Hiring in hospitality in the UK shouldn’t be this hard. And yet, HR teams know all too well that it’s one of the toughest recruitment landscapes in the country. As of recent industry data:

• The sector regularly reports tens of thousands of job vacancies, with around 79,000 roles unfilled between April and June 2025 alone.

• Hospitality still faces a high staff turnover rate, much higher than in other sectors, which means HR constantly repeats the hiring cycle.

• According to The Access Group, as of July 2023, a huge 42% of new hospitality staff were leaving their jobs in the first 90 days.

• Despite this ongoing demand, recruitment processes struggle to keep pace with candidate expectations and market shifts.

It’s not just that hospitality needs talent. It’s that the way teams recruit in hospitality often loses candidates long before they join the business. This article explains exactly where and how the hiring funnel is broken, and what HR teams should fix first.

 

Key Takeaways

• The hospitality hiring challenge isn’t a lack of candidates, but a broken hiring funnel: Talent is leaking at multiple stages, often before HR teams even get to speak with candidates.
• Most candidate drop-off happens due to process friction, not pay: Slow responses, vague job ads, long applications, and unclear timelines quietly push good candidates elsewhere.
• Speed is now a competitive advantage in hospitality hiring: HR teams that move faster from application to interview and offer consistently secure better candidates.
• Generic job adverts attract volume, not quality: Clear pay ranges, shift details, and expectations reduce mismatches and early turnover.
• Traditional screening methods often filter out the wrong people: Over-reliance on CVs and experience can exclude reliable, capable hospitality workers.
• Candidate experience is a measurable hiring risk: Poor communication and long silences directly contribute to ghosting, no-shows, and offer rejections.
• Onboarding is part of the hiring funnel, not a separate process: Weak onboarding increases early attrition and negates recruitment effort.
• Fixing the funnel saves time, improves hire quality, and reduces churn: Small process improvements compound into better outcomes across the entire hiring lifecycle.

 

Understanding the Hospitality Hiring Funnel

Think of the hiring funnel as a series of stages:

• Attracting candidates
• Receiving applications
• Screening and selecting
• Interviewing
• Offering and acceptance
• Onboarding and retention

In a healthy funnel, each stage smoothly hands off to the next. But in hospitality today? There are leaks at nearly every step. Here’s a breakdown of what happens in every stage:

 

The Attraction Stage: Why Hospitality Jobs Aren’t Standing Out, Even With the High Demand

Despite a huge need for workers (think tens of thousands of vacancies), many hospitality jobs go unnoticed or ignored by job seekers. 

This happens for several reasons, some of which include:

• Generic job ads: Listings from hospitality roles often mimic one another, offering no real insight into the role, culture, or even expectations.
• Lack of clarity: Phrases like “competitive pay” or “great environment” are too vague for candidates who want specifics on shifts, pay bands, and workload.
• Poor visibility in searches: Without strong SEO, hospitality job ads often rank below those in sectors investing more in talent acquisition tools.     

This means candidates might see the role but still skip it, and as HR knows, fewer qualified applicants means increased time and cost to fill positions.

 

Application Drop-Off: Why Candidates Quit Before Applying

Once attracted to a job, candidates rapidly decide whether to apply, and many abandon before completing the process. Here are the key causes of application drop-off

• Long, complex application forms
• Lack of mobile optimisation
• Unclear next steps or timelines
• No feedback or auto-responses

A hospitality job should be simple to apply for, especially since many workers use mobile phones as their primary job-search tool. Any friction here pushes candidates into “easy apply elsewhere” mode.

Pro Tip: Simplify your application process. If candidates hit a roadblock before submitting, you’ve lost them before you even meet them.

 

Screening & Selection: Wrong Metrics, Wrong Signals

Let’s be honest, many hospitality screening processes lean heavily on outdated assumptions:

• Years of experience, rather than aptitude
• Formal qualifications over practical skill
• Lengthy CV reviews rather than brief assessments

This creates two problems:

a) False negatives

Good candidates who don’t tick every box get filtered out.

b) Inefficient HR time

Hours spent digging through CVs that don’t accurately predict job success.

A better screening process integrates skill-based questions, quick mobile assessments, and pre-screening calls that filter quality candidates without draining HR time.

