The American Hotel and Lodging Association's 2026 State of the Industry report, released in January, projects the hotel workforce to grow by more than 30,000 jobs this year, pushing direct hotel employment in the US toward roughly 2.2 million people. The industry is expected to put close to 131 billion dollars toward wages and benefits in 2026, up from nearly 128 billion the year before. After a stretch of tight margins, that is a genuine growth story, and a reminder that hospitality is still one of the biggest employers in the country.
The real question for 2026 was never whether hotels would keep hiring. It is how they will do it well, at that scale, without losing what makes a great hospitality hire great in the first place.
The Machines Are Doing More of the Looking
A wave of fresh data on hiring technology helps explain why that question matters. A 2026 survey from Resume.org found that 87 percent of companies now use AI somewhere in their recruitment process, and Gallup's February 2026 workplace survey found 41 percent of US employees say their employer has already built AI tools into day to day operations. The recruiting research firm DemandSage found that 93 percent of recruiters plan to lean on AI even more this year. In practice, that mostly shows up early: reviewing resumes, running first pass candidate assessments, and researching applicants before a person ever picks up the phone.
For a hotel or restaurant group trying to fill dozens of roles at once, from a hectic front desk shift to a busy line in the kitchen, that speed is genuinely useful. Sorting hundreds of applications by hand is not what hospitality managers signed up for, and it is not where their time is best spent. Handled well, AI clears the noise and leaves people free to do what people still do best in this industry: read a candidate's warmth, judgment and hustle in ways a keyword scan never will.
Candidates Still Want to Be Seen
The same data points to something worth paying attention to. Greenhouse's 2026 hiring research found that only 26 percent of job seekers trust AI to evaluate them fairly, and 67 percent said they feel uneasy about hiring processes led by AI. Hospitality candidates are being asked to prove something particular: that they can read a room, calm a frustrated guest, or keep service moving under pressure on a Saturday night. That is hard to prove to an algorithm, and it is exactly what a real conversation with a real recruiter still does better.
It is the balance we try to strike every day at ItalianExperience. We use technology to move quickly when we match Italian chefs, hotel staff and restaurant professionals with open roles across the US, but every candidate we put forward has been spoken to by someone who has worked in Italian kitchens and hotels and knows what a strong hire actually looks like beyond a resume. We also walk that talent and their future employer through the visa process itself, because a great match on paper means little if the paperwork never clears.
The hotels adding those 30,000 jobs this year will mostly win or lose not on how fast they can screen candidates, but on how well they can tell, quickly, who is actually right for the role. That is a problem technology can help with. It is not one it can solve alone.
Data referenced from the American Hotel and Lodging Association's 2026 State of the Industry report, Resume.org, Gallup, DemandSage and Greenhouse.
Hiring faster only matters if you are still hiring right.