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Highlights
Increasingly demanding work is one reason for the worsening labor shortage.
Low enrollment in academic programs results in a low supply of managerial talent.
Labor shortage is not a temporary challenge facing the hospitality and tourism industry.
Collaboration will help with talent acquisition, learning and development, and retention.
Academic research on talent management is suggested to address labor shortage.
Introduction
Businesses have been presented with many unprecedented challenges because the pandemic hit the global economy. Non-essential business activities were suddenly put on hold because of massive lockdowns, mask mandates and strict enforcement of social distancing measures for consumers and workers. When people stopped traveling and dine-in services were restricted, the hospitality and tourism (H&T) industry collapsed (Kwok et al., 2021). Furlough or layoff was one immediate action businesses took to reduce labor and operational costs (Baum et al., 2020). Starting in the summer of 2020, selected markets and sectors in the H&T industry began showing signs of recovery. Airbnb, for example, laid off 25% of its workforce or 1,900 employees in May 2020 but had already observed growth in year-to-year gross-booking value over the weekend of June 5–7 in 2020 (Bosa, 2020). Gradually, companies resumed hiring more staff to meet the growing demand. It did not take long for businesses across different sectors to realize that they needed to deal with another new challenge from the COVID-19 crisis – labor shortage.
According to the December Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2021a), the number of job openings in the USA reached 11 million as of the last business day of October 2021, of which the accommodation and food services sector took the lead and added 254,000 jobs. Meanwhile, there were only 6.9 million unemployed workers in November 2021, about 542,000 fewer than the previous month (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021b). That means, even if all unemployed workers found a job in November, there were still about 4.1 million unfilled positions in the market. On top of that, a trend called “Great Resignation” emerged. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (2021a) reported a record-high number of people quitting jobs, at 4.5 million in November 2021, with the largest increase from the accommodation and food services sector (+159,000)....