By 2025 UK hospitality sector short by 500,000 key workers

A report, published on behalf of the British Hospitality Association in collaboration with KPMG, has a stark warning for the hospitality sector that within five years the sector will be looking to fill 500,000 roles. The problem is since the beginning of the Brexit crisis, EU migrant worker numbers have slowly started to drop. As Britain legally leaves the European Union, this problem will get even worse.

Here’s what AlohaEPOS believes hospitality firms needs to do:

“In the UK we’re seeing unemployment at its lowest rate since the 1970s, according to the Office for National Statistics, so it’s already becoming a struggle to recruit bar, hotel and restaurant staff.

But the hospitality industry is booming as the lower pound is also making the UK more attractive to tourists. At the moment, more than 7,000 extra hotel rooms are being built in London alone to cater for them all.

So are we already in a crisis?

Hospitality expert Prof. Peter Jones says in his white paper ‘Staffing – the issue of our times’ that the hospitality industry already has the top number of vacancies in any sector as a share of total employment.

He says the KPMG study “concludes that it will be hard to fill the recruitment gap with UK unemployed workers or workers from other sectors.”

“For ‘hard to fill’ read ‘impossible’.”

Prof. Jones calls for a vigorous response to the situation from a government perspective but can your café, restaurant or hotel afford to hang around for government initiatives when you need waiters, housekeepers and counter staff?

So can your hospitality business beat the Brexit blues?

We took a look at the tactics being used by several highly successful UK restaurant and hotel businesses to offset staffing issues.

It seems thriving businesses have much in common when it comes to using a hospitality EPoS system to boost efficiency and reduce operating and labour costs.

We spotted 6 tactics these businesses use:

1. Good rostering
2. Better customer service
3. Mobile ordering devices used table-side
4. Fraud detection methods
5. Improved stock control
6. Informed planning and decision-making”

There you have it, get in touch if you would like a reliable network which can handle the kind of EPoS system which can help you in all these areas.