Hospitality Does Not Have a Labour Shortage — It Has a Visibility Problem: A Conversation with Paathz at ITB Berlin

At ITB Berlin, Simone Puorto spoke with Ayush Soota, Founder and CEO of Paathz, about why the hospitality labour shortage narrative misses the real problem, and what a purpose-built talent platform for the industry actually looks like. Ayush is a Glion graduate who built his foundation in luxury hospitality through experience with Mandarin Oriental and Four Seasons before founding Paathz to fix a connection problem he had seen from the inside.

The problem is fragmentation, not shortage

The labour shortage conversation has been running in hospitality for years. Ayush's take cuts through it. The talent exists. The problem is that the systems built to connect that talent with opportunity are nowhere near adequate for an industry this people-driven. Talent is scattered across multiple platforms. Operational workers, the people who make hotels run day to day, often have no LinkedIn presence and no expectation of needing one. The infrastructure for finding them, and for them finding the right role, simply has not kept pace with what other industries have built.

Hospitality is a global travel industry by nature. The talent market should reflect that. Most of the tools available today are regional at best.

Built for the industry, not adapted from outside it

Paathz is designed specifically for hospitality, and that specificity shapes everything about how it works. For a candidate, sign-up is simple: a few questions, a CV upload in any format, including a scanned photo if that is all someone has. The platform reads it, identifies skills, and starts matching against relevant roles. For frontline workers where first impressions matter, Paathz recommends an asynchronous video cover interview, a short clip recorded on a phone that lets an employer see how someone presents before investing time in a formal interview.

For employers, the pitch is quality over volume. Instead of sifting through a thousand applications where the majority have no specific interest in hospitality and simply hit easy apply on LinkedIn, an employer on Paathz receives a shortlist of candidates who are genuinely in the industry and matched on skill. Nobody is eliminated from view, but the signal-to-noise ratio is fundamentally different.

One account covers the full process, with no redirect to a separate careers site, no duplicate CV entry, no friction at the point where candidates most often drop off.

AI as a tool, not a hiring manager

Ayush was clear on where AI belongs in this process and where it does not. Matching, scanning, surfacing relevant candidates: all appropriate uses of AI. The final hiring decision, one human evaluating another, stays with a person. His view is that in an industry built on human interaction, automating the decision itself misses the point. The value of AI is in removing the noise so that the human judgement at the end of the process is better informed and more efficiently reached.