Although neither speedy nor cheap, there are still ways to recruit talented staff from the EU. Edmund Weil offers some pointers and outlines the positives of doing so.
Ever since 2020’s double whammy of Brexit and Covid, recruitment in hospitality has represented an ever-evolving challenge for operators all across the sector; nowhere more than in the cocktail world, where skill and dedication are pre-requisites for a good employee.
As members of the EU, free movement – through which many of the brightest lights in our industry joined the scene – was a recruitment panacea, and its termination in 2020 sparked a tipping point in our workforce. I’d been conscious of this change both from personal experience and anecdote, but my research into the numbers really brought it home: using Speakeasy Entertainment as an example, the percentage of EU employees in our business has halved from 80% to 40% between 2017 and 2024. Perhaps because of the aforementioned requirement for skill and dedication in our employees, ours is an extreme example, but similar figures for the UK-wide industry (Financial Times tracking 2019-2022) show a fall from 42% EU nationals to 28% – still a reduction of one third.
The fact that we’ve continued to progress against the background of such fundamental and precipitous change should be a source of great pride for our industry. To attract and retain new British workers with the requisite qualities to maintain and improve our standards, businesses like mine have brought in a raft of improvements to pay and working conditions, as well as overhauling recruitment practices and training programmes to develop skills from a lower base level. As a result, I believe hospitality is a far more attractive career path for British people than it has ever been in the past.
In spite of this, there remain over 100,000 unfilled vacancies in the hospitality sector (15% higher than in 2019). While the difficulty in hiring skilled bartenders and floor staff probably reached its nadir in 2021-22 as we exited the pandemic, we’re still in a tough spot. As an industry we must continue the work we are doing to attract better, brighter British candidates, but in the meantime, it’s worth looking at the routes available to hiring skilled hospitality professionals from abroad. One of the few consolations to our industry when EU free movement ended was the relaxation in the general immigration policy to include many more hospitality roles than had previously been allowed. As one door slammed shut, so another creaked open; now it is possible to sponsor visas for roles as junior as floor manager or bar supervisor from almost anywhere in the world.
Make no mistake – this is not an easy route. Like any interaction with the apparatus of the British State, dealing with the UK Visas & Immigration service is byzantine, expensive and, above all, very slow. In addition, immigration’s status as a political football means that requirements and regulations are subject to frequent and frustrating change. For example, the minimum base salary for a Skilled Worker visa recently increased from an easily-achievable £26,200 to a whopping £38,700, making it much harder to achieve for hospitality roles. This headline change alone was enough to deter many operators from exploring the possibility. Thankfully, there are a number of ‘new entrant’ exceptions which reduce the requisite salary to a more achievable £27,000. For example, anyone under the age of 26 qualifies as a new entrant, and likewise any applicant who is a recent graduate under a student visa.
If you’re willing to make the investment in sponsoring a skilled worker for a visa, it can come with some real advantages – not least among them loyalty. A visa will normally be sponsored for a minimum of two years, during which time employer and employee are effectively joined at the hip. Likewise, that mutual initial commitment can form the basis of a strong professional bond. Our longest ever serving employee – the peerless Ivana Popovic (Class FoH of the year 2017) was on a student visa when she started as a waitress at Nightjar in 2010. After we sponsored her visa, she ascended to GM at Oriole and only left after having her second baby in 2022.
For those considering taking that first step, here are a few guidelines:
First step is to apply for a sponsor licence, a fairly simple process involving form and document submission. Costs £536, takes around eight weeks. Once registered, you will have access to the online Sponsor Management system (SMS). This website is almost comically clunky and difficult to navigate (although the accompanying helpline is surprisingly useful).
The SMS is your only route to apply for, create and assign Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS), which are effectively digital tokens which can be assigned to visa applications to confirm they have a bona fide job offer with an approved employer. There are two types of CoS:
1) Defined – which is for a candidate applying for their visa from overseas. In this case, your application for a CoS will need to be accompanied by plenty of detail on the candidate, as well as the role they are being hired into.
2) Undefined – for candidates applying from within the UK. This often applies to existing employees on student or graduate visas whom you wish to keep on board. You can apply for a fixed number of these per year, so you can also keep them ‘in hand’ for when opportunities to hire someone special come up. You will need to justify the number you are applying for annually, and unused CoS expire at the end of the annual period.
It’s important to be aware that everything takes a very long time. If you wish to increase your annual allocation of undefined CoS, you’re looking at a target response time of 18 weeks, which means you need to plan your recruitment and your prospective employees’ visa applications meticulously. Failure to co-ordinate closely can easily lead to the expiration of an existing visa and a potentially devastating outcome for the employee.
There are costs on both sides. Each CoS costs £239, and there is an additional ‘immigration skills charge’ of £364 per year of the visa. This investment is dwarfed by the newly inflated charges required of visa applicants. For a three-year visa, they would need to pay a £712 application fee plus over £3,000 in NHS surcharges (more if they have dependants such as children or spouses). This lump sum can prove a bridge too far for a new hospitality employee, in which case you may wish to consider offering a loan repaid gradually through regular payroll deductions.
Sponsoring visas certainly isn’t for everyone. It requires investment of time and money from both sponsor and employee, and the burden of administration and compliance can be onerous. But for those prepared to make the leap of faith, it can open doors to a whole world of gifted and entrepreneurial professionals whose commitment to your business from day one will be difficult to match.