 

Interviewing Bottlenecks: Speed Matters, Especially Now

One of the biggest leaks in the hiring funnel is time-to-offer. In today’s job market, hospitality candidates are interviewing for multiple roles at once. If your process is slow:

• Candidates accept faster offers elsewhere
• HR teams lose momentum
• Roles stay open longer

Even a wait of a few days between screening and interview can cost you the candidate.

Pro Tip: Aim to schedule interviews rapidly, ideally within 24–48 hours of an application.

 

Offers & Acceptance: The Ghosting Phenomenon

Recruitment ghosting isn’t just a buzzword. It’s real. Candidates may interview and then:

• Not respond to offer letters
• Accept and then disappear before start date
• Decline late without explanation

While ghosting is frustrating, it often signals issues with the candidate experience during the hiring process:

• Lack of timely communication
• Unclear timelines
• Slow or disjointed feedback

HR teams that keep candidates engaged with regular updates and clear next steps dramatically reduce no-shows at this stage.

 

Onboarding: The Last Funnel Stage Where Many Candidates Slip Away

Even after a candidate accepts, the job isn’t done. Poor onboarding stacks the deck for early turnover.

Common onboarding problems include:

• Lack of clear first-day expectations
• Inadequate training schedules
• Slow paperwork
• Poor communication between HR and operations

Given hospitality’s already high turnover (estimated to be much higher than most other UK sectors), effective onboarding is critical to retention. 

 

What Hospitality HR Teams Are Missing And Must Fix

Now that we’ve seen where the funnel leaks, here’s how HR can fix it.

1. Optimise Job Ads for Search and Clarity

Include:

• Exact pay range
• Working hours
• Shift patterns
• Contract type
• Benefits and perks

This improves search visibility and candidate relevance.

2. Create a Quick, Mobile-Friendly Application Process

Mobile optimisation is critical for hospitality roles, where many candidates search and apply via phone.

3. Use Pre-Screening Tools

Quick, automated pre-screening assessments can significantly reduce unqualified applications and save HR time.

4. Speed Up Interview Scheduling

Candidates lose interest fast. So the quicker you engage, the better the candidate experience and the higher your acceptance rates.

5. Maintain Regular Communication

At every stage, set expectations and deliver on them. Silence breeds uncertainty.

6. Improve Onboarding

Great onboarding reduces early turnover, improves productivity, and boosts employee satisfaction.

 

Examples of Funnel Fixes That Work

Here’s how some HR teams in hospitality we worked with are already tightening the funnel, according to reports from their internal HR reports:

Example A: Clear Job Descriptions with Pay Bands

When a mid-size restaurant group added clear hourly ranges and shift details to job ads, they saw:

• A 35% increase in quality applications
• Fewer unqualified candidates
• Faster hire cycles

Example B: Automated Candidate Updates

Another hotel chain implemented:

• Auto-responses at application
• Weekly update emails
• SMS reminders for interviews

This reduced candidate drop-off before the interview stage by over 25%.

 

The Cost of an Ineffective Funnel

Here’s what a broken funnel really costs hospitality businesses:

1. Time Cost

• Longer open roles
• Increased hiring admin work
• Manager frustration

2. Talent Quality Cost

• Settling for less-qualified candidates
• Higher early turnover

3. Financial Cost

Frequent hiring and training impact the bottom line. A single recruit can cost hundreds of pounds. Multiply that across dozens of hires each year, and you’re looking at a significant burden. 

 

Why This Matters More in Hospitality Than Other Sectors

Unlike some industries, hospitality has:

• High turnover
• Seasonal spikes in hiring
• Variable shift patterns
• A large proportion of younger or flexible workers

This makes the hiring funnel both more complex and more fragile. A broken process has a much bigger impact here than in many corporate settings.

 

Our Final Advice for HR Professionals 

If there’s one idea HR teams should remember from this article, it’s this: Every vacancy is only as strong as the weakest stage in your recruitment funnel.

Fix the leaks, attract more talent, keep them engaged, and hire faster. That’s how HR professionals transform hiring from a reactive chore into a strategic advantage.

 

Conclusion: A Better Hiring Funnel Leads to Better Teams

In a sector with tens of thousands of vacancies and continual churn, the difference between a broken and optimised hiring funnel is not subtle. It influences:

• Quality of hire
• Time-to-fill metrics
• Candidate experience
• Staff retention and productivity

For HR teams in UK hospitality, optimising the recruitment funnel is not just best practice. It’s becoming business critical.