Why hospitality teams are always hiring

Most HR experts agree that a 10–15% annual turnover rate is normal for most industries. So why is hospitality staff turnover around four to five times higher than that?

Several factors contribute to hospitality employee churn:

Odd hours: Taking a hospitality role usually means working unsociable hours and giving up evenings, weekends, and holidays.

Many people are happy to take on these types of roles temporarily, while a much smaller number view hospitality as a vocation. Those who love it may stay or leave depending on their overall experience and how sustainable the role feels long term.

Lower income: Hospitality employees often work irregular hours for lower pay, relying on tips or overtime to top up what they take home.

In a UK survey in 2025, nearly half of all respondents said they’d worked eight or more extra hours a week outside of their contracted hours, despite not all of them being compensated for this work.

Burnout: Too much of this type of pressure can take a toll on employees’ mental and physical health. Even people who love their jobs may leave sooner than expected if the workload is too demanding.

In a 2020 Burnt Chef Project survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they’d had three or more episodes of poor mental health from working in hospitality, and over 60% flagged poor work–life balance and workplace pressure as contributing factors.

Competitive markets: In tourist hotspots, employees usually have more options and may jump ship if a competitor is offering better pay, improved hours, or bigger benefits. In more remote areas, the challenge becomes a lack of local skills. When there are fewer trained candidates nearby, it’s naturally harder for businesses to fill roles or keep staff long term.

Career goals: Career progression isn’t why most people join hospitality, but it matters when they’re deciding whether to stay.

In a UK-based YouGov survey, only 3% of respondents said they entered hospitality for the career prospects it offered, but 35% said they were leaving the sector because there weren’t enough opportunities to grow.

Seasonal swings: Many hospitality roles are inherently seasonal, tied to tourism cycles, holidays, and special events. When a busy rush comes, businesses rely on temporary staff to manage the increased workload.

Once demand drops and contracts end, hospitality staff turnover rises. These seasonal swings affect permanent staff, too, with irregular schedules, changing responsibilities, and fluctuating hours, shifting expectations throughout the year. Even committed employees can feel destabilized by the unpredictability of hospitality hiring.

For hospitality teams, this combination of factors creates a cycle of constant recruitment. No matter how many people are hired, there’s always another empty role to fill.

This changes how teams make decisions. As roles keep popping up, hiring leans toward speed over perfection—like a game of whack-a-mole, but with much higher stakes.

And this has a knock-on effect on the rest of the process.

For example, it changes:

• How and where managers find candidates: Busy teams have less time to maintain or consult existing talent databases, which means previously qualified candidates are easily overlooked. As a result, teams rely heavily on external job boards and the fastest applicants first, missing opportunities to speed up hiring or bring back proven talent. Referrals and internal hires are also extremely low, with only 3% of hospitality hires sourced internally.
• How managers make decisions: Managers are forced to prioritize filling vacancies quickly over finding the perfect fit. They may need to compromise on experience, availability, or skills just to get someone in the door. This can lead to more short-term hires who aren’t set up to succeed, which only adds to the churn.
• How much time gets invested upfront: Interview stages are shorter, onboarding is rushed, and training becomes more informal or inconsistent. Instead of building strong foundations, teams focus on getting new hires operational as quickly as possible, even if it means they’re less engaged or more likely to leave down the line.
• How success is measured: There’s limited time to step back, review how things are working, and make improvements to the process itself. Over time, this creates a pattern where frontline hospitality hiring becomes reactive instead of proactive, and hiring teams feel like they never have a second to breathe.

During demanding periods, such as holidays, special events, and peak tourist months, this pressure reaches all-time highs.

Teams need to bring people in quickly and in large numbers, all while competing with other local businesses for a limited pool of candidates.

There’s more stress, more admin, and more decisions to make. If teams get it wrong, it affects both employee and guest satisfaction. Preparation is key, but there’s no time to prepare if you’re already on the back foot.

The combination of ongoing hospitality staff turnover and seasonal spikes creates an unhappy cycle: hires are made fast, they aren’t the right fit, they leave, the pressure rises, so hires are made fast, and so on. Breaking this cycle means moving away from reactive hiring and putting systems in place that help you prepare for seasonal demand before it hits.

