Women in pubs: recruiting female licensees

Pink posters, pink beer-bottle tops and the slogan 'Come on girls….it's time the women were in charge'. Welcome to the future of licensee recruitment.

Well, according to Greene King at least. But don't be fooled by the pastel colour scheme and the girly Sex and the City-esque approach of the pubco's latest recruitment drive, Public Housewives, a campaign aimed squarely at attracting more women into the trade.

Behind the fluff and lipstick is a calculated strategy to get business people, those with a flair for marketing, attention to detail and a desire to get to the top, behind the pubco's bars, says Caroline Hollings, director of recruitment and training for Greene King Pub Partners.

Hollings says the pubco is going after women in such a strong way as part of a wider recruitment drive to target people who have the skills to run a pub, but have never considered it as a viable career.

"We recognise that women are misrepresented in this sector and because of this we're missing out on a quality addition to our pubs," says Hollings. "Recruiting and retaining the very best licensees has always been our number one priority and this won't change. We want the best and we'll continue to target them."

The campaign has its own website, and holds regular forums with female licensees to discuss the best way to recruit more women to the trade.

Love it or loathe it, Greene King's campaign is just one of a number of different approaches pub companies have embarked upon to recruit the right licensees (see panel, right). Indeed it seems to have been acknowledged that for pubs to survive and thrive in the tough conditions ahead, it is going to take an army of shrewd and business-savvy licensees to pull them through.

Sounds simple and sensible enough, but the problem lies in how to (a) locate and (b) attract such business-minded and ambitious individuals to the pub trade in the first place.

"The pub trade hasn't been about business, it's been about property for too long," says Nigel Sapsed, a recruitment consultant who has placed many of today's pubco board directors in their current roles.

"I think pubs have just been milked for years," he says. "We are now in a situation where many of the bigger pubcos have products that haven't kept up with the consumer, and haven't kept up with the business people needed to run them. In the current climate it's all going to be about people."

Hollings agrees that when it comes to getting high-quality business people to take on a pub, the industry has an image problem. "There's talent there that has never considered taking a pub on, mainly because of how it is perceived," she says.

And it seems that even successful licensees agree that the current image of the pub trade acts as a real barrier to recruiting quality people.

Sue Bowler is licensee of Greene King pub, the Queen's Larder in Holborn, London. Speaking at the first Public Housewives forum back in November she said: "It's not 'be your own boss - run a pub'. It's 'be your own boss - run a business'. People look down on going into a pub. They think anyone can do it. But as far as I am concerned, I am a business woman first, not a licensee."

So what's the solution, then? How can the industry recruit the people that the trade really needs?

Sapsed says the solution is investment. "If someone is offered a tired-looking pub or a nice shiny new Nando's restaurant, for example, what are they going to choose?" he says. "If you can't go out wholesale investing millions in your estate, you have to find a way of presenting your business so licensees feel that they are business people.

"So, for example, develop all in-house teams so that they are people orientated, business orientated and opportunity orientated. Some are starting to do that but they are all way too late, in my opinion."

With the UK now in recession it's abundantly clear that there's not going to be widespread refurbishment of pub estates any time soon. But the girlish publicity material of the Public Housewives campaign is clearly working to change that old-fashioned image by presenting the concept of becoming a female licensee as trendy, feminine and modern. But what of the increased business support?

"Across the industry, there are significantly fewer people looking to take on pubs. I think we could do so much better as an industry," says Punch operations director Kevin Georgel. "Since the smoking ban there has been a real diversification of pub businesses," he adds. "That helps to get different types of people to look at the sector for the first time as it moves away from its traditional profile. We need to utilise that opportunity.

"As a sector I think we have to market the pub. The big players need to get together to improve the appeal of the pub sector."

It appears that Punch is putting its money where its mouth is. Georgel says the pubco has developed a number of new initiatives over the past year to help licensees develop their businesses. The Flying Start scheme is an intensive programme of BRM support in the first six months. And the Foundation for Success, launched in December, includes one-to-one licensee training on things such as cellar management, delivered in the licensee's own pub.

Both Punch and Greene King have also said that targeting graduates is important. Punch is in the process of developing graduate training schemes to get young, fresh talent into the trade through their managed sites. And Greene King is currently working on recruiting leavers from the armed forces through its Civvy Street campaign.

So it all comes down, once again, to the question of what came first, the chicken or the egg? Can pubs lure business-minded people from other areas such as retail without changing their image first? Or will the introduction of more modern and rigorous recruitment and training packages attract the kind of licensees who will change the image of the pub trade? We will have to wait and see.