Graduate Recruitment Market Update

Since our last h-g-r newsletter back in April 2009, the hospitality job market in general has continued to be very tough. Summertime is always a 'slow' period traditionally for hospitality recruitment at all levels, and this year has been no different.

However, in the last few months specifically, we have noticed and received an increasing number of new requests from employers globally, particularly in Asia (especially in China) and now also from the Middle East and even Europe (including a small number of assignments in the UK!). Analysing all available market data, the overall impression is that Asia is now leading the way out of the recession, followed slowly by the Middle East and Europe. There starts again to be a lot of activity in the Middle East, but the recent Ramadan 'holiday' period has slowed this down, and we anticipate considerable recruitment activity to follow up from November 2009 onwards, across the Middle East. Certain markets continue to be very badly affected by the global recession even still. Namely the UK and the USA geographically, and in terms of hotel types, the 5 star market has been the most greatly affected in general.

Most of the large international hotel groups are still very cautious in their approach to recruitment, and in general are trying to move people around within the organisation rather than taking on new people. New opening projects represent the biggest opportunities for securing new employment, and there are no shortage of large projects opening over the coming 18 months. Unfortunately most of these have experienced considerable construction delays over the last year, but we are starting to see them commit to opening dates now, mainly in mid 2010 onwards.

Official branded Graduate Management Training Programmes continue to be scarce, with certain chains continuing to put their Programmes on hold for 2009/2010.

It is hard to forecast how things will go over the coming months and year, but our best guess will be that the employment market will continue to slowly recover, and that from February 2010 onwards it will start to gather some momentum. Hopefully this will continue throughout 2010 and then beyond, barring any major further negative global economic event.

For now it is important for students and graduates to be patient, to ensure their cvs are as good as they can be, and to be very flexible and openminded in their expectations, in terms of position, salary and geographic location for their next job or training placement.