The Grateful for Hospitality Podcast features candid conversations with founders, operators, and experts shaping the sector. Practical insights, honest stories and ideas to make you think.
Watch Episode 6.
About the Episode
Everyone in hospitality talks about a recruitment crisis. Dawn Lawrence thinks we’re solving the wrong problem. In this episode she makes the case that retention is the real issue – and that the fixes are cheaper and simpler than most operators assume. She unpacks why benefits belong at the top of every job ad, why free parking and a uniform count, why transparency on tips is now a competitive advantage, and where AI in recruitment quietly filters out brilliant people. She also opens up the CLEAR campaign – care, leisure, entertainment, attractions and retail – the parts of hospitality nobody thinks to advertise. Practical, blunt and full of things you can action this week.
About the Guest
Dawn Lawrence is Co-Founder and CEO of Hospitality Jobs UK, a job board built around quality over quantity that also runs employer microsites, and Co-Founder of HUU – Hospitality & Universities United, a free platform connecting students, universities and hospitality employers. Before hospitality she spent her career at Dixons Stores Group (Dixons Carphone PLC), leaving as European Head of Recruitment covering the UK and Europe for 90,000 employees with a team of 53. She is a vocal advocate for structured hiring, transparent pay and tips, and the CLEAR campaign.
Key Topics Covered
- Why your job ads are losing candidates in the first three seconds – and the one section that has to sit at the top.
- How to turn tips into a hiring advantage – what to disclose, how to explain the split, and why £100 a week changes the whole offer.
- Where AI helps in recruitment and where it costs you good people – the screening trap most operators walk straight into.
- How to keep your best people without spending more on pay – L&D as a retention tool, not a training line item.
- What great hospitality managers actually do differently – listening, succession conversations and handing over real projects.
- The five hospitality sectors you’re not recruiting from – care, leisure, entertainment, attractions and retail.
- How to sell hospitality against a warehouse job – the benefits maths that wins the argument.
- Why brand awareness beats brand size – parent brands, sub-brands and what candidates actually recognise.
What We Discussed
- Introduction – Mason sits down with Dawn Lawrence of Hospitality Jobs UK.
- The white-label graduate programmes Dawn built on HUU, and the 18-month rotation scored against a discipline matrix.
- Inside HUU: employer, academic and candidate sections, hospitality acronyms explained for international students, interview tips, charities and trade bodies.
- Why HUU isn’t commercialised – universities pay nothing, and what employer sponsorship actually buys.
- The heat-map exercise that revealed candidates were leaving to research employers, and how microsites fixed it.
- Why every microsite must have a benefits section – uniform, food, tips, and in some cases live-in accommodation.
- What students actually want: the monthly university sessions with eight to ten employers across different sectors.
- The career story hospitality never tells Gen Z – head office, not just the shop floor.
- “More than just a jobs board”: quality over quantity, and the audiences other boards ignore – the armed forces career transition programme, universities, Springboard, the BII, the Institute of Hospitality and the care sector.
- Tips as a benefit, and why some operators still hide them – culture, transparency and where the money really goes.
- How to build a job ad that converts: benefits at the top, brand awareness as the second pillar, and the underrated wins like free parking.
- Mental health support as a benefit – and the free industry provision operators forget they already have.
- Retail versus hospitality: what Dawn found when she moved across from Dixons, and what has improved since.
- Tech and AI in recruitment – where it earns its place, where it has to be policed, and the case for human-to-human.
- The retention argument: why L&D is a retention tool, and why onboarding and ideas from the team matter more than pay rises.
- The Peach Pub Company “Peachy Parade” – fifteen minutes each morning that set the team up for the day.
- What makes a great hospitality manager: listening, succession conversations, giving away projects and hiring people better than you.
- The good news stories the industry doesn’t tell – new openings, competitive socialising and pubs that are thriving.
- The report stat that stopped Mason: 72% said working with people they like mattered most – ahead of pay.
- Dawn’s own career – from an hour and a half sat waiting on day one at Dixons to European Head of Recruitment, and why she left.
- Hospitality versus the warehouse: life-work balance, predictable hours, and the five to eight grand difference.
- The CLEAR campaign explained – care, leisure, entertainment, attractions and retail, and why people leave the industry without knowing it.
- Career waiters: what the UK can learn from America and Europe about front of house as a profession.
- What the armed forces career transition survey revealed about why leavers want to run a pub.
- Imposter syndrome, and why the answer sits with how we train and recruit managers.
- The closing question we ask everyone: what are you grateful for?
Key Quotes
“We talk about, is there a recruitment problem in hospitality? There’s a retention problem in hospitality. Because if you retain people, there wouldn’t be a recruitment problem.”
– Dawn Lawrence
“If you’re earning 100 pound tips a week, that’s five grand extra a year.”
– Dawn Lawrence
“I like AI. I think there’s a need for it, there’s a place for it, but it’s got to be supervised and managed. It’s got to be policed properly.”
– Dawn Lawrence
“The older you get, you realise that possessions don’t mean anything, memories mean everything. And when you go away, every memory, if you look at all your memories, it’s created normally in a hospitality environment.”
– Dawn Lawrence
Key Takeaways
Widen your talent pool with CLEAR. Care, leisure, entertainment, attractions and retail all run hospitality operations. Position moves as a sideways step within the industry, not an exit from it.keep its best people. In this episode, Jo and Mason get into why retention is still broken in 2026: engagement scores that don’t predict anything, managers who “don’t have time” to talk to their teams, and recognition schemes nobody uses. Jo shares the five things people actually want from work, why embedding beats engagement, and the client data showing career conversations made staff six times less likely to leave. Straight talk, hard numbers, and a proper dose of hospitality heart.
Put your benefits at the top of every job ad. Candidates flick through adverts in seconds. Uniform, food, free parking, accommodation, tips, mental health support – list them before the responsibilities.
Be explicit about how tips are split. Say what goes to back of house and what goes to front of house. Hiding it reads as something to hide – and £100 a week is £5,000 a year you’re not advertising.
Treat learning and development as retention spend, not training spend. If people are developed and feel valued, you don’t have to recruit and train a replacement.
Never leave an AI screen unsupervised. Rigid criteria will reject candidates who have the skills but not the CV wording. Police the filters and keep a human in the loop.
Reintroduce the fifteen-minute morning huddle. Menus, standards, how everyone is doing. Peach Pub Company’s “Peachy Parade” set the tone for the whole shift and built a sense of team.
Keywords
Grateful Hospitality Podcast, Grateful net, episode 6, HJUK, hospitality jobs UK, hospitality, retention, engagement, embedding, employees, workforce, careers, progression, development, leadership, management, coaching, recognition, rewards, performance, conversations, culture, belonging, motivation, onboarding, check-ins, recruitment, hiring, attrition, turnover, succession, talent, transparency, payroll, pay, tronc, fairness, expectations, managers, training, technology
