Building a sustainable talent pipeline

All across Asia Pacific, hotels are grappling with a persistent talent shortage, particularly in entry-level operational roles. This was surfaced in JLL’s Hotel Operators’ Sentiment Survey 2024-2025, with front office, kitchen and housekeeping flagged as the most challenging departments to recruit for.

It’s not hard to understand why.

Operational roles are often seen as unattractive: the hours are long, the pay modest, and shift work can be exhausting.

But for Paavan Patel and Ellis Hoe, two key members of JLL’s Advisory & Asset Management, Hotels & Hospitality team, starting on the ground gave them the firm footing they needed to grow into, and beyond, a career in hospitality.

The real issue is not that operational jobs are tough, but that they are rarely seen as a springboard for progression.

Using his own experience to illustrate, Paavan shared, “My first job was as a Guest Services Officer. I was later reassigned to the baggage department, a deeply humbling move that felt like a step backwards. On hindsight, however, it was anything but.

My role included managing a team of baggage handlers. I found myself honing leadership and resource management skills—a rare opportunity for someone as junior as myself. Those fundamentals would carry me through a decade-long career across hotel operations and, eventually, to my current role in consulting.”

Paavan’s story is a reminder of what the industry is at risk of losing: young talent willing to start on the ground (quite literally) and build up their careers.

Adding to that is the rise of Gen Z workers. Compared to the generations before them, Gen Zs want careers with impact, flexibility, and fast growth — attributes not typically associated with the hospitality industry.

In markets like Singapore, where young people have many career options, hospitality struggles to enter the consideration set. If this continues, the consequences will be felt not just now, but also far into the future. A weak entry-level pipeline today erodes the industry's ability to develop the middle managers and senior leaders we need tomorrow.

This sounds like a recruitment issue, but it’s a strategic risk. Increasingly, workforce sustainability demands to be treated with the same rigour as asset planning: long-term, structured, and performance-driven.

There are four key opportunities for the industry to respond decisively.

One of the most glaring gaps is how and when the industry starts engaging young talent. We are doing ourselves a disservice by not effectively showcasing how rewarding a career in hotel operations can be.

By the time students attend tertiary career fairs, many already have fixed ideas about their future. We need to spark interest earlier, perhaps among 14—and 15-year-olds, when career curiosity is still at a formative stage.

This could take the form of immersive experiences like holiday job shadowing, behind-the-scenes tours, or mentoring from successful young professionals in the industry.

Storytelling is critical here. By spotlighting local success stories, such as people who started at the front desk and now lead teams or run departments, we are giving students (and their parents) real-life role models to follow. This is especially important in the Asian context, where parents can wield significant influence over their children’s education and career decisions — like in Ellis’s case.

“Studying hospitality was actually my parents’ idea,” she shared.

“This was around the time Singapore announced the creation of two Integrated Resorts. The government’s push to boost tourism gave my parents the confidence that I would enjoy strong career prospects in the hospitality industry, so they advocated for it. As a young girl with no real career convictions at the time, it made sense to take their advice.”

Most hotels already offer internships, which play an important role in shaping early career perspectives.

Ellis, who completed two internships as part of her hospitality studies, reflects: “As a hospitality student, I benefited from two internships — one in a front office role and the other in corporate office. Each gave me a window into different parts of hotel management. The experiences helped me understand my strengths, what roles I enjoyed, and where I could thrive.”

However, such short-term experiences rarely translate into long-term engagement. To seed meaningful careers, hotels can go further by investing in structured management associate programmes designed specifically for operational tracks. These could provide accelerated development pathways, financial sponsorship and global exposure through six-month rotations at overseas outposts, with a return commitment through bonded tenure.

This will appeal to the fast-track growth that many young talents desire and prove to them that the hotel is serious about developing their potential.

This can be difficult to hear, especially amid rising wage pressures, but hotels must find ways to compete on pay in order to attract and retain good talent.

Often, a diploma or a degree holder earns the same starting salary as someone without formal training. This undermines the value of hospitality education and removes any motivation to upskill.

As in any profession, compensation should reflect both qualifications and capability, with clear progression aligned to the skills and experience gained over time. 

Additionally, hotels could consider distributing a portion of the service charges collected from guests to frontline teams through a transparent, performance-linked model. This would not only recognise contribution where it’s most visible but also offer operational staff a source of motivation to perform well and stay in their roles.

In a post-pandemic world where remote work has become the norm in many industries, hotels face a hard truth: flexibility is no longer a perk; it’s an expectation, especially among younger talent.

While remote work isn’t feasible for operational roles, flexibility is still possible and increasingly essential.

In Singapore, for example, hotel frontliners typically work 44 hours a week while their corporate office counterparts work 40 hours. Creating a consistent 40-hour work week would go a long way toward creating parity between operational and corporate roles. Improvements in roster predictability and more innovative shift planning, through the use of technology, can also help alleviate shift fatigue, support better work-life balance, and strengthen long-term retention.

Ultimately, hotels need to acknowledge that while operational roles cannot move online, they can still move with the times.

Confronting the hiring crunch in hotel operations will require coordinated efforts from industry players, educational institutions, and policymakers. The stakes are not just about filling jobs, but about protecting service standards, brand equity, and long-term competitiveness.

It bears repeating that for both Paavan and Ellis, their front-of-house roots didn’t just shape their careers; it gave them insights that now inform their work advising hotel owners and operators on strategy and performance.

They were both willing to take a leap of faith into hospitality, but we cannot bank on the hope that the younger generation would too. If we want them to act, we must show them that there’s more waiting on the other side than they might imagine.