Only five months into the launch of Hospitality Rising’s inaugural campaign, ‘Rise Fast, Work Young’, the campaign has reached over 5.5m of the UK’s 16 to 30-year-olds, equal to half this demographic, via its digital marketing campaign.

Hospitality Rising, the world’s biggest hospitality recruitment initiative, was created to tackle the sector’s challenging jobs crisis. As part of the industry backed campaign, Tik Tok creators were also engaged to create content that specifically targeted young job seekers. This alone generated 13.5m impressions, reaching 2.1 million young people.

Mark McCulloch, founder of Hospitality Rising and campaign director, said: “We are reaching this 18-30 audience like no one else is. We get them, we know where their attention is daily and we are reaching them on their phone screens in a more relevant way than anyone else with relentless TikTok campaigns, ads and content creator partnerships. We now need to focus on reaching all 18-30 year olds at least four times in a short period because this is where you see consideration move to action.

“Whilst hospitality businesses are working on retaining staff, we’re here to support them in their efforts by finding new and effective ways to attract a new audience into the industry.”

The next step for the campaign is to bring on board new operators to back a burst of activity aimed at an audience of job seekers leaving education this summer. With six months of the first year left, those wanting to back the hospitality movement can join from £5 per team member.

Hospitality Rising is backed by some of the biggest names in the UK, including Whitbread, Pret, Welcome Break, Hilton, Soho House, Prezzo, Revolution Bars Group, Parkdean Resorts, Claridge’s, J W Lees and The Pig. On the supplier-side, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, hospitality tech supplier Zonal, and guest WI-FI based marketing solution, Wireless Social, are platinum sponsors.

Celebrity chefs including Tom Kerridge, Angela Hartnett and Raymond Blanc OBE, have also generously leant their time and support to the initiative.