Problem roles in hospitality: overcoming talent scarcity
Why some hospitality roles stay open while others fill in days, and how to put budget and a better application behind the roles that are short.
You overcome talent scarcity in hospitality by treating problem roles as a separate case: identify the roles and locations that stay open, give them their own segment and budget, and stop spending on the roles that fill themselves. Scarcity is rarely spread evenly across a business, so a single media plan run everywhere will always overspend in one town and underspend in the next.
That is the core of it. The rest of this piece is about how to find those roles and what to change once you have.
What a problem role actually is
Every hospitality employer knows the pattern. Front of house in a city centre fills in a week. The same role in a seaside town sits open for a month. A head chef or a sous chef is hard almost everywhere, night and early-morning shifts are hard in most places, and anything in a location with a thin local labour market is hard all year.
A problem role, then, is not a job title. It is a combination of role, location and moment: a vacancy that stays open long after its neighbours have filled, usually because local supply is thin or because the channel that used to work has quietly stopped working. And problem roles tend to be the ones the business can least afford to leave empty, because a missing chef closes a kitchen in a way a missing host does not.
Why the usual approach overspends
The default response to a hard-to-fill role is to raise the budget across the board. More job board credits, bigger adverts, the same plan with more money in it. The result is predictable. The roles that were going to fill anyway absorb most of the extra spend, and the problem role gets a small share of a larger number.
The other default is to wait until a general manager escalates, by which point the role has been open for weeks and the rota is already stretched.
Segment the roles, then let rules do the work
The approach that works is to group jobs into segments that reflect how they actually behave. Côte, for instance, runs its recruitment marketing by segments such as front of house, London and sous chef, rather than as one list. Each segment gets its own rules.
With job distribution, each segment has its own budget, so the money follows the roles that are short rather than the ones that fill themselves. Where a location is hard to fill, job sponsorship on the paid boards puts that listing in front of more of the people it needs. Limits set in Studio stop the spend at the point you choose, so no single vacancy runs away with the money. The decision about where budget goes is made once, per segment, instead of vacancy by vacancy whenever someone escalates.
Problem roles carry the highest cost per application, so they are where the gains are largest. At Compass Group, cost per application for problem roles fell 50%. The Compass Group case study describes how.
Do not waste the candidates you do reach
Reach is only half the answer for a scarce role. When the pool is small, losing people at the application stage hurts even more. A chef who finds your role on their phone after a long shift will not complete a long form built for a desktop.
Conversational apply adapts the application to the role and the region, so a kitchen role asks kitchen questions and finishes in minutes. The Candidate Agent answers the questions a chef will actually have, about hours, pay bands and which site, from your own approved content, in the gap between lunch and dinner service when they finally have a minute to look, and hands to a person when judgment is needed. And the Hiring Agent scores each application as it arrives, with reasoning the general manager can read, so a good candidate for a hard role is seen the same day rather than next week.
Measure by site, not just in total
Problem roles only become visible when you look at performance by location and role. A company-wide cost per application can look healthy while three sites are quietly failing to hire. Analytics and attribution shows each site its own funnel and each channel its own return, so the rules that decide where money goes can be tuned on evidence rather than on who escalated loudest.
What to do next
List your ten longest-open vacancies and look at what they have in common. It is usually a small number of role and location combinations, and that list is your first segment.
The quality in volume page covers how job distribution puts budget behind the roles that are short, and there is more on the sector in our writing on hospitality hiring.
