Hospitality Knows Its Next Guest. Does It Know Its Next Employee?

Hospitality is brilliant at designing what guests experience. In this abridged version of an article originally written for HOSPA’s The Overview, we ask whether hospitality businesses give the same thought to what employees experience.

Hotel groups can describe a guest’s stay in forensic detail. Discovery, booking, arrival, checkout, review. Every touchpoint mapped, tested and improved.

Ask the same operator to describe a new starter’s first ninety days, and the detail often runs out fast.

That gap is worth examining. Not because hospitality has got something wrong, but because it has already proven, through guest experience, how much difference deliberate design makes. The same thinking rarely gets pointed at the people delivering that experience.

The research backs this up. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found 89% of Gen Z and 92% of millennials rate a sense of purpose as important to job satisfaction. Gallup’s 2025 workplace research shows manager quality accounts for around 70% of the difference in team engagement, yet only 44% of managers have had formal training. Hospitality’s turnover sits at roughly 52%, more than three times the UK average, and Cornell’s hospitality research has linked rising turnover to falling guest satisfaction. Guest experience and employee experience, two conversations the industry tends to keep separate, turn out to be closely connected.

None of this means younger employees are hard to manage, or that hospitality needs to lower its standards. Every generation arrives with expectations shaped by its own moment. What has changed is how easily people can compare what an employer promises with what they actually experience.

Hospitality already holds real advantages. Genuine international mobility, fast progression, hands-on skills, constant human connection. Operators including Hilton and Whitbread’s Premier Inn have shown these strengths can be designed and communicated with real intent. For most businesses, the opportunity is not inventing new benefits. It is telling the story they already have with the same craft used in guest marketing.

A useful starting point for any operator is comparing what gets invested, in budget and senior time, in acquiring the next guest against developing the next employee. Few will find the two close. That is not a criticism. It is simply where the next gain is likely to sit.

This is the work FM Recruitment does with hospitality operators every day. Helping identify where roles, skills and leadership capability need support across an existing team, not just filling vacancies. If any of this sounds familiar in your business, we would welcome a conversation.

This is an abridged version of an article written for HOSPA’s The Overview. The full original article is available on HOSPA’s The Overview.

https://www.hospa.org/post/hospitality-knows-its-next-guest-does-it-knowits-next-employee

FM Recruitment works with hospitality operators on permanent and interim Finance, IT & Procurement positions. If you’d like to talk through how the current market is affecting your hiring approach, please get in touch and we can have that conversation.

 Chris Denison Smith, Managing Director – FM Recruitment

+44 7775 711923 / +44 20 8 600 1160 / chrisdenisonsmith@fmrecruitment.co.uk