When teams are under pressure to fill roles quickly, especially during peak season, communication between locations starts to break down.

Each manager prioritizes their immediate needs, spinning all the plates at once to manage vacancies, schedules, and available candidates. With barely any time to step back, they make decisions based on gut instinct rather than following a consistent, organization-wide approach.

Over time, this leads to differences in standards and hiring practices. One manager might prioritize skills above everything else, while another prefers to hire based on personality or team fit. One might reply to emails straight away, while another takes a couple of weeks to respond.

As these inconsistencies build up, they begin to bog down processes and complicate decision-making. This makes it much harder for multi-location businesses to deliver a consistent candidate experience and maintain the same operational standards across every site.

In bigger businesses, legacy systems that aren’t fit for purpose add to this problem, even if they were once introduced to make life easier.

Butlin’s experienced this firsthand while using a legacy human resource information system (HRIS) to recruit hundreds of employees across three holiday resorts in the UK. The system was originally brought in to automate admin tasks like payroll and benefits, not recruitment, and using it to manage applications was slowing the entire recruitment process down.

Without bulk functionality, everything from reviewing CVs to updating candidates had to be done manually. Central HR couldn’t use the system to communicate, and there was no way to access email threads or candidate conversations. The team was struggling to maintain a consistent, effective candidate experience and attract the right people to the right roles.

This kind of technology gap is a common challenge for multi-location hospitality businesses trying to maintain consistent hiring standards.

This is exactly what Butlin’s set out to change. By implementing Pinpoint ATS, the team replaced manual admin and disconnected communication with a centralized, streamlined recruitment process designed for high-volume hiring. Bulk actions, automated interview scheduling, and full visibility into candidate communication reduced repetitive tasks and removed friction for both recruiters and candidates.

With real-time reporting and shared access across resorts and the Support Centre, Butlin’s gained the insight and consistency their legacy system couldn’t provide. Hiring became faster, more organized, and easier to manage across locations, helping the team deliver a more consistent candidate experience while freeing up time for more strategic resourcing work.

💡 Read the full Butlin’s case study

Luckily, it’s not all doom and gloom. Recognizing the hiring patterns in your organization is the first step toward taking control of the cycle. Switching from a reactive to a proactive mindset gives you the time and space to focus on quality, not just speed.

Here’s what changes when teams plan ahead for ongoing hiring:

Your hiring becomes more consistent: Standardizing core recruitment steps across the business ensures every role is sourced, assessed, and onboarded the same way. Clear, repeatable processes reduce uncertainty and ad hoc decisions.

Over time, this consistency improves productivity and performance. Managers and HR know what works, what doesn’t, and how to refine the approach without reinventing it for every new role. Predictable processes also help maintain service quality and guest satisfaction when your business is busy or growing fast.

Teams work more efficiently together: A shared framework aligns managers and HR teams across locations. When everyone understands the hiring process from start to finish, collaboration becomes smoother, communication improves, and teams help each other out more often.

Screening candidates becomes quicker and fairer, too. All of this combined helps improve the candidate experience, strengthening your brand and making it easier to attract and retain talent.

Decisions are smarter and more data-driven: Planning ahead gives you the ability to track, analyze, and keep learning every day. Metrics like time-to-hire and time-to-fill what’s working and what’s not. Over time, this cycle of learning turns recruitment into a strategic advantage instead of a reactive operational task.

Sourcing becomes more proactive and targeted: Once you’re saving time, you can diversify how and where you find talent instead of relying on last-minute job ads. This might include building and maintaining Talent Pools, using industry-specific databases, strengthening referral programs, or targeting searches through different channels such as social platforms and niche job boards. This helps you reach higher-quality candidates and saves time spent scrambling to fill roles.

Flexibility is preserved, even under pressure: Proactive hiring doesn’t just mean removing adaptability. Instead, it provides a framework that supports both speed and quality, even when turnover is high.

Teams act quickly without sacrificing standards, maintain a consistent candidate experience across locations, and build a recruitment process that grows stronger over time.