Articles 
In the aftermath of the pandemic, the current state of hospitality recruiting reflects a complex landscape defined by both recovery and persistent challenges. As the industry contends with the intertwined narratives of resurgence and staffing constraints, reimagining hospitality recruiting strategies becomes pivotal to harnessing the potential of a market that has changed significantly.
Turnover has always been a key pressure on hospitality recruiters, but with more available opportunities in the market, it’s increasing. Though recruiting pressure is being felt across the board, it seems to be highest in the quick-service segment. Persuading a candidate to work for you and not the competition is the crucial first step. But how can you truly distinguish yourself as an employer of choice?
Finding people to cover difficult shifts is an additional challenge that hiring managers face. But is there anything you can do to ease the challenges of recruiting in the restaurant sector? Below, we highlight four key creative recruiting ideas for hiring hospitality staff we gathered from speaking to our customers in the sector who shared their tips for tackling hospitality recruitment. Grab a pen and paper, because these tips will help you optimize and modernize your approach to hospitality recruitment.
1. Enhance Your Candidate Experience
In a candidate-driven market, your employer brand should be your secret weapon to entice candidates to work for you rather than the competition. Providing a great candidate experience both online and in-store is essential to bolster your brand and drive applications. Many hospitality settings, such as fast-food franchises, are great places to source potential talent.
How are you treating customers that want to apply in person? Sending them away to apply on your website isn’t an optimum experience. Instead, you should leverage innovative solutions such as SMS or QR codes so they can apply seamlessly while they dine.
With an open rate of almost 100 percent, SMS campaigns are highly effective. With Avature, you can set up an auto-reply messaging service empowering candidates to text a keyword such as “Apply” to a shortcode. They’ll then receive a reply with a link to your application portal.
Candidates can also be directed to apply by scanning a QR code displayed in your restaurant. For those applicants that hand over paper resumes, with Avature, you can scan CVs on the fly and upload the information directly into your ATS.
For online applicants, make sure you offer a mobile-optimized experience. Research shows that 86 percent of job seekers use their phone to search for a job, and one in four wouldn’t apply if the company’s career page wasn’t accessible via a mobile device. To top off the experience for all candidates, adopting creative recruiting ideas such as offering an exclusive perk (e.g., a 10 percent discount) can really help boost perceptions of your brand as well as sales.
2. Speed up Hospitality Recruitment with a Sustainable Talent Pool
To encourage a steady flow of applicants, you should take advantage of talent pipelines. Building a pool of qualified and interested candidates can help reduce time to fill when someone leaves the business, as well as the cost of hiring someone new. Talent pipelines can therefore minimize the impact of turnover on restaurants that might otherwise be crippled by lack of staff in a very short period of time.
By re-engaging a pool of talent that had previously demonstrated interest in working for the organization, World Duty Free was able to quickly fill vacancies once the world could fly again after Covid. By automating the process of attracting, processing and interviewing, they were able to hire over 1,000 employees for shops in 25 different airports in a matter of weeks.
We know managers are often pressed for time, but an alarming 61 percent of candidates will share a negative experience with their inner circle. A diminishing perception of your employer brand can spread rapidly and have a rippling effect on your bottom line. Beyond speeding up the process, talent pools can help organizations foster a memorable hospitality recruitment experience when paired with automated communication.
3. Optimize the Restaurant Manager Experience
Providing managers with intuitive tools that facilitate the central management of all recruiting activities is one of the simplest ways to overcome the hiring challenges they face. Invest in an industry-specific, mobile-optimized solution, such as Avature In-Store, specifically designed to handle high-volume recruiting on the go. The technology you choose should allow hiring managers to easily screen and rank the best candidates using knockout or weighted questions.
With Avature, restaurant managers can also take advantage of advanced filtering for shift requirements, making it easier to find the perfect candidate in the haystack. This is hugely important for shift planning and ensures that no time is wasted engaging with candidates who aren’t available to work when the restaurant really needs a headcount.
By providing managers with these tools, you’re enabling them to efficiently handle the recruitment process on top of their day job, saving time and ensuring that the right candidates are selected for the team. All without scaling their workload. This is exactly what GPS Hospitality did, and you can hear the benefits firsthand from Cassandra Fischels, Director of Human Resources.
4. Automate for Success in Hospitality Recruitment
For busy restaurant managers, taking advantage of automation to communicate efficiently with candidates can also help to ensure a positive experience. Avature offers a powerful workflow engine that empowers organizations to automate any process they like, leaving all tedious and time-consuming tasks behind.
For example, using our automated interview scheduling capabilities, candidates can self-schedule a time that suits them based on the manager’s availability, so they don’t have to spend time coordinating interviews. When it comes to making an offer, speed is of the essence in order to successfully hire a candidate, and this is another key moment in the hiring process where automation comes to the rescue.
Rather than waiting for a manager to reach out personally, offers can be automatically sent by email or SMS. This saves time and contributes to a smoother and more efficient recruitment process, benefiting recruiters, managers and candidates alike. But most importantly, it can dramatically enhance recruiting outcomes.
Customers across all industries have seen impressive results when automating offers. Take BMC for example. Prior to automating its offer extension process, the organization was struggling to recruit globally and comply with every region’s regulations, which was creating an endless back-and-forth of emails and Excel sheets that could lead to many headaches for recruiting and audit teams alike. Since automating this critical stage, the organization has saved recruiting stakeholders 14 hours a week.
Final Thoughts on Hospitality Recruitment
It’s a competitive market out there, and there’s no doubt that restaurant managers will continue to feel the pressure when it comes to recruiting in the sector. However, with the insights gleaned from working with the world’s leading hospitality companies, we can see a path forward. By automating and customizing your sourcing and recruitment strategies and equipping managers with effective tools, you can tackle turnover’s impact head-on.
