Insider: Demographic Dirty Tricks – Recruiting in a Media Desert
By Jeffrey Catrett, Dean, Les Roches School of Hospitality Management, Kendall College, Chicago
Mr. Jeffrey Catrett
Remember Michael J. Fox in The Concierge? Or Tom Cruise in Cocktail? Or Pretty Woman Julia Roberts shedding her “street clothes” and learning table manners at the Beverly Wilshire? If you do, then you’re dating yourself. While the cameras are rolling in real and studio kitchens across the planet, the media seems to have abandoned traditional front-of-house hospitality. James Brolin no longer courts Connie Sellecca in our living rooms and his Hotel lobby, Robin Leach got rich and famous and departed the airwaves, and there are no longer any pint-sized Frenchmen exclaiming “ze plane! ze plane!” weekly to the general amusement of a hospitality savvy generation.
While the culinary arts are basking in the glory of media attention, traditional hospitality, once the darling of television, cinema and print media, has been brusquely cast aside during the last several years. It is a cruel twist of fate that the very moment when the industry sorely needs publicity to help attract new talent in order to shore up its withering management ranks, hospitality finds itself deserted and unable to rely on entertainment media for support. In fact, the very demographics that put hospitality in the spotlight during the Boomer Yuppie years of the eighties, conspire against the industry today: on the one hand, a dire need for talent has been created by the movement of the Baby Boomers into retirement and consulting while, on the other hand, today’s Millennials have not quite reached the age when grand hotels, fine restaurants and entertainment pique their fancy.
How is the traditional hospitality industry to recruit new management talent without media attention when many of today’s high school students don’t even know the meaning of the word “hospitality”? My article "Demographic Dirty Tricks – Recruiting in a Media Desert" in the Hotel Business Review, I propose a number of innovative solutions to this dilemma that is threatening the future well-being of hotel management education and of the industry itself. With talent recruitment and retention at the center of everyone’s attention today, finding ways to carry our message to young people will be critical to our continued viability.
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Sincerely,
Jeffrey Catrett
Dean
Les Roches School of Hospitality Management
Kendall College, Chicago
jcatrett@kendall.edu
