The hospitality industry is consistently ranked as one of the largest and most influential industries in the United States and world. It comprises multiple sectors, including accommodation (lodging), food and beverage (F&B), travel and tourism, recreation and entertainment, and meetings and events. You can land a top job using proven methods to attract hospitality recruiters on LinkedIn. 

Employment projections and job security are promising in this high-growth field, making the hospitality business a mainstay for experienced professionals. With a workforce representing one of the world’s largest, thousands of mid‑ to senior‑level and executive jobs become available every year, and the numbers are not slowing down. 

If you’re a hospitality industry professional wanting to advance your career, diversify your expertise, relocate to a more desirable city, or just explore new opportunities – make LinkedIn work for you so that top talent recruiters and corporate hiring managers can find you. 

The unrivaled benefits of marketing your experience on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most robust social media platform out there for job seekers in the hospitality industry (and just about every industry). It’s the world’s largest professional networking platform focused on employment and career development. There are more than a billion members in 200+ countries and territories, including 250 million in the United States alone. 

Given those membership numbers, some professionals might feel lost in a sea of other job seekers. But the platform’s distinct features and benefits prove the opposite: 

• LinkedIn is the place to be if you want to connect with top talent recruiters and jobs: LinkedIn is a key talent sourcing tool for hospitality recruiters and company hiring managers. At Goodwin Recruiting, our experts spend a good deal of time on the platform as part of our overall recruitment strategies, looking for ideal candidates to place in top jobs. We place professionals in many leadership roles at hospitality companies, from hotel and restaurant general managers to operations managers, food and beverage directors, sales executives, event managers, revenue managers, and many executive-level roles across industry sectors. 

• You can become a magnet for recruiting firms and corporate HR departments: If you use the LinkedIn platform in the right ways, you will surface in our searches for people who possess your specific skill set and experience as fitting job opportunities arise. Even today, we may be looking for someone just like you. Recruiting is about matching the right talent with the right jobs, and LinkedIn helps us do that. 

This vigorous career-building platform is underutilized by today’s professionals

If you’re not visible on LinkedIn – meaning, if you’re not using its features to strategically market yourself – then you’re essentially invisible to recruiters, hiring managers, and a substantial segment of the job market. 

Consider this: Many influential and high-paying roles are never advertised on public job boards because recruiters fill those jobs through their LinkedIn talent searches, outreach, connections, and referrals. 

Believe it! LinkedIn is heavily used to find candidates for top jobs at hotels and restaurants, in the food and beverage and meeting and events spaces, and in the bustling entertainment, travel, and tourism sectors. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram may be more fun, but career-minded professionals are wise to prioritize LinkedIn. 

Use these 5 tips for drawing hospitality recruiters and hiring companies to your LinkedIn profile – and into their interview and hiring process!

1. Update and refresh your LinkedIn page

Whether you’re actively job hunting on LinkedIn or you’re a passive candidate who is not looking but wants recruiters to know where to find you, you must have a current and compelling LinkedIn profile page. An outdated profile (or résumé) is worse than no profile at all because it inaccurately reflects your current job status and experience. Again, it makes you invisible to recruiters. 

Hospitality recruiters and corporate hiring managers use LinkedIn’s sophisticated recruiting tools to find candidates with very specific skills, credentials, certifications, years of experience, or other requirements. Most notably, we use keyword search criteria specific to the roles we need to fill. These searches generate a pool of candidates whose experience and skills meet our criteria. We review these profiles and reach out to the most qualified candidates. 

It’s also important to have a headshot that enhances your personal brand, along with a branded background photo at the top of your LinkedIn page. For your headshot, choose clothing that reflects your style or the type of job you are seeking, look into the camera so people can connect with your eyes, and smile! 

Here’s how to increase the odds that we’ll find you: 

Write a LinkedIn Summary for your page that states your career vision, communicates your expertise and skills, and emphasizes your professional goals. Use language and terms (keywords) that speak directly to your desired sector of hospitality and the ideal job you are seeking. Make it resonate.  

Next, make your Experience Section sing! Many professionals treat this section like a flat, bullet-pointed job history. This misses key opportunities! Instead, be conversational and engaging. Let each job entry be a success story by highlighting your achievements and if possible, quantify them with cost savings, revenue gains, or other ways you made a positive impact (without disclosing proprietary employer data).  

