Hospitality Rising pauses recruitment campaign due to shortage of funding

Hospitality Rising has paused its industry recruitment drive due to a lack of available funding, having reached a “milestone” of 300,000 job applications.

The high-profile advertising campaign was launched in October 2022 with the backing of top chefs including Tom Kerridge and Angela Hartnett. It had also raised £900,000 from operators, suppliers and sponsors.

At the time of the launch, the industry was facing an acute staffing crisis, with 400,000 vacancies and businesses scaling back operations as a result of the lack of staff.

Hospitality Rising aimed to encourage young people aged between 18 and 30 to consider a career in restaurants, bars, hotels and foodservice with catchy straplines, social media campaigns and easy access to an online jobs board.

In an Instagram post, Mark McCulloch, founder and campaign director of Hospitality Rising, said: “Our vision is to attract the next generation of talent into hospitality by changing the deep-rooted negative perceptions of hospitality amongst UK nationals.

"To make this change will take a 5-10 year continuous national advertising campaign costing circa £1m+ per year to get the reach and repetitional impact needed to truly turn perceptions around.

“Unfortunately, this funding is not available at present, which has led me to the decision to pause the Hospitality Rising campaign for now. However, should the funding become available we will be ready and waiting to jump into action as the campaign and the team will be ready to go.”

McCulloch said the industry is facing “bigger challenges in terms of VAT, business rates and fewer customers”.

He added: “Should that change at any point, the team is poised and ready to reactivate the campaign. For now, a huge thank you to everyone who has supported Hospitality Rising to date.”