When you spend enough time inside balance sheets, P&L statements and financial models, you start to notice patterns long before they hit headlines. But sometimes a trend from an entirely different industry hits you like a runaway train.

I used to work in hospitality for a while during my college years, so I sometimes go through OysterLink’s latest job openings and keep up with industry news just to see where things stand. And over the past few years, I’ve noticed something: hospitality has shown us all a masterclass in labor agility, dynamic recruitment and frontline retention strategy.

If you’re wondering what on earth the hospitality industry has to do with your next board meeting, stick with me for a case study in workforce adaptation. It might be more relevant to your spreadsheets than you think.

A Labor Crunch Forcing Innovation

Restaurants, bars, and hotels didn’t have the luxury of slow pivots or multi-quarter rollouts in the Great Resignation. They have had to rebuild their staffing models in real-time, which meant ditching outdated hiring processes and embracing tech, flexibility and better employee incentives.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the hospitality sector has consistently led all industries in hiring rates since late 2020, sometimes going as high as 19%.

As a CFO, that shift fascinates me. Here was an industry that couldn’t afford downtime, but also couldn’t afford bad hires. What used to be just about putting warm bodies behind counters became an exercise in retention, adaptability, and skill-matching.

How Hospitality Became the Canary in the Labor Coal Mine

There’s a reason why hospitality was the first to feel the pressure and the first to adapt. It operates on razor-thin margins, with a notoriously volatile labor pool. Every dollar counts and every unfilled shift hits the bottom line.

That level of sensitivity forces innovation, so they used data and tech and started paying serious attention to the employee experience. The reason this is relevant to you is that labor expectations that started in hospitality are now bleeding into every industry, including finance.

Today’s job seekers want flexibility, clarity, purpose, and transparency across all industries.

Lessons in Real-Time Hiring

One thing I noticed while looking through job platforms was how fast the process has become, and I’m not just talking about job posting to hire. Profile creation, vetting, scheduling interviews, and onboarding are now often completed within days.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that this speed comes from cutting corners. It’s actually coming from:

• Clear job descriptions
• Built-in scheduling tools
• Immediate feedback loops
• Simple, mobile-first application flows

When was the last time your company could fill a position in 72 hours?

If you’re thinking “we’d never do that in finance,” that’s exactly the problem. We keep assuming white-collar roles require slower, more bloated processes. But job seekers today expect velocity. They’re used to it now, and if they don’t get it, they tend to bounce.

Culture as a Line Item

One of the most enlightening conversations I had during my research was with a restaurant GM who told me that “retention is cheaper than recruiting.”

In hospitality, they’ve started putting employee satisfaction on par with traditional metrics. Because when someone leaves, it costs productivity, morale, training hours, and often, customer experience.

Smart GMs and Hiring Managers in hospitality are running internal Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, tracking turnover cost per employee, and even forecasting burnout risk. They treat culture as a measurable financial lever, and CFOs should too.

We track customer churn like it’s gospel. Why aren’t we tracking employee churn with the same urgency?

Financial Forecasting With Human Variability

One of the trickiest parts of my job is modeling workforce-related volatility. Forecasts break when you assume humans behave like formulas. Hospitality companies are getting better at embedding flexibility into their financial forecasts. They’ve adopted tools that let them model:

• Fluctuations in hourly staffing
• Surge pricing for labor during holidays
• Impact of local regulations on scheduling
• Training investment vs. performance curve

If you’re still baking flat labor assumptions into your models, it might be time to revisit that spreadsheet. A bit of dynamic modeling goes a long way when your talent pipeline looks more like a faucet than a firehose.

Frontline Insights Are Boardroom Gold

Another lesson I’ve stolen shamelessly from hospitality is the value of bottom-up data.

The folks doing the work know exactly what’s broken and how to fix it, so smart managers have learned to ask, listen and implement. The feedback loop is short and sharp.

In finance, we tend to overvalue top-down strategy and underutilize grassroots insight. But if you want real-time operational intelligence, go talk to your AP clerk, your Salesforce admin, your junior staff, and build financial models that reflect the truth of the workflow.

What This Means for Finance Teams in 2025 and Beyond

I’m not suggesting CFOs start wearing aprons or memorizing the cocktail list. Instead, what I’m saying is that the hospitality industry, out of pure survival instinct, got better at:

• Hiring quickly
• Measuring culture
• Building flexible forecasts
• Listening to employees
• Tracking ROI on retention

These are all bottom-line wins.

The next time you’re buried in a quarterly review or prepping for headcount planning, ask yourself if you’re moving at the speed of our workforce. Are you making data-informed decisions about people, not just products, and are you creating a workplace where people want to stay?

Because if not, someone else is, and their CFO might have learned it from a bartender.

Where Finance Meets Fryers

I didn’t expect to find CFO-level insights by browsing jobs on a hospitality hiring platform. But there I was, getting schooled by an industry we usually overlook.

The truth is that the best financial strategies are often hidden in unexpected places, and right now, the hospitality industry is quietly running one of the most efficient, responsive labor economies out there.

If you’re serious about modernizing how your company attracts, retains, and empowers talent, maybe it’s time to look beyond your usual sources.

The answers might not come from an MBA course or a McKinsey slide deck. They might come from someone who runs two family restaurants and understands churn better than most execs.