Talent6 min read
The seasonal staffing problem is a retention problem
Every coastal property chases the same two hundred people every April. The ones that stop chasing have usually fixed something else.
Zanele NkosiHospitality Trainer
Along any resort coastline the same conversation happens each January. Forty positions to fill by April, in a market where every competing property is trying to fill forty of their own, from what is broadly the same two hundred people.
Framed that way it looks like a sourcing problem, and it gets a sourcing answer: more agencies, higher rates, earlier start. That works for one season and makes the following season worse, because rates ratchet and nobody comes back.
The properties that stop chasing
The operations that solve it are the ones with a return rate. When 60% of last year's seasonal brigade comes back, the vacancy is twelve people rather than forty, and twelve is a normal recruitment problem. Return rate is not built in January. It is built in the previous August, in accommodation standards, rota fairness, and whether a supervisor was any good.
- 71% → 34%
- Turnover, 260-room property, 14 months
- 60%+
- Return rate that makes seasonal recruitment normal
- 1.5×
- Salary cost of a failed appointment
None of that is a staffing intervention. It is a management one, which is why staffing agencies cannot sell it and operators rarely buy it.
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