Travel Talent Cliff – Real or Imagined?

I thought I mis-read it. I hadn’t. Once a day I scroll through my LinkedIn feed. Today it included a link to an open vacancy at a household name in the travel and leisure sector. I skimmed the headline, then read the post had 2,500 applicants. That’s not a candidate pool, that’s a mid-size company. In fact, the number of applicants for that single role equated to fourteen percent of the hiring company’s total worldwide workforce. And here’s the kicker: the advertisement was a re-post by the hiring company. I wondered how many applicants applied the first time around.

This is the current state of human capital in travel.  There is a loud chorus of industry leaders complaining about a talent cliff, then we see chaotic and ineffective practices like the one above.

I wanted to better understand if the talent cliff in travel was real, or imagined.

Steve Browne heads up travel, hospitality and logistics at global executive search and advisory firm Venari Partners. The firm has a deep and weighty track record in sourcing talent for some of the world’s most well-known companies. Steve has an interesting background starting out as an investment consultant in fine wines before moving into recruitment in 2014, and executive search in 2018. He operates on the front lines of sourcing and placing talent, and has seen at first-hand how the travel and hospitality industry has been forced to adapt in a post-COVID world.

Steve works in markets across the globe, with the picture varying dramatically depending on where you look. We start in Asia where there is material leakage of high calibre expatriate professionals choosing to exit the region, especially from Hong Kong. Japan has traditionally hired prized talent locally, and that dynamic remains. China is effectively a domestic-first market, so key hires are generally local, which on occasion means firms can lack international awareness.

Crossing the Pacific, the US has a sizable homegrown candidate pool, and coupled with current immigration hurdles it remains underweight with overseas hires. Fortunately, local candidates can offer deep domain expertise but, like China, on occasion US firms can be a one-size-fits-all proposition, as they exclude themselves from more diverse and varied talent pools.

In Europe, we see fluid markets where cross border talent hires are commonplace.

The Middle East is fizzing with extensive high-grade hires particularly in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, often poached from a decelerating Dubai. Packages are generous, lifestyles attractive and opportunities to operate at the bleeding edge of transformation, as evidenced by NEOM, are creating talent magnets.

“Overall, the talent is there, and it remains mobile. However, we are seeing topflight candidates gravitate towards the more meaningful opportunities and forward-thinking employers. If there is a talent cliff it’s not universal, it is localised” says Steve.

The top quartile of talent, across most disciplines, has traditionally been underrepresented in travel. The industry’s average compensation falls below top payers such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, and energy, so many join the travel sector for a broader set of rewards and fulfilment than purely monetary compensation. There is a strong sense of fraternity in travel, more than in most industries, and it comes complete with its own rituals, ideology, and language. Sometimes these factors can make the travel vertical a little insular and myopic.

I speak with Johnny Thorsen, who is in Copenhagen and wearing a Star Wars t-shirt underlining his unwavering belief in the deliciousness of imagined futures. Johnny is a serial entrepreneur; he has been actively involved in some fifteen early-stage ventures as founder, early employee, or advisor, as well as stints at blue chips such as Sabre, Travelport, American Express and SAP. Johnny has travelled in the speedboats of start-ups as well as on the cruise ships of big enterprise. He knows the travel space well, and he is here to re-order it.

Johnny suggests any talent cliff needs to be bifurcated: Legacy skills and digital skills, the latter being a catch all for the know-how, ambition, and mindset necessary to build and run a digital enterprise.

“There is no shortage of legacy skills, and a decent talent pool exists today” starts Johnny. However, “that pool is drying up. It’s a ticking time bomb, but it is ticking slowly. The cliff is in sight, but we’re not there yet.”

What concerns Johnny is the acute shortage of talent required to imagine, build, rollout and support the next generation of digitally enabled travel services. Think intuitive automation, dynamic chatbots and omni channel self-service. Think machine learning, AI, and cloud native apps and software. “That is the cliff edge” he says. But Johnny is a man who has spent his life jumping cliffs, and today is no different.

Spotnana, where Johnny is one of the early hires, are shaking up the corporate travel market through the clever deployment of ‘a new generation of cloud-based’ travel services. The firm places a premium on hiring the best and brightest digital natives, and the investment is architected into their expense base. With Spotnana, attracting high octane talent is truly strategic, and every provision is made to source and retain it. To do that Spotnana have overturned industry hiring conventions: the majority of development resources are from outside of travel, new hires can elect what they work on, and salaries are aligned with best in class, regardless of sector.

To triangulate what Steve and Johnny shared, I speak to half a dozen HR professionals across talent acquisition and learning and development, the key areas where any talent cliff would be visible.

“Talent cliffs are self-induced” I was repeatedly told. None of the individuals I spoke with said the drop off in, or lack of access to, key skills was a surprise. Talent cliffs are allowed to occur due to short-sighted and short-term decision making. If organisations are a reflection of their leaders, then talent cliffs are a reflection of the leadership’s inability to plan. As one individual suggested, talent cliffs are not an external phenomenon, but ‘very much an internal condition.’

Both Steve and Johnny had told me talent cliffs are ‘localised’ not universal, now it was clear they are also self-imposed.

Attracting 2,500 applicants for a single role is not a responsible use of a company’s time or resources, and will drain its employer brand equity. It speaks to an employer’s inability to accurately determine, and purposefully identify, the exact skills it needs to deliver on its mission. Cliffs are two sided: look down and there is a sudden and deep drop off, look up and there is an overwhelming mass looming above you, like 2,500 applicates. Both are worrying.