Chapter 8 Talent Management and Youth Employment

This chapter focuses on young people as a source of talent and thereby a source of competitive advantage for the hospitality organisation. It is structured in three main sections. The first section provides a theoretical foundation for understanding talented individuals as a source of competitive advantage in alignment with the resource-based view of the firm. The following section explores characteristics of youth, or young people, that make them particularly suited to some forms of hospitality work, and thereby a talent to be recruited and managed. The final section seeks to better understand the work values, broadly defined, of today’s youth, which may arguably assist in their recruitment and retention, as well as their management. It should be noted from the outset that this line of investigation, i.e. a focus on youth attributes and their relationship to the hospitality firm, is fairly novel and as such the discussion is necessarily theoretical in the main for want of empirical evidence. Nonetheless, in an increasingly competitive world, being able to recruit and manage talented young people may very usefully feature as part of a competitive strategy of the hospitality firm.