Hospitality wants fresh thinking, then rejects anyone without restaurant experience

A senior marketer from luxury fashion contacted me recently. Strong CRM background, sharp digital strategy, real brand partnerships experience. She wanted to move into our industry. Every door closed with the same line: "You don't have restaurant experience."

The irony is hard to ignore. We study how luxury brands build desire and turn transactions into relationships, then refuse to hire the people who actually built those programmes.

At senior marketing level, hospitality recruits from a tiny pool. Meanwhile, exceptional talent from fashion, retail and luxury sits outside the gate with exactly the skills we say we need.

This matters for hospitality leadership more broadly. If we want to compete for attention and loyalty in a market like Dubai, we need people who think differently about guest engagement, not just people who've always done it the way we've always done it.

My advice to anyone trying to cross over: learn the key players and market positioning, then make your transferable skills impossible to ignore. Show operators how your approach would work in their world.

Are we serious about raising the bar, or just comfortable hiring from the same small circle?