Finding the right workers for hotels and hospitality jobs isn’t easy these days.
There has been an uptick in the deployment of new technology in hotels, some of which is a reaction to labor market conditions. But now, firms like Tampa-based McKibbon Hospitality are turning to tech — and AI internally to optimize the hiring and recruiting process. Hospitality employment levels nationally have dropped dramatically since 2019.
“And that’s with more hotels open,” said Bruce Baerwalde, president of McKibbon’s hotel management unit.
There were 16.59 million leisure and hospitality jobs in 2019, Bureau of Labor statistics show. In 2020, it dropped to 13.15 million, or 3.45 million jobs. That number was back up to 14.1 million in 2021. But BLS predicts employment levels won’t return to the 16 million level until 2031, and that’s still well below 2019 highs. Of the jobs lost in leisure and hospitality during the pandemic, only about one in four was recovered by 2021, BLS reports.
“There’s not a lot of people out there,” Baerwalde said. Florida is at 2.6% unemployment.
The company has shifted how it recruits. “We are using some AI to help us attract talent at the hourly level and [change] the way that we interact so that we are engaging with them faster, getting them to interview faster,” he said.
In the last 18 months, it has cut in half the time from posting a position and interviewing candidates.
“It used to take us almost two weeks, and now it takes us less than a week,” he said.
Providers in the space include San Francisco-based firms Jobvite and Rippling. They use AI to manage and personalize talent acquisition and the candidate experience. Jobvite’s AI-powered platform recommends jobs to candidates, provides personalized feedback and tracks progress through the hiring process. Rippling says it manages “every aspect” of the pipeline but doesn’t do things independently, like reject applications, without manual intervention from HR or recruiting, the company said.
Job candidates will need to get used to interacting with the tech. A recent Resume Builder survey projected that by 2024, roughly four in 10 companies will use AI for job interviews. Of that number, 15% of employers said they would rely on AI to make hiring decisions without any human input.
