Recruitment in hospitality is tough right now. Here’s what’s working.

Recruitment in hospitality is harder than it’s been for a long time. And it’s already been hard for a long time. Here’s a breakdown of the challenges we’re seeing hospitality teams face in 2026 – and the strategies they’re using to overcome them. Put your gumshields in – let’s go.

Hospitality is all about people but right now, people are hard to find. Hotels, restaurants, bars, retailers and leisure venues everywhere are roaring back to life after years of disruption. But hiring hasn’t caught up. 

Talent shortages, rampant turnover, complex compliance, and shifting candidate expectations have created one of the toughest hospitality recruitment landscapes in decades.

If you’re battling to attract and retain hospitality staff, you’re not alone. Staff vacancies remain around 48% higher than pre-pandemic levels. The industry has lost around 200,000 workers since 2019, and competition for every role is fierce.

But there’s good news too. Smart, skills-based, tech-enabled recruitment can help you build the resilient, flexible teams your business needs, even in a candidate-short market.

Here’s how to make recruitment in hospitality fairer, faster, and better for everyone.

The state of recruitment in hospitality in 2026

After a turbulent few years, hospitality is bouncing back – but recruitment still hasn’t recovered. The UK hospitality sector contributes £63 billion a year to the economy and supports around 2.6 million jobs, or 7.1 % of total employment. But despite strong demand from consumers, business remain terminally understaffed.

UKHospitality report 132,000 open roles across hotels, restaurants and bars across the UK – 48% more than before the pandemic. That shortfall has become structural, driven by several forces:

1. Demographic and migration shifts: Post-Brexit, many EU workers left the UK and haven’t returned. Combined with an ageing domestic workforce, that’s squeezed the available talent pool.
2. Changing worker expectations: Gen Z is now the fastest-growing segment of the hospitality workforce. They expect flexible, tech-enabled, mobile-first hiring. A slow, black-box recruitment process is an instant turn-off – but that’s what many businesses still offer.
3. Massive technological change: Automation and AI are transforming every aspect of hospitality from guest experience to recruitment, changing the types of roles and skills businesses need. The gap between who’s available and who’s needed keeps getting wider. 
4. Heavier compliance burden: Hospitality recruitment teams are facing toughening compliance standards that will disproportionately impact the sector’s mixture of full-time, part-time, zero-hours, seasonal, and casual workers, deterring applications and increasing admin overhead.
5. Economic pressure. Rising costs, record wage increases, and squeezed margins make it harder for employers to compete on pay or invest in training. With labour costs already accounting for 30% to 40% of hospitality operating costs, minimum wage and “devastating” Employer NIC increases hit the sector hard.

The upshot is, hospitality businesses are rebuilding in a world that’s fundamentally changed. Recruitment models that worked five years ago simply don’t cut it now, as hospitality recruiters face a day-to-day operating reality that’s a nightmare to navigate. Let’s talk about what’s happening on the front-line.

Five biggest hospitality recruitment challenges

Working with talent acquisition teams from customers like Greggs, Ski Famille, Tesco, Sofology, Neilson, and cardfactory as well as heaps of brilliant SME recruitment teams, we see first-hand how tough retail and hospitality recruiters’ lives are right now. 

Here are the biggest challenges hospitality recruitment teams are facing on-the-ground.

1. Relentless turnover

The hospitality sector has the highest rate of turnover in the UK – a whopping 52%, compared to a UK average of 34%. The sector also has the lowest tenure: over a third of hospitality workers have been in role for less than a year.

The constant cycle of hiring, training, and replacing staff erodes productivity and morale. Worse, it traps teams in reactive recruitment, leaving little space for long-term talent acquisition strategy or employer brand building.

2. Shrinking candidate pools

Hospitality recruiters aren’t just losing people faster; they’re also fighting over a smaller pool of available talent. Restrictive immigration policies after Brexit removed a vital source of labour, especially for kitchen, housekeeping, and management roles. Around 120,000 EU workers have left the UK hospitality sector since 2019, leaving a major skills gap that hasn’t been filled. 

At the same time, domestic workers – especially Gen Z – are gravitating toward sectors seen as more predictable or progressive. Many perceive hospitality as low-pay and high-pressure, rather than a career with development and stability.

As of 2022, for example, only 1 in 10 young adults said they’d consider a career in hospitality, citing reasons like low pay, unsocial hours, and lack of career choice. Damning. 

3. Seasonal volatility

Hospitality lives and dies by its peaks. From summer holidays to Christmas parties, staffing demand can double overnight, then collapse just as fast. Hospitality recruiters must constantly scale up and down, juggling agency staff, short-term contracts, and redeployment to meet demand. 

This volatility isn’t just inconvenient; it creates a permanent tension between flexibility and security. Employers can’t always offer year-round stability, while candidates can’t (or won’t) always commit to fluctuating hours. That stop-start rhythm makes workforce planning complex and fuels the turnover problem. 

4. Rising recruitment costs

The cost of labour is climbing sharply, putting extra strain on already-tight recruitment budgets. In the hotel sector, for example, payroll costs rose from 38.8% of revenue in January 2024 to 39.6% in January 2025.

Given almost a quarter of hospitality workers are paid minimum wage and labour typically accounts for 30% to 40% of operating costs, minimum wage increases over the past two years have hit the sector hard. Many hospitality organisations have responded by reducing hours, delaying new hires, or shifting toward less-experienced staff – all of which deepen the skills shortage and weaken the capability pipeline long-term. 

In other words, the stuff that’s happening now will be a thorn in hospitality recruiters’ side for years to come.

5. Process friction and crummy candidate experience

Even when candidates are available, outdated recruitment systems and poor processes make hiring them unnecessarily difficult. 

Many hospitality recruitment teams don’t have the right recruitment software to optimise the end-to-end hiring process. Instead of automating all the sensible stuff, they’re stuck with time-consuming manual admin that snarls up their desk and creates cracks for candidates to fall down.

In a sector defined by speed, these hiring delays are costly. Candidates expect fast, mobile-first processes and clear communication – and when they don’t get them, they move on. The result is a double loss: wasted recruiter effort and missed opportunities for great hires.

The vision: What great hospitality recruitment looks like

Hospitality is a people-first business. The best recruitment teams build processes that reflect that (with the right tools underpinning them). They’re not doing anything wildly futuristic; they’re getting the fundamentals right.

In a moment we’ll dive into the specific hands-on strategies hospitality recruiters can adopt. But let’s paint a picture for a moment.

Imagine:

• You’ve stopped firefighting vacancies and started building communities of great people. Every interaction across every touchpoint shows who you are and what you stand for.
• Your processes respect candidates as people. That is: they’re simple, human, and transparent; applying takes minutes, not hours; communication is clear and timely; every touchpoint reinforces a sense of belonging. 
• You hire for potential, not just years behind the bar or counter. You care about attitude, adaptability, and heart – and build support structures to help those people succeed. That shift unlocks whole new talent pools while building more loyal, diverse teams.
• You move fast but never lose fairness. Technology supports decisions, not replaces them. Hiring feels data-driven but human-led – the perfect balance of efficiency and empathy.
• You tell a compelling, memorable story. You’ve replaced the old narrative of hospitality as transient, low-paid work with a new one: you offer a career of creativity, growth, and connection. You own that story and invite people into it.

That’s what great hospitality recruitment looks like today: fast, fair, personal. Tech-enabled, but proudly human-first. Let’s talk about actionable strategies to make that vision a reality.

Smart strategies for hiring hospitality talent in 2026

Getting to fairer, faster, better recruitment takes more than crossed fingers and goodwill. It takes new tools, new mindsets, and new ways of working. Here’s how forward-thinking hospitality recruitment teams are doing it.

1. Move towards skills-based hiring

CVs tell you where someone’s been, not who they are. They filter out people with non-linear careers or unconventional backgrounds – which, in hospitality recruitment, means filtering out a lot of great people.

Skills-based hiring flips that model. It’s become a modern recruiting best practice by focusing on tangible skills and attributes like learning agility, problem-solving, and emotional intelligence: the things that actually predict success in people-centred roles.

The shift isn’t theoretical. The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2027, six in ten workers will need reskilling as the mix of in-demand skills changes dramatically. 

Assessing candidates for potential rather than pedigree opens the door to those future-ready workers.

Pragmatic hospitality recruiters are experimenting with candidate assessments and task-based screening to spot transferable talent early, surfacing great candidates who’d never make it through a traditional sift.

2. Use AI to save time, not to replace judgment

Hospitality recruiters are under huge pressure to do more with less. Used wisely, AI is becoming a crucial part of the solution, automating repetitive admin so humans can focus on human work.

AI recruitment tools that automatically write inclusive job descriptions, flag biased phrasing, and facilitate skills-matching can save hours. But the trick is transparency and control: AI should support, not decide.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) reinforced this in its 2024 guidance, emphasising that employers using AI in hiring must ensure fairness, accountability, and human oversight.

Forward-thinking hospitality recruiters are combining automation with empathy, building faster pipelines but without losing the personal touch.

3. Build an always-on talent pipeline

Recruitment in hospitality shouldn’t start when a vacancy opens. It should be continuous. Smart TA teams are nurturing alumni, silver-medallist candidates, and seasonal staff into active talent pools. That way, when demand spikes for summer terraces or Christmas parties, they’re not starting from zero.

The pay-off is huge. Organisations with active talent pools can hope to fill vacancies around 25% faster and at around a 20% lower cost per hire. And candidates get a smoother, more personal experience, because they already know you and what you stand for. That’s the dream, right?

4. Prioritise candidate experience

Candidate experience matters in every industry but especially hospitality, because:

• Candidates are often customers, so there’s a direct line to your bottom line
• High-volume recruitment means your impact is bigger (positive or negative)
• High competition and low loyalty mean candidates go elsewhere fast
• Buoyant market means candidates might reapply tomorrow – if they left happy
• Hospitality is all about service: poor candidate experiences set the wrong tone
• Younger demographics you often hire have even higher CX expectations

Good CX means fast, modern application journeys designed for mobile, with transparent communication and clear next steps. It means timely feedback, transparent offers, and zero ghosting. It means fairness. It means every step made as easy as possible, from application to compliance. 

Read more: How to improve CX in the hospitality sector

Getting candidate experience right isn’t complicated. But it is hard, when you’re got a bazillion moving pieces and are buried under applications and admin. The right recruitment software should make CX a problem of the past, by making all the basics effortless.

5. Invest in onboarding

Retention is one of the major pillars of successful hospitality recruitment. You can’t improve recruitment without also improving retention, or you’re creating a Sisiphian task for yourself. 

One of the most influential factors is onboarding: organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by 70%.

But onboarding is often overlooked by busy staffing teams, who’re pulled straight back onto the next requirement. 

One of your highest-impact actions right now is ensuring you’ve got onboarding software in place, to take care of the fundamentals. Make sure your new tribe start with everything they need to thrive. 

6. Tame your volume

Much of hospitality recruitment is high-volume, which makes mountains out of molehills because you’re doing everything at x1000 scale. You won’t have time for the step-back-and-breathe strategic stuff if you don’t get a handle on the volume first.

That means recruitment software functionality like:

• Full automation
• Talent pooling and CRM
• AI assistance
• Templates
• Job cloning
• Bulk actions
• Workflows that work for you
• Multi-layer permissions
• Mobile manager-hubs 
• Video screening
• Drag-and-drop builders
• Integrated compliance checks

Make your volume roles run more smoothly, and you’ll free more time and space to focus where your efforts count most. (Chefs, anyone?)

7. Design for fairness and inclusion 

DEI isn’t just a social goal; it’s an operational advantage. In a people-powered industry, the more inclusive your hiring process, the stronger and more sustainable your teams. And the more representative of your customers.

But fairness doesn’t happen by accident. Hospitality’s reliance on fast, high-volume recruitment often bakes bias in by default; through subjective sifts, inconsistent screening, or processes that unintentionally exclude people without certain backgrounds, accents, age, appearance, or resources.

McKinsey’s well-known research shows that diverse companies are dramatically more likely to financially outperform their peers – by as much as third, in some cases. But the CIPD’s 2024 Resourcing and Talent Planning report shows major room for improvement on how organisations are actually operationalising DEI.

Smart hospitality recruiters are tackling that head-on. They’re training hiring managers to make evidence-based decisions, reviewing hiring processes and people policies, and using tools like Tribepad to make fair, inclusive hiring the rule not the exception. Because the more your workforce reflects the guests you serve, the better experience everyone has. 

8. Fight for flexibility 

Over half of hospitality workers consider flexibility as important as pay and benefits when choosing a job. When your hands are tied on pay, it’s worth exploring whether you can embed more flexibility into the roles you hire for. 

Is more shift flexibility possible? Role sharing? 

Hour-based recruitment functionality, for example, lets hiring managers recruit total hours needed rather than rigid headcount, giving you more levers to balance supply and demand.

Plus, flexible hiring models are more inclusive, opening doors to parents, students, and people with caring responsibilities who might otherwise be excluded. In a sector fighting to widen its talent pool, flexibility could be a big competitive advantage.

9. Be bullish on employer branding and recruitment marketing 

Hospitality has a perception problem. The industry is often seen as transient, low-paid, and lacking career progression: a stopgap, not a career. That narrative is costing employers candidates before they’ve even applied.

Successful hospitality recruitment teams are rewriting the story. 

They’re using employer branding and recruitment marketing to show the real face of hospitality: creative, dynamic, purpose-driven, and full of opportunity. They tell stories of growth – from waiter to GM; kitchen porter to head chef – and celebrate the community that make hospitality special. They give future candidates a window into what it actually feels like to work – and grow – with them.

And it’s working. LinkedIn’s research shows that a strong employer brand delivers:

• 28% reduced turnover
• 50% lower cost-per-hire
• 50% more qualified applicants
• 1 – 2x faster time-to-hire

Storytelling, employee advocacy, and social recruiting aren’t marketing fluff; they’re strategic tools to change perception – so “just a job” becomes a career worth committing to.

10. Invest in the right tech

The right recruitment software isn’t silver bullet, of course. There are systemic, structural reasons making hospitality recruitment hard, and no software is a magic wand.

But it’s true to say many TA teams are making their lives harder than they need to be. Good talent acquisition software is the foundation that underpins your recruitment processes, creating some breathing space so you can do more than firefighting.

That’s what it’s really about. What could your team achieve if you weren’t spending all your time scouring for candidates; trawling through CVs; copying data from system to system; copy-pasting and updating jobs; chasing managers; hunting down data for arduous reports; checking compliance docs, and so on?

The right software doesn’t make recruitment in hospitality easy, no. But it sure makes it easier. Because when you get the foundations right, then you can add the flair.

Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, Video Interviewing, and Onboarding, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for fairer, faster, better recruitment for everyone.

Trusted by organisations like Tesco, NHS Professionals, and Subway, 30-million people in 16 languages use Tribepad.