Hospitality jobs served to you
- 6/03/2024
- Debbie Mendoza
- Career Advice
Did you know that the hospitality sector is the fourth-largest industry in the UK? It boasts a net worth of close to £60billion. What’s more, the sector employs around six per cent of the total working population, so the opportunities are vast.
It’s not all about a Sunday roast at your local or a Friday-night takeaway anymore. Young, well-travelled entrepreneurs are being influenced by weird and wonderful recipes and bringing them to the UK – particularly London. Think street-food stalls and pop-ups, alternative restaurants specialising solely in sugar-free/wheat-free/gluten-free/vegan, cultural specialities from across the globe and dining experiences to shock, thrill and amaze.
Restaurants are now offering you the opportunity to eat a slap-up meal in the pitch black or eat a five-course tasting menu on an old tube. The hospitality industry is booming, changing and adapting beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. A new generation of work-savvy graduates is demanding flexible working hours, more control over pay and a fast, technology-focussed method of digesting info to reflect the current market trends.
The current service
The way we search for a new job in the UK has changed, with technology playing a radical part in how we search for information on our dream roles.
Currently, the most common methods of finding a new job include word of mouth, online job boards, recruiters and social media (including LinkedIn) as well as older, more trusted methods such as newspaper advertisements and the Job Centre. Whilst these methods are successful, Short on Staff believe it has identified a key gap in the market to help those of you looking for hospitality work, and those hiring.
That’s right – no job adverts, no trawling through hundreds of repetitive mediocre adverts promising a “trusted client” or an “exciting opportunity” written by bored recruitment agents. No uploading of a CV – ever. Crazy? Yes. A bit risky? Totally. Breaking the rules? Absolutely. But then again, so is eating a gluten-free-soy-bean-wheatgrass muffin, in the pitch black, on a disused tube carriage, whilst suspended in an aquarium tank full of robotic sharks. SoS wanted to develop a unique, easy-to-use, fast, reliable platform for job seekers and employers to find their perfect match. A bit like online dating, but with far less innuendo…
The gap in the market
Short on Staff believes it has identified a gaping hole in the hospitality recruitment market. With over 30,000 new job opportunities for young people created by the British Hospitality Association (BHA) in the past few years and a projected increase of over half a million new jobs in this sector by 2020, this is an industry with huge potential. According to a study carried out by Deloitte, unemployment will continue to be the top challenge faced by society in the next five to 10 years. So Short on Staff wants to make working in the hospitality industry accessible to everyone – from those with absolutely no experience looking for their first job to a seasoned worker looking for their next career move.
Our target market
Whilst SoS is designed to create opportunities for everyone, with over 40 per cent of its total UK workforce made up of Generation Y (that’s those of you born from 1980 onwards), the business is jumping on the hypothetical bandwagon. Couple that with the shrinking average age of a CEO, a healthy percentage of millennial entrepreneurs and strong government backing for young and new businesses, students, graduates, apprentices and others who fall into similar age brackets are emerging as our target market.
How it works:
Listen up, candidates!
The platform is designed to optimise and shake up both the candidate search for employers and the job hunt for candidates. As a candidate, it couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do is fill in a profile – set your own wage requirements, the distance you’re willing to travel and your availability. Then, write a little about yourself, select the type of work you’re looking for and you’ll be set up and ready to go. You’ll only be notified about a relevant job role when you’re already on the shortlist for it.
Rather than spending hours searching for, applying to and waiting to hear from different job applications, you’ll receive a notification on your mobile phone alerting you that you’ve been selected for a job that matches your criteria. You’ll be able to respond to or delete the notification (which could be a question, an interview or a job offer) – taking literally seconds to secure your next job! The better your profile and the more up-to-date your personal calendar, the more likely you are to appear in a client’s search.
So, to help you make the most of your experience, Short on Staff has a team of dedicated account managers on hand to help you to help yourself. You can email, call, instant chat, text or WhatsApp the company – there will always be someone on hand.
The wage you set for yourself will always be the minimum wage you’re paid directly by the client. SoS never take a commission, it doesn’t use snazzy technology to advertise you at a higher wage to clients and then take a nice fat cut of it, and it never hides what it charges. Clients pay a low, flat monthly or annual membership fee to have access to your profile – nothing more, nothing less. Open, honest and easy.
Listen up clients!
As a client, finding candidates for your roles could not be more straightforward. Using Short on Staff’s website or mobile app, simply fill in the details of the job you’re looking to hire for and its profile-matching technology will automatically bring up a list of interesting candidates. You’ll only be shown candidates who exactly match your criteria brackets. Need someone for a 4 pm start? You won’t be shown people who are available from 6 pm.
You can filter by location, wage expectation, availability or closest matching profile. Do you have complicated criteria? SoS will show you people who might match your search, giving you the power to decide whether to engage with them or not. Short on Staff offers a simple, easy payment plan enabling you to use our services like an insurance policy. It won’t add on fees, commissions or hidden costs – what you pay is what you pay for unlimited usage, unlimited searches and unlimited support. Use it once or use it every day – you’ll never pay more. Listen up, recruiters! Whilst SoS aims to simplify and streamline the internal recruitment process, it understands that some clients just trust recruiters.
It knows that recruiters are often given a bad name, and know that that’s not fair, so it has a package that can help you to help your clients. Imagine a database of tens of thousands of individuals where every candidate is active and looking for work in hospitality. Now imagine you can contact multiple, relevant candidates instantly with a job opportunity and know you’ll get an answer within a day, an hour or even a minute. Imagine a database where inactive candidate profiles are temporarily disabled, those no longer looking for work is made inactive and irrelevant profiles are deleted. Well, this is a reality with Short on Staff.
Pay structures and competitive fees
Advertising people and not jobs is not the only thing that makes Short on Staff distinctive. Its flat, monthly or annual membership fee system is totally unique in this marketplace. You become your own recruitment consultant, without the 20 per cent mark-up and you’ll get the candidates you’re after without needing a map, a compass and a magnifying glass to find them!
Commitment to giving back
Whilst Short on Staff is committed to solving your recruitment needs, it’s also committed to giving back to the local communities that SoS influences. Unlike any other job board in the country, it offers the opportunity for volunteer candidates to create profiles, and for charitable clients to have free, unlimited access to our volunteer database.
You get the same SoS experience and commitment but at absolutely no cost! What’s more, Short on Staff features and advertises a local charity every quarter on its website and encourages our regular, paid candidates to opt in for voluntary roles.