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Hospitality And Leisure Job Descriptions

The hospitality and leisure industry may have gone through testing times recently, but as business returns, the competition for hospitality staff is picking up. There is a broad range of positions under the hospitality moniker, ranging from cleaners to caterers, porters, receptionists, personal trainers, event coordinators, and hotel managers.

To hire employees with the relevant skills, work experience, and qualifications, these need to form the basis of any good hospitality job description. To help you create the copy you need, we recommend using a job description template, which can be converted into a job advert, ready for posting on the UK’s most popular job boards and professional networking sites.

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What Do Hospitality And Leisure Professionals Do?

Your hospitality, leisure, and tourism job description should cover the details of the hospitality team functions and how they fit in your organisational culture. Your hospitality and leisure business needs to hire its staff carefully to ensure your company has the best mix of skills and experience. With qualified personnel and the right commercial and management strategy, companies can find or continue their success across sales, customer services, catering, and leisure.

Depending on the company, products, or services, tourism and hospitality employees oversee:

  • Implementing the hospitality management strategy (Hospitality Manager)
  • Sales and hitting profit targets
  • Using relevant software such as EPOS and MS Office
  • Handling customer complaints
  • Spotting promotional opportunities
  • Providing exemplary service to ensure customer satisfaction and the quality charter
  • Ensuring safety norms are maintained (catering and food production)
  • Hiring and coaching staff members (Hospitality Managers)
  • Administrative tasks required for day to day operations
  • Creating staff schedules
  • Budgeting and financial management

Hospitality And Leisure Role

The duties of tourism sector and hospitality professionals are completed by individuals in roles titled as:

  • Housekeeping
  • Operations or Hospitality Manager
  • Hotel Receptionist
  • Cleaner
  • Events Coordinator
  • Personal trainer
  • General Manager

Hospitality And Leisure Responsibilities And Duties

A hospitality worker’s duties are the must-do and high-priority responsibilities of the role. These are the job aspects that you will likely govern the person’s performance on, and as you can imagine, these vary significantly depending on the seniority of the position, the worker’s role, and type of hospitality business.

Hospitality, leisure, and tourism jobs may have responsibilities and duties including:

  • Greeting guests
  • Acting in a professional manner at all times
  • Using an EPOS system to process sales
  • Answering telephone calls and emails
  • Creating staff schedules
  • Liaising with suppliers and contractors
  • Restocking supplies
  • Reporting breakages and maintenance issues
  • Entering data into a spreadsheet
  • Managing budgets
  • Handling customer complaints/ensuring guest satisfaction
  • Developing or implementing the management strategy
  • Producing high-quality food and drink in restaurants and pubs
  • Serving customers in pubs, clubs, hotels, and restaurants
  • Event planning
  • Conducting performance reviews
  • Training junior staff
  • Marketing a restaurant, pub, hotel, or leisure facilities
  • Ensuring guests’ safety in swimming pools, bars, clubs, and leisure centres
  • Hitting profit and sales targets
  • Organising a schedule for maintaining rooms

These duties are pretty generic, but you can make the job’s duties more engaging and meaningful by saying how the responsibility should be accomplished. For example, ‘You will produce high-quality food by ensuring safety norms are in place and following the direction of the sous chef or head chef.’

Hospitality And Leisure Skills

To ensure your establishment follows best practices, hits its sales targets, and completes daily operations in line with UK standards and regulations, you need to hire hospitality sector staff members with the right soft skills for the job.

To complete their hospitality, leisure, and tourism job, candidates need skills that include:

  • Excellent communication skills
  • Knowledge of UK health regulations and law
  • Computer and application proficiency
  • Numeracy and English, a second language can be advantageous
  • Leadership and experience managing staff members (Hospitality Manager/Leisure Club Manager)
  • Sales and customer service skills
  • Organisation and multitasking
  • Good time management
  • Ability to work long hours, evenings, and weekends
  • Active listening
  • Excellent interpersonal skills
  • Decision making
  • Positivity
  • Receptiveness
  • Team-working and collaboration
  • Problem-solving skills
  • Stress management
  • Objectivity
  • Physical fitness
  • Committed/commitment to career development
  • Aware and adaptable
  • Detail-orientated/attention to detail

Hospitality And Leisure Qualifications And Education

The education and qualifications employers might seek depend on the sector, career, and level of seniority, but could include:

  • A Bachelor’s Degree in Hospitality Management, Hotel Management, or Hospitality Business Management
  • Level 3 Diploma in Hospitality Supervision and Leadership
  • Level 4 Diploma in Hospitality Leadership
  • Level 2 Certificate in Cleaning Principles
  • Personal Trainer Qualification

Required Hospitality And Leisure Experience And Training

Work experience and training for the UK hospitality, leisure, and tourism sectors is advantageous and might include hospitality management experience (for management opportunities), MS Office proficiency, reservation system proficiency, health and safety knowledge (including fire safety), and CPR, AED, and First Aid certification.

Hospitality And Leisure Job Description FAQs

Here we answer your questions on hospitality, leisure, and tourism industry job titles and job descriptions.

WHAT ARE THE HOSPITALITY ROLES?

There are many roles and job titles, including hospitality manager, housekeeping, chef, and personal trainer. Restaurant managers, catering managers, and marketing professionals also work in the hospitality industry.

WHAT DOES A HOSPITALITY PERSON DO?

A hospitality industry worker may manage staff, enforce the company’s quality charter, or provide services for guests or participants.

WHERE IS THE BEST PLACE TO FIND SKILLED HOSPITALITY WORKERS?

Advertising jobs on multiple job boards or niche career job boards will help when recruiting candidates with the skills and ability you need.

