Recruitment: the market is changing

“What is the moral of these reflections?” I was asked.
Job in Tourism was created twenty years ago with the mission to give hotels the possibility to recruit qualified personnel. The underlying assumption was that high-standard hotels required already-trained personnel, and, therefore, the possibility to showcase their requirements was, in fact, an opportunity for them.
Consequently, we initially mainly addressed iconic hotels, and tried to establish steady relationships with them. Indeed, the idea was correct. Nobody had created a showcase of this kind before us, and it was precisely high standing hotels that were first to understand its value, also because their managers had often experienced working in other countries, where publications like ours have a longer history.
The culture of recruitment, however, has progressively spread, and is now shared on a vertical basis.
Indeed, my reflection goes beyond the number of hotel stars, and rather concerns the realisation that nowadays not only hotels are mindful of personnel recruitment, but also restaurants and, particularly, the new chains that develop innovative projects.
While in manufacture the introduction of automation processes has changed the manner of production by reducing the contribution of individuals, the same did not happen in hospitality / restaurants, despite some marginal adjustments, and this has kept the demand for staff high.
So what is the moral? In this business, which is labour intensive by definition, even for basic positions there is no longer room for improvisation; recruitment has to be conducted with extreme accuracy, with particular care for the candidates’ aptitudes. It is a new, immense market which nobody would have thought of twenty years back, but is now real and growing. Good job opportunities, even though based on different premises from those we were historically used to.
As a joke, we might say that – like in Lavoisier’s law – in personnel recruitment nothing is created, nothing is lost, but – at present – everything is changing (for the better) both in size and manner.