Hospitality Hiring Insider – Exclusive insights from Nightcap PLC

How do you see the talent market right now?

“It’s always going to be a challenge. The market’s tough, finding great people and retaining great people. If you’re recruiting for one smaller venue it can be incredibly hard.

Our focus this year is bringing the whole Nightcap brand to life, being able to show potential hires the opportunities within the group and offer them a career within a larger organisation. This has really been key for us and is successfully helping us as part of our attraction strategy.”

Is Nightcap doing anything differently to attract new hires?

“Social media is playing a major role. Our recruitment team is creating a strong TikTok and Instagram presence to find personalities, particularly for our bars (@nightcapcareers).

We’re encouraging people to apply with videos that show us who they are, not just a video CV. We’re recruiting for personality. We can bring people in who, on paper, don’t necessarily have the experience that we might previously have looked for when recruiting.

We have an incredibly small recruitment team within Nightcap who go out to our venues and create the content themselves with our existing team members. We’re confident that we can teach people the skills they need. What we can’t teach is the charisma and character that our guests are looking for when they visit one of our venues.

We look at the latest trends and as a brand, we go against some branding guidelines. We do things that other bigger brands may not necessarily do, simply because we’ve got that freedom. It’s a fun way to recruit, looking at 50 videos instead of 50 CVs and a great way to find real stars for our business.”

Are you using other recruitment methods?

“We still use traditional job platforms because not everybody wants to apply by video. We get that and so the traditional methods are always going to be a part of our hiring strategies. When we’re looking at more senior teams on the management team, we’re looking for experience and where they’ve previously worked. Using a jobs platform like caterer.com can help us find and shortlist suitable candidates quickly.”

How do you keep the personalities onboard?

“It’s all about helping our people develop and grow their skills. We’ve just launched a new development programme called Night Path, which is our way of formally developing our people, particularly our bartenders, through nationally recognised programmes.

Bartending is a real skill that can take people around the world. We have bartenders that go and do competitions and made it a full-time career. We’re developing our people across the business and recently had two amazing internal promotions. One of our deputy general managers who started as a floor tender is now an area training manager and another who started with us as a general manager is now an Ops Manager, both very important roles.

It’s great if someone wants to join us and have that career development and that’s amazing and we want that. But actually, if somebody wants to come and work for us for six months, we’re going to give them a great time, and the confidence to take those skills into their next role.”

Have you got any tips for businesses in the industry who have recruitment challenges?

The number one priority for me is flexibility.

You must be flexible in terms of the way you recruit, who you recruit, how you recruit, what sort of questions you ask, and what sort of environments you bring people into when you’re interviewing them.

It’s important to remember that the right candidate is often not the final package. Having faith in your own training and development programmes is crucial to finding the superstars of the future because the superstars of the future are not going to come into your business as superstars. They’re going to be very raw and will appreciate the support.

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