7 Best Hospitality IT Staffing Solutions

Key Takeaways: 

• Outsource to Recruiting Agencies: Leveraging recruiting agencies can lead to faster hiring times, better candidate options, and cost savings, allowing in-house personnel to focus on other priorities.
• Utilize Employee Referrals: Implementing an employee referral program with attractive incentives can effectively tap into your existing workforce’s network, bringing in qualified candidates who are more likely to succeed.
• Offer Competitive Compensation and Benefits: To attract top tech talent in the competitive hospitality industry, offer competitive wages and unique benefits such as flexible scheduling and remote work options.

“The GDH team has been awesome to work with. They always go out of their way to make sure we have what we need.”

– Talent acquisition coordinator for a major consumer firm.

The hospitality industry has lost more than 3.5 million workers since 2020. While this impacted the front lines of the industry most heavily, there were also significant issues for the back office, where technology workers keep systems for booking, scheduling and more running efficiently. A record number of consumers are traveling and dining out in 2024, but organizations are having trouble hiring the IT staff they need to keep operations flowing.

It’s not from lack of trying. It’s simply that in-demand positions such as data analysts, web developers, and IT support have become harder to fill. Companies have needed to work harder and smarter since the pandemic’s end to find the talent they need.

Source: ZipRecruiter

Here are some of the top hospitality staffing solutions available in 2024 to help you maximize hiring efforts and find the right people for your team.

1. Let a Recruiting Firm Do the Heavy Lifting

The perception that using a recruiting staffing and recruiting solutions firm comes at a high cost simply isn’t true. Outsourcing recruiting can be the best solution because of a faster time-to-hire, better candidate options, and the ability for in-house personnel to focus on other priorities. Overall, using a recruiting agency can be more cost-effective than recruiting in-house because of the greater speed and effectiveness. 

2. Use an Employee Referral Program

Your employees are one of the best sources for recruiting new workers. Plus, if they’re rewarded for referrals, they’ll be happy to recommend people that they know are looking for work. The keys to making an employee referral program work are making sure incentives are attractive enough and including an introductory period (usually 90-180 days) in which referred employees need to work successfully before rewards are earned. 

3. Offer an Attractive Compensation Package

Your tech hiring efforts will be made more challenging if you don’t offer competitive wages and benefits. With so much demand for tech workers, even those offering competitive wages may have difficulty hiring staff. If you can offer desirable perks, like flexible scheduling, remote work, or other items your employees want, you may be able to attract top workers that wouldn’t be interested otherwise.

Source: ZipRecruiter

4. Hire at Colleges and Trade Schools

Going straight to technology schools and colleges to look for talent could give you advantages over other companies trying to hire. Schools can help you identify promising students, and you can form relationships with them before graduation so they’re more likely to come work for you as soon as they have their degrees.

Some colleges have job fairs you can participate in, or you can approach career offices directly if you want to start initiatives. Mentoring programs and internships are other programs that form relationships, and they can yield top hires in the industry.

5. Two-Way Interviews

In any field where hiring is difficult, workers who have their pick of jobs will be evaluating potential employers just as much as employers are evaluating them. Formalize this process by instituting two-way interviews where the goal is to give stats about your company while getting information about the applicant.

While video interviews have become more commonplace, they don’t have to be one-way without a chance for the applicant to ask their own questions and have a dialogue with the interviewer.Two-way interviews are a better method of ensuring positive, cultural fits for positions and the respective companies, which can improve retention.

6. Decentralize Hiring

Many larger hospitality companies have multiple locations. In these instances, it makes sense to decentralize hiring rather than having one main process running out of the national or international headquarters. Local recruiters and hiring staff will be more successful in finding talent in that area, rather than trying to do so from distant locations.

7. Consider Bootcamp Grads

An IT bootcamp is a concentrated course teaching essential skills and providing real-world training for people seeking jobs in the information technology field. Coding bootcamps focus on the hard skills that employers desire. As a result, bootcamps can provide an accelerated path to a rewarding technical career.

The strength of a Boot Camp graduate lies in their ability to put essential skills into practice, rather than merely understanding the theory. As per Indeed.com, these graduates are well-equipped to produce quality code, offer unique problem-solving approaches, and excel from the get-go, making them just as competent as those with Computer Science degrees. Boot Camp graduates are a force to be reckoned with!

BONUS #8

Highlight Opportunities for Advancement

The best candidates look for ways to grow their skills and advance in their careers. Your company needs to provide these opportunities and highlight them during the recruiting process in order to get an edge over other employers who also want to recruit IT staff. Making these opportunities clear to candidates could mean the difference between making the hire and losing candidates to companies that do highlight these opportunities.

If you need help hiring IT staff in the hospitality industry, GDH can bring its top-notch staffing strategies to work for your company. GDH’s talent pools, job listings, and personalized, people-centered culture will help you find easy workforce solutions tailored to your specific needs .