Hospitality Doesn’t Have a Talent Shortage. It Has a Talent-Model Problem.

Hospitality leaders across the UK continue to face intense recruitment pressure.

In 2025, the sector employed around 2.7 million people (over 7% of UK employment), yet still

carried approximately 77,000 unfilled vacancies in food and accommodation. More telling still, the industry lost nearly 9,000 jobs in late 2025, during what would normally be a peak hiring period (ONS labour market data as analyzed by the House of Commons Library, Dec 2025).

This isn’t a short-term disruption.

It’s a structural one.

The conventional wisdom and where it falls short

The prevailing narrative is familiar. Industry reports consistently cite inflation, rising operating

costs, and labour shortages as the main forces affecting hospitality jobs and business performance. Margins are tight. Wage costs are up. Recruitment feels harder and more expensive than ever.

This diagnosis isn’t wrong.

But it is incomplete.

The industry keeps calling it a labour shortage.

What it’s really facing is a lag in redesigning work for the talent it already has.

The talent hasn’t gone it just doesn’t fit the old framework

Many experienced hospitality professionals didn’t leave the industry.

They left rigid employment models.

Across 2025, hospitality continued to struggle less with attraction than with retention and fit.

Turnover remains among the highest of any sector, with replacement costs reaching six to nine months’ salary once recruitment, training, and lost productivity are factored in.

The issue isn’t skills.

It’s design.

Today’s professionals increasingly want:

* flexibility across venues, brands, and projects

* control over schedules and workload

* the ability to combine operational roles with management or advisory work

* careers that evolve without exiting hospitality altogether

Portfolio careers have existed for years in consulting, technology, and creative industries.

Hospitality is only now catching up.

What this means for Hospitality leaders?

For operators, this is not theoretical.

F&B leaders need:

• skilled, reliable professionals who understand standards

• teams that flex with demand without compromising quality

• support not just at floor level, but also at management and advisory level

Yet many are still forced into a false trade-off:

flexibility or consistency

speed or standards

That tension is no longer sustainable.

A different approach: curated, flexible, professional talent

This is where FlairMakers comes in.

Not as a traditional agency.

Not as an open marketplace.

But as a Talent-as-a-Service platform built specifically for hospitality.

FlairMakers connects operators with a curated pool of freelance hospitality professionals across:

• operational roles (F&B, events, front-of-house, back-of-house)

• management support (opening teams, interim leaders, project roles)

• advisory and specialist expertise (training, standards, experience design)

• 
  

Every professional is vetted for experience and service mindset because flexibility should never mean lowering the bar.

For operators, this means:

• access to talent that is ready to perform, not just available

• teams that flex with demand while maintaining standards

• support across the full operational stack, not just shift cover

• 
  

For operators, this means access to talent that is ready to perform, not just available.

For professionals, it offers a credible way to build a portfolio career within hospitality.

The future of work isn’t coming, it’s already here.

Portfolio careers are no longer experimental. They are established across multiple sectors, and hospitality is now catching up to the same reality: people don’t want less work, they want better- designed work.

Work that values skills and experience.

Work that fits real lives.

Handled well, this shift doesn’t weaken hospitality.

It makes the industry more resilient, more attractive, and more sustainable.

Hospitality has always been powered by people. The challenge now is to design workforce models that support both operators and professionals without compromising standards or leadership.

The conversation is already shifting.

The question is whether the models will shift with it.

F&B Managers Association of London in partnership with FlairMakers