While gearing up for the return of live events, the industry finds itself struggling to find the staff to run them.
The events and hospitality industry is once again in crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and this time it’s lack of available personnel causing the problem. UK hospitality saw 660,000 professionals lose their jobs in 2020, making it one of the hardest hit sectors, with many leaving the industry for good. As venues reopen and as more events go ahead, a lack of workers to run events is posing a significant challenge for the industry.
“One of the reasons we’re having this problem is that there’s been a lack of help given to the hospitality and events sector by the government,” comments Rich McLaren, Co-founder of CM Recruitment. “We feel like we’ve been completely and utterly ignored and forgotten about. Other businesses and other industries are getting a lot of help that our industry hasn’t received. It’s no surprise that people are leaving.”
“Hospitality has always been seen as something that you do as a student or as a part-time job, rather than as a career,” says Reece Deignon, Director of Easy-Staffing, a recruitment agency for the hospitality industry. “A lot of the people who work in hospitality were abandoned when the first lockdown hit. With the furlough scheme, when businesses started having to pay into it themselves, employees got abandoned. From a business perspective, there is no way you could afford, when you have no money coming in, to pay hundreds of people 5% or 10% of their wages. But without having that, the hospitality workers were left in a difficult situation of not having enough on the furlough scheme and not being able to get work, and so many decided to move into another industry.”
Live events and hospitality was one of the first industries to close, and will be one of the last to reopen. It’s not difficult to imagine why many professionals are searching for steadier income in unsteady times. According to the #wemakeevents campaign 77% of events industry professionals have lost 100% of their income during the pandemic. In addition to this, a combined effect of both the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit has led to an exodus of overseas workers, many of whom worked in the events industry.
“The EU staff have left because they don’t feel welcome anymore after Brexit,” Reece explains. The question that needs to be answered is: what can the events industry do about this lack of specialist personnel?
Rich offers an opinion: “You have to be more flexible when it comes to hiring people. The people that have left the industry weren’t born events professionals. They had to be given an opportunity to learn, and that’s what we have to keep offering to people.”
“Increase the pay rates,” says Reece Deignon. “You have to increase the pay rates and make hospitality more attractive if you want people to join the industry. Make it become more of a career rather than something you do to get by. Right now, it’s not something that’s taught in school or encouraged really. That’s something that has to be dealt with if we want the industry to recover.”
An opportunity to learn is exactly what is being offered by The Hospitality Professionals Association, who are offering professional development programmes in Financial Management and Revenue Management which are specifically tailored for the hospitality industry. Accreditations like these, as well as the government’s new scheme which offers businesses £3,000 for taking on a new apprentice, are designed to help bring young people into the industry. In addition to this, the emergence of hospitality-specific recruitment agencies such as Perfect Recruitment go a long way towards helping businesses to find skilled industry professionals to fill vacancies. While the hospitality industry is facing significant challenges in the wake of the pandemic, we are already on our way to conquering them.
