If you’re in the hospitality business, your digital strategy is nearly as important as the cleanliness of your hotel rooms or the friendliness of your waiting staff.

Travelodge now receives an average one million visits per week with a booking made on average every three seconds.  Take a look at Travelodge.co.uk and you’ll see a website that knows its customers – the home page tells you a few unexpected features of Travelodge today, tempting you with one of their SuperRooms, while the booking process is front and centre.  No other clutter.  No parallax scrolling.  Essentially, leave the bells and whistles for others; we know our audience.

But when it comes to job hunters, you suspect that many hospitality employers don’t.  There’s a trend that websites need lots of employer branding content – profiles from people, tours of locations, personality quizzes, video diaries and more.

Of course, we don’t doubt that some or all of this content is valuable – and to some extent, your google analytics and social media data will tell you what’s working.  But there are some interesting trends and insights that could potentially change the structure and content of your site.

Mobility – For one employer (Crieff Hydro) over half of people applying are applying on mobile devices.  So should you go for mobile optimized?  Or a mobile site?

Time –  Rosewood Hotels suggests companies should be responding to candidates within the hour; and ideally interviewing on the same day.  Your website could help make this happen by alerting recruiters to applications and making interviews an immediate action.

Age – With  fewer young people coming in the industry, it’s important to appeal to young and old. “Management and development training in the industry is a bit ‘one size fits all’.  Leaders need to understand how to be more ‘chameleon-like’ in their approach,” says Crieff Hydro.

Opportunities (especially for people new to sector) – Again we see a need to sell the industry to people, to let them know that there are varied careers within the sector, but also, according to the catering team at Durham University, to ‘Recruit for Personality, Train for Skill’.

New experience (especially for people in the sector) – This is absolutely brilliant and so true.  “We believe that when candidates are looking for a new job, they are actually looking for a new experience. When you join a new company in a new position you instantly enter that new experience. Rewards and benefits play a huge role in this. Having attractive rewards and benefits that cater to your needs is very important for potential candidates and can often be the reason they choose one company over another.” (Jumeirah).

So for any recruiter in the hospitality sector, there’s a lot to think about.  And we go back to our point earlier – think first about your user, and then provide the experience that’s going to be the best for them.