What do people think about working in hotels today? How do they view a career in hospitality?
To answer these questions, Benchmark Research Partners recently conducted the Hotel Career Views Survey, with support from Hospitality Daily, Upshift, and Remington Hospitality.
We wanted to understand what people not currently working in hospitality think about working in hotels and hotel companies, and asked more than 2,000 people about this. The study participants were between 18-40 years old, had a range of career experiences, and lived across the United States.
Our goal with this research is to help you understand how people view working in hotels today, so that you can more effectively communicate and recruit talented people into your hotels.
Let’s jump into some of the things we found.
Personal referrals top the list of most useful ways of finding jobs
This underscores the importance of creating an employee experience and work environment that people will tell their friends about. Yes, you can give people referral bonuses, but there’s so much power to building a culture that people can’t help but talk about and refer people into.
Pay is the top factor for choosing career opportunities today
This isn’t true for everyone, but it’s most commonly the #1 criterion by far.
This may or may not surprise you, but as much as we talk about career advancement opportunities – which is true – we need to be competitive to get people in the door. The good news is many of you have made a lot of effort to create compelling opportunities in this area.
Tech and HR jobs top areas of interest
This was out of nearly 20 areas you could work in hotels or hotel companies:
I found it interesting to see tech and HR roles top the list, as both are big areas of opportunity in hospitality today.
Something else that stands out is that front-office roles are #3 on this list, which is an area of need for many hospitality businesses. I think also speaks to the desire people have to be in fun environments where they can interact with other people.
These are just some of the insights from the study. We also asked about the perception of hotels being a good use of professional skills, feelings on career opportunities in hospitality, what pay would be required to take a job in hotels, top concerns about taking a hotel job, what types of flexibility they want, and more.