Hospitality hiring never stops.

Students and seasonal staff move on. Summer and Christmas need extra hands. New sites need full teams. Many hospitality employers are doing all three at once, with the same small team.

When hiring falls behind, the gap is filled by agency staff at a higher cost, or by the people already on the rota working longer.

A problem role is not a job title. It is a role, a place and a moment: a chef in a seaside town, a night shift, a kitchen porter where the local labour market is thin. Raising the budget everywhere mostly pays for the roles that were going to fill anyway.

Problem roles carry the highest cost per application, so they are where putting the budget in the right place pays back most.

More on problem roles in hospitality

A multi-stage form that sends a candidate from page to page is where people give up, and a phone after a long shift is the least forgiving place to fill one in.

The candidates lost there never show up in a report. They are simply not in the pile.

Across many sites, the screen falls to a general manager, a head chef or a unit manager, between a service, a delivery and the rota. Applications wait for a quiet moment that rarely comes.

Meanwhile the candidate has applied to several other places from the same phone, often after a shift somewhere else. In hospitality the first employer to reply is often the one that hires, so a good candidate who waits a day takes the job down the road.

Compass Group gave its managers hiring manager notifications and a live view of their own jobs, so the people doing the hiring know when there is something to read.