Hospitality Rising 'breaks the internet' with over 20,000 job applications

Recruitment campaign Hospitality Rising has received over 20,000 applications since it launched its jobs board at the end of October.

Over 83,000 people have viewed its job listings and its TikTok channel has had 4.3m impressions, the campaign said.

Application figures have almost tripled over the space of a month, as 7,000 people applied for jobs through the site within two days of its launch.

Hospitality Rising founder Mark McCulloch tweeted on Tuesday: "So yesterday @HospoRisingUK broke the internet – well our own site fell over due to traffic from our YouTube adverts. A good bad problem to have.

"We have increased the loading so bring it on job applicants. We're here and ready to welcome you into a job / career in hospitality!"

McCulloch shared a photo of Kim Kardashian's 2014 cover shoot for Paper magazine with the new caption "Break the internet Hospitality Rising", topped with a cartoon image of his face.

High-profile chefs, including Raymond Blanc and Tom Kerridge, as well as Wahaca co-founder Thomasina Miers, have backed Hospitality Rising, which aims to attract more young people into the sector, and appeared on its podcast to discuss the importance of the hospitality industry.

McCulloch told The Caterer: "We are completely blown away by the performance of our Hospitality Rising campaign and it gives us faith that we are attractive as an industry and that the creative and media targeting of under 30s is working.

"This is testament to the brains we have working on this including creative from Forever Beta and media planning from Smithfield.

"Although to the industry we have lots of questions around should we be doing TV, radio and print, you have to be where the target's attention is and that seems to be largely in YouTube, TikTok and Google AdWords."

Hospitality Rising has raised around £850,000 of its £5m funding target ahead of plans to launch a ‘government-sized' recruitment campaign.