The heat is on.

• Author: Sommars, Jack
• Position: Worker shortage in the booming hospitality trade - Industry Overview

A worker shortage and booming business drive hospitality to creative heights.

"Could we delay our interview until 9:30?" Kristen Pobanz pleaded in her before-hours voice mail message. Pobanz is director of human resources for downtown Denver's Embassy Suites Hotel. "We're a little short-handed this morning, so I'm helping out in the restaurant."

But that's just the way it is in Colorado's exploding hospitality industry, where hotel managers, convention planners and restaurant owners scramble to fill payrolls and, in Pobanz' case, omelet orders. If you think it's tough finding computer programmers, put yourself in those shoes.

From offering benefits and gifts to luring away competitors' help, hospitality management is practically prostrating itself to draw and keep workers - and to motivate them to pitch in when and where needed.

In the meantime, management is hands-on, like it or not.

Colorado's hospitality industry is huge, and growing fast. Restaurants, meeting and conference facilities, lodging, travel including tours, transportation, and related retail generate annual statewide sales of about $7 billion, said John Dienhart, chairman of Metropolitan State College's Department of Hospitality, Meeting and Travel Administration.

No wonder recruiting and retaining employees is the No. 1 concern of the 2,500 members of the Denver-based Colorado Restaurant Association, ranking higher in a recent survey than customer service and cost control. The industry presently employs 160,000 statewide.

Likewise hotels, which are cropping up like Subway Sandwiches franchises and reaching all-time highs in occupancy. Downtown hotels have increased capacity 20 percent over the past three years, but room occupancy hit an all-time high of 72.2 percent during 1998, said John Montgomery, president of Horwath Hospitality Consulting/Montgomery & Assoc.

"On any given day, anyone looking for a job could walk into a high-rise, commercial hotel in downtown Denver and find one," said Ilene Kamsler, executive vice president of the Denver-based Colorado Hotel & Lodging Association. "Finding employees is the No. 1 operational problem facing our industry today."

"It's the tightest job market I've seen," said Eugene Dilbeck, president and CEO of the Denver Metro Convention & Visitor's Bureau. "More companies are tapping into the labor pool of unskilled workers that the hospitality industry has traditionally relied on. It's not just the Burger Kings and McDonald's anymore...