Hospitality operators have told The Caterer they are struggling to recruit for a variety of roles including chefs, sommeliers and runners amid the ongoing staffing crisis.
The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) data revealed there were 174,000 unfilled jobs in the industry between March and May this year.
This was an increase of 8,000 on the previous quarter, indicating that the industry’s ongoing recruitment crisis worsened in the first six months of 2022.
New research released this week suggested hospitality firms are finding it hardest to recruit for front-of-house, cleaning, and delivery roles.
The report by Barclays Corporate Banking was based on a survey of 605 senior managers within UK-based hospitality and leisure firms with 10 or more employees.
It found 94% of businesses are struggling to fill gaps in rotas. Of those surveyed, 20% listed cleaning roles as being hardest to fill, 18% listed front-of-house roles as "causing the most issues", while 16% struggled to recruit for delivery positions. Some 14% said they were finding it hardest to recruit for chefs and kitchen staff.
Nearly 20% of firms said they had already increased wages given to staff, while many told researchers they had launched new initiatives to help recruit such as flexible working arrangements, an increase in staff welfare budgets and the introduction of bonuses.
Differing experiences
Operators told The Caterer their experiences of recruiting for different roles varied.
Jay Visciano, managing director of events and restaurants group, Bourne & Hollingsworth, said the company had found it hardest to recruit kitchen staff and had hiked wages for the roles by over 25% as a result.
He said: "The shortage has caused such a price hike in kitchen wages and placed the staff in an extremely strong position to negotiate their terms and fees.
"The solution we eventually found has been to raise salary levels by over 25%, give two consecutive days off every week and to pay overtime for extra hours worked."
Visciano has mixed feelings about the situation. "This feels like a better deal for the kitchen staff a previously notoriously tough environment to work in pre pandemic. However, these additional costs have really hit the bottom line for the company," he said. "We haven’t felt able to pass this cost on with further price increases to the customer, so the company is currently absorbing this as an investment into the future."
Tel Aviv-inspired Street food offering, Shuk, is based in Borough Market and Seven Dials Market in London. Founder director Mark Jankel said he was feeling the pain in every area of his business, but chefs had been the hardest to find.
Jankel has tried to tap into networks to find "people with the right mindset and attitude" with the aim of offering training and long-term promotions within the business.
"It is going to take some time to build a new workforce within our sector, and we all have to focus massively on training individuals and making sure that we deliver a great workplace in which they can feel fulfilled," he said.
Sunny Hodge, owner of Diogenes the Dog wine bar, which has branches in London’s Elephant and Castle and Battersea, said he had found sommelier and runners for his bars "the toughest to find".
The business owner said he has done "everything that could have been done" to attract staff.
He has tried overall wage increases, introducing private medical care incentives, using online agencies and video job application apps – and last week even stuck "a neat little ad on our nearest bus stop".
"Something needs to change," he said.
Image: al clark / Shutterstock
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