Hospitality Industry Characteristics

The characteristics of the hospitality industry are extremely dynamic and differ from other industries. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the predominant industry is transitioning from manufacturing to service. The hospitality industry is growing—the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the hospitality industry to add 17% in wage and salary employment, compared to the 14% for all other industries combined. The nature of the hospitality industry makes it very labor intensive. Additionally, the hospitality industry has extremely high employee turnover rates. While the annual turnover rate for all industry sectors was 39.6% the leisure and hospitality sectors averaged 74.6%.

It only means that there is a big opportunity

Active recruitment of individuals with disabilities is extremely important in creating a diverse workforce, because not all hospitality establishments are accepting persons with disabilities as their staff. Only those large companies are more likely to employ them unlike those medium to small scale companies because large companies have more resource than those small to medium scale companies. Employment agencies can provide valuable services to companies wanting to recruit people with disabilities. Because almost all human resource would prefer to contact one agency or company to provide them staffs and not all agency are giving chance to those disabled persons in finding appropriate jobs for them. Lastly, one way to make recruiting people with disabilities a top-down commitment within an organization is to include “disabilities” in corporate diversity plans.

Human resources professionals in the hospitality industry hold many of the same concerns about hiring people with disabilities as professionals in other sectors—most notably inability to perform the work and accommodation costs. Beyond these concerns shared by most industries, the hospitality industry provides a unique set of hiring challenges. First, the broader issues revolving around hiring people with disabilities will be discussed, and then particular attention will be paid to specific issues in hospitality.

These actions are informed by set ideas and stereotypes about the types of jobs that people with disabilities can perform.

While it is true that disabilities create inherent limitations, it needs to be understood that people with the same disability can have a wide range of abilities and limitations. People with disabilities are often pigeonholed into certain types of positions without managers conducting in-depth assessments of the particular individuals. For more advancement opportunities to occur in the industry, managers need to create them.

The assumptions that managers make about the abilities of workers with disabilities stem from inherent biases and serve as a major barrier to advancement. The biases human resources professionals have about people with disabilities also extends to how they view their motivation to work. Ms. Mest, who works to place individuals with disabilities into jobs in the hospitality industry, states that “people with disabilities are no different that people without disabilities. Some people want to advance, some do