This section should also be optimized with keywords that are naturally integrated into your experience, such as relevant industry terms, skills, and initiatives that relate to the job you are seeking.

2. Grow your network of connections

LinkedIn offers you massive reach to people and decision makers in your industry, with each new connection you establish yielding many more second-degree views of your profile – and even more connection prospects. Simply put, a robust LinkedIn network positions job seekers for success! 

Most LinkedIn users are receptive to legitimate connection requests; however, it’s important to use common sense when engaging in outreach efforts. For example, personalize your requests for connections by letting people know you’re a hospitality industry professional wanting to expand your network, learn from others in your field, and offer ideas and expertise that may be useful.  

The approach that deepens and grows a network fastest is to tap into mutual connections that are automatically displayed by LinkedIn. These will increase as you build your network.

3. Secure endorsements and recommendations from people who know you

LinkedIn offers two ways for members to vouch for the credibility of others. These include Skill Endorsements and Recommendations: 

• Skill Endorsements: You can add up to 100 specific skills on your LinkedIn profile to showcase your abilities to other members (including recruiters!). There’s no need to request a skill endorsement to receive one. You’ll receive a notification when a connection endorses one of your skills. 

• Recommendations require greater effort on your part to invite colleagues, co-workers, clients, past employers, or other contacts to write a unique summary of their experience in working with you. Needless to say, Recommendations take more time but they carry more weight when viewed by hospitality industry recruiters and other professionals who can refer you for open jobs.

4. Join LinkedIn Groups

Reach out and connect with people through LinkedIn Groups. Many professionals don’t realize that LinkedIn has a huge variety of industry-related and special interest groups (more than 1.2 million!), providing lively spaces for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share their insights and experiences, ask for guidance, and build connections. 

These online communities are terrific for networking – and they’re hunting grounds for recruiters and hiring managers seeking potential employees. Recruiters tend to view a candidate’s group engagements as a sign of professional interest, knowledge, passion, and leadership.

5. Adjust your profile settings for greater visibility

LinkedIn settings have become quite sophisticated, giving members power over both your privacy and profile visibility. For example, you have the option to use LinkedIn’s Open to Work feature, which lets recruiters and your network connections know you’re looking for new opportunities. You can control who sees this notification. 

Important social media safety recommendations for industry candidates 

As with any social media platform, use caution to protect your account and identity: 

• Maximize your use of LinkedIn privacy settings: Enable two-factor authentication in your LinkedIn profile settings and periodically change your password. Alternatively, set up and use a passkey to log in. Both precautions prevent bad actors from hacking your account. 

• Recognize suspicious behavior: Avoid job listings or disengage with any purported recruiter or hiring manager requiring that candidates pay for training or equipment, or who ask for personal, sensitive, or financial information early in the recruitment process. 

• Thoroughly vet recruiters and corporate hiring managers: Check for verified badges on company pages and ensure email addresses given to you by a recruiter or hiring manager match the company domain. It’s also a good idea to call a potential employer and verify the name and title of the person who reached out to you about an open position. 

• Protect your current job if using LinkedIn’s Open to Work feature: LinkedIn’s Open to Work feature can be set it to Recruiters Only to hide your job search status from your current employer. 

• Overall networking security: Only connect with people you know or those with a legitimate and verified professional connection.  

Make a direct connection with a leading hospitality recruiter 

A successful job search requires both active and passive efforts. The above tips are some of the easiest ways to attract attention from hospitality recruiters and hiring managers. Take full advantage of the free and beneficial tools on LinkedIn – and reach out directly to an industry-leading recruiting firm. 

For more than 25 years, Goodwin Recruiting has been the go-to source for top hospitality industry talent. If you’re an industry professional seeking new opportunities, there are three ways to connect with us to learn about great jobs as they become available with leading employers: 

• Check out our jobs board for specific job titles by industry and salary range and come back often as new roles are added every day. You can enter keywords to drill down to specific job opportunities, such as hospitality, restaurant, hotel, events, food and beverage, or other industry sectors.   

• Connect with one of our expert recruiters based on your location (or desired location!). Our recruiting partners not only give you access to available jobs in the hospitality industry, but they also provide solid career advice to our candidates and job applicants. 

• Sign up for job alerts: When you sign up for our new job notifications, we help take the ‘search’ out of your job search by alerting you when our clients have new hospitality job openings that align with your experience, skill set, and career goals.