Industry talent branding: a collaborative and strategic approach to reducing hospitality’s talent challenge

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the talent challenges faced by hospitality organisations. This paper aims to propose a new concept – industry talent branding – which, is argued, offers industry stakeholders the opportunity to reduce such issues through working more collaboratively and strategically to magnify the pool in which individual organisations compete for talent. Design/methodology/approach: This paper proposes a conceptual framework of industry talent branding, based on brand equity theory, signalling theory and the employer branding literature. Findings: Industry talent branding opens a potentially new stream of research on how talent attraction and retention issues may be addressed. The authors propose that there is merit in moving beyond the organisational-level phenomenon of employer branding to industry talent branding through articulating a broader collaborative and strategic agenda to increase and widen the talent pool available to organisations. Research limitations/implications: The proposed framework offers the hospitality industry and its encompassing stakeholders a means to adopt a more proactive, collective and strategic approach to address long-standing talent challenges. Originality/value: This paper combines brand equity and signalling theories to develop the concept of industry talent branding, defined as a strategically curated, yet realistic impression of the employee value proposition (i.e. the benefits and rewards received by employees in return for their work performance) available within the industry, that by design will sustainably attract new employees into the industry and retain existing talent.