WHAT ARE FOUR BASIC DUTIES OF HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT/HOSPITALITY MANAGERS?

A Hospitality Manager job description should define at least four basic responsibilities; hire qualified personnel, oversee compliance with regulations and company policies, ensure sales targets are achieved, and ensure excellent customer service.

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT CHEF TIERS IN A HOSPITALITY BUSINESS?

Chef tiers include Kitchen Porter, Commis Chef (Junior Chef), Chef de Partie (Station Chef), Sous Chef (Deputy Chef), Chef de Cuisine (Head Chef), and Executive Chef.

HOW DO I HIRE A HOSPITALITY, LEISURE, AND TOURISM INDUSTRY PERSON?

Job advertising for hospitality careers will differ based on the hospitality skills, position, daily operations, and establishment. It will help to prepare a job description that you can leverage for a recruitment strategy that encompasses advertising on general and specialist hospitality sector job boards, social media, and employee referrals. Your hiring strategy might also include having a presence at hospitality conferences, events, and online with organisations or professional bodies.

To ensure hiring success, it will help to prepare a job description for job boards that includes keywords a candidate may search for and select the proper job title. Your job description should define the job and the job advert should promote your company’s culture and values and state if you are recruiting for full time, part time, permanent, or temporary (seasonal) hospitality jobs.

Flat fee recruitment solutions continue to deliver the best results when recruiting a hospitality manager or operations staff. Hiring People facilitates the process with one submission that automatically posts your careers and jobs across many job boards. The one submission approach saves significant time and hassle.

WHAT IS A HOSPITALITY JOB DESCRIPTION?

A hospitality job description is a document that sets out the role’s duties, tasks, and key skills. Putting these in black and white is vital and will help you find the ideal hospitality staff for a position that directly affects the customer satisfaction, safety, reputation, profitability and success of your company.

An effective job description should be transparent and clearly set out who you are, who you want, what they will do, and why hospitality industry professionals might want to work for you. It helps tremendously to use language and jargon that connects with and engages your audience.

When you get all of this right and include the best words to use when writing hospitality job descriptions, you will get job applications from qualified candidates that closely match your ideal person specification.

HOW DO I WRITE A HOSPITALITY, LEISURE, AND TOURISM JOB DESCRIPTION?

When writing a job description either for advertising a job or an internal job specification you need to focus on 5 main criteria:

  1. What are the key jobs, tasks, and duties required for a hospitality position
  2. Consider all the job responsibilities required for a hospitality role
  3. What skills the person must have for the job
  4. What personality traits the person must have to work in the hospitality industry
  5. Appropriate and relevant education and qualifications

These five criteria should help you build a picture of your ideal candidate. Good questions to consider that will help you write a concise hospitality industry job description that stands apart from others (essential in the current competitive job market), and attracts candidates of a high calibre, include:

  • What value does this role bring to your hospitality business?
  • How does the role align with your company culture, values, and mission?
  • How does this role differ from other positions?
  • How is this role similar to other positions?
  • What are the minimum hospitality industry skills or transferable skills?
  • What are examples of your standards, goals, and profit targets?

Suppose you are not hands-on in the day-to-day operations or highly familiar with the company’s services or products. In that case, it can help to interview one of your hospitality managers or an experienced employee to gain a greater understanding of the role.

A word about jargon: The phrase ‘jargon’ has good and bad connotations, and if it isn’t carefully considered, it may deter candidates from applying. Ask yourself if words and phrases are company or hospitality sector exclusive or recognisable by individuals who may have valuable transferable skills refined in alternative business sectors.

Furthermore, if you are hiring for senior-level or hospitality management positions, you might expect candidates to have a greater vocabulary and understanding of hospitality industry jargon and health and safety regulations. However, if you are hiring for a junior-level position, consider being as straightforward and transparent as possible.

WHAT HOSPITALITY TASKS SHOULD I INCLUDE IN A JOB DESCRIPTION?

The tasks of a hospitality manager or worker are any other activities that they complete occasionally or on a daily basis. These are usually subsidiary tasks such as completing administrative tasks, chopping raw ingredients, and answering customer questions.

It is tempting to leave some of the more ‘mundane’ tasks out to make your jobs sound more attractive, but this can lead to trouble down the road as you may recruit an individual that is not a perfect match or willing to carry out certain tasks. If you hire the wrong candidate for your business, co-workers, guests, and your organisation may suffer. The employee might leave your company, and you are back to square one, requiring another investment in recruitment and training.

If you get to the end of the process outlined here and find that your job description is too long and concise has gone out the window, it is time to review your first draft. To bring things back into line, you should delete unnecessary phrases and fluff, remove prepositional phrases, focus on what is role critical, and refrain from putting your entire ‘about us’ page in your content.

HOW DO I ENGAGE HOSPITALITY, LEISURE, AND TOURISM CANDIDATES?

As a final note for employers and hiring managers, it is crucial to remember that while a job description is about what and who you want, describing this alone will not create an inbox full of eager candidates willing to comply. A good job description and job advert must go beyond the duties, skills, education, qualifications, traits, and tasks that you want and communicate the position’s value to job seekers.

Your business or organisation should convey its employee value propositions to engage candidates, highlighting both monetary and other benefits. Benefits that will entice qualified job seekers to apply might include:

  • Stating the average salary range
  • Focusing on work-life balance
  • Flexible working – is the role remote or are hours and shifts flexible?
  • Opportunities to gain additional qualifications
  • Career development opportunities
  • The quality of facilities, equipment, or services
  • How the organisation’s values align with those of patrons and employees

Hospitality And Leisure Job Description Examples And Samples

We recommend creating your hospitality and leisure job description using one of the samples and examples below.

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