefs, service staff, and hotel personnel.

The impact of prolonged business closures and redundancies has led many workers to seek alternative employment. It's unsurprising that many workers found alternative employment opportunities and are hesitant to reenter the hospitality industry.

Unfilled vacancies are hindering operations across the industry.

In this article, we explore the hospitality industry's skills shortage and how inploi's technology-driven solutions are tackling harder-to-fill problem roles and locations.

Hospitality Industry Skills Shortage: The Big Picture

The hospitality sector faces long-standing challenges in filling problem roles, such as skilled chefs, kitchen staff, and experienced hotel personnel. While only 10% of roles are harder to fill, they contribute to 90% of operational challenges. Chefs are particularly in high demand, with vacancy rates reaching as high as 21% for production chefs and 10% for head chefs. Remote areas face even more significant shortages, making it even harder to find people with the right skills.

Apart from chefs, there is also a demand for hospitality supervisors and multilingual receptionists. And although there are calls to include these roles on The Shortage Occupation List, the timeline for this change remains uncertain.

Utilising Technology to Fill Problem Roles

At inploi, we believe that technology is the key to overcoming talent shortages and supporting the growth of the hospitality sector. It's crucial to overhaul conventional recruitment practices for sustained success.

Our platform empowers businesses to launch and manage multi-channel campaigns across platforms like Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Google Ads to engage passive job seekers. And it helps businesses promote individual jobs to active candidates through programmatic advertising on job boards and aggregators.

But it is our solution to identifying and sponsoring problem roles that is unique.

We collaborate with our customers to identify problem job verticals and locations and create custom segments of their jobs. Roles that hit established criteria, such as having fewer than 5 applications from organic and/or paid channels after a certain time period, are then automatically sponsored via programmatic ad campaigns.

This ensures that the recruitment spend is hyper-focused, targeting only the roles and locations that matter most. To avoid overspending on individual roles, we also build in exclusion rules to automatically remove jobs once they meet a defined spend or application threshold.

This innovative approach to proactively identifying and prioritising problem roles has delivered remarkable results for our customers. By leveraging our platform to fill problem roles, one of our customers achieved over 150 hires while reducing the cost per hire by 30%.

With inploi's innovative tools and seamless connections between employers and job seekers, hospitality businesses can find the right talent in the right places.

Ready to level up your hiring game? Get in touch with us to find out how we can help you overcome recruitment challenges and fill problem roles.