With so many positions to fill and competitors to outpace, operators must balance efficiency and thoroughness in their hiring processes. Though data from the National Restaurant Association suggests operators should be optimistic – the industry’s job numbers are projected to grow by more than 200,000 – filling open roles will always be challenging.
The following restaurant hiring tips from the Back of House team and a panel of industry experts can help you review candidates more quickly and conduct more effective interviews to avoid wasting your time or asking applicants to waste theirs.
Meet Our Restaurant Hiring Experts
To better understand what defines an efficient hiring process for restaurants, we consulted a trio of industry experts and asked them for their best restaurant hiring tips. We talked to:
- Aaron Delgadillo, Head of Implementation at Workstream
- Leon Graves, Associate Director of Client Enablement at Restaurant365
- Vivian Wang, CEO of Landed
13 Restaurant Hiring Tips
Here's a baker's dozen of recommendations for accelerating recruiting and hiring without rushing the process or settling for lesser candidates.
Evaluate Your Needs and Set Goals
You need two things for an efficient restaurant hiring process — measurable goals and a strategic vision. If you don’t have a clear idea of your current state, where you’d like to be, and how the right employees can support your efforts, you don’t have a real strategy and are unlikely to build a truly world-class culture.
Study the Competition
Look at what your competitors are doing and where they’ve found success. Browse their social channels, check out their website, and consider stopping by their restaurant to scope out any “help wanted” signage. Ask members of your staff how they’ve found jobs in the past. You may learn some tactics worth borrowing.
Make a Strong First Impression
You know what makes your business a great workplace, but an applicant may be learning about your restaurant for the first time. What’s more, they aren’t exactly low on options. “Most applicants go through dozens of job openings,” remarks Delgadillo, “each with similar pay and responsibilities.” That’s a lot of potential offers you may need to beat.
Set your organization apart by settling on a two- or three-sentence “pitch” that highlights things your competitors can’t match. Operators who can’t afford to offer robust benefits packages may need to get creative in pitching their restaurant.
Graves encourages restaurateurs to focus on telling a compelling story that showcases everything that makes them special. If you’ve got a farm-to-table restaurant manned by an accomplished chef, for example, Graves suggests highlighting that as a wow factor.
Talking about your restaurant’s culture will build an instant connection and encourage candidates who will thrive in your restaurant to reach out. “The truth is,” Graves stresses, “you need someone that’s a culture fit.” The costs of recruiting, onboarding, and training new hires are much too high to risk starting all over again.
Pre-Screen Candidates
It should only take you a few minutes to think up a few pre-screening questions. Those few minutes can save you from wasting tons of time on interviews with disengaged candidates who’d make poor cultural fits.
Graves suggests including some mandatory open-ended questions on your application forms. He calls them “the best way for candidates to show how engaged they are.” A highly interested candidate will take open-ended questions as an opportunity to kick-start the interview process. Less engaged applicants, on the other hand, will favor terse responses that suggest you’re just another potential employer to them.
Keep It Moving
Remember, your restaurant probably isn’t the only one most applicants are looking into. More likely, they’re checking out numerous potential employers every day throughout their job searches.
Don’t wait to reach out to promising candidates and move them through the hiring pipeline. Urgency and a sense of purpose will ensure you’re connecting with top-notch applicants before competing restaurants have the chance to.
It often pays to make an offer sooner rather than later. Wang reports conducting a study of more than 1,000 hourly workers and finding that one in three considered themselves very likely to take the first job offer they receive. Around half of respondents said they’d like to receive a job offer on the spot after a successful interview.
Know Where to Post Your Job Listings
“It’s no longer a world where you can just rely on Craigslist or Indeed,” says Wang. The same old channels that brought you great candidates in years past won’t help you find a new generation of restaurant talent. For Gen-Z applicants in particular, recruiting through social media has become a necessity. As Wang notes, “they grew up spending their day on phones.”
It’s not just Zoomers looking for work opportunities through mobile sites and social networks. Across all generations, Wang points out, “people spend 30 percent of their waking hours on social media.” Your listings may as well be invisible if potential employees can’t find them while browsing their feeds.
If you’re mounting a multi-channