Jobs fair aims to fill over 600 hospitality staff vacancies in London's West End

One of London's biggest landlords is to hold its first ever recruitment fair in a bid to fill hundreds of empty hospitality job roles across the West End.

The Crown Estate, which owns all of Regent Street and around half of St James's, said a survey of 25 of its tenants found there was a shortfall of over 600 staff in the area.

The fair will take place on 14 June at Park Row restaurant on Brewer Street, between 10am and 4pm, with operators including Fallow, Cafe Murano, Corbin & King, Hotel Cafe Royal and Neat Burger taking part.

Businesses are recruiting for a wide range of hospitality roles including baristas, waiters, chefs, managers, operations managers and housekeeping staff.

James Holah, group executive chef at Murano Group, told The Caterer the company was around 10% short of the staff it needed and had struggled to find mid-level talent.

He said: "It's the chef de partie or sous chef roles, where there's an expectation for them to have a decent set of skills or experience, [where the staff] are just not there or there are a precious few that everybody's scrapping over.

"Compare that to as far as four years ago you used to have a queue round the block of people wanting to work in the best restaurants, there was always someone ready to jump in, but that isn't happening anymore.

"We accept those days are gone, everyone's moved on geographically or in different careers. The only way out of this crisis is to grow our own talent. If the careers fair attracts a few people we'll take them on and give them the skills we need. The people with the skills are already snapped up."

Six months ago the Crown Estate launched a customer partnership team to help support its tenants as businesses struggled to recover from the pandemic. Leanne Catterall, customer partnership director at the Crown Estate, said the staffing problem was across the board in retail and hospitality.

She added: "There's been a real dip in people in the industry since Brexit, that's when we first started to notice the challenges and that's just started to worsen with the pandemic.

"Our customers are seeing the impact on their bottom line and having to spend more on staffing."

James Robson, co-founder of Fallow, said: "We need to do all that we can to show prospective employees the wonders that a role in hospitality can provide, and the jobs fair will do just this."

The fair will be free to attend and is open to anyone. Tickets are available on the Crown Estate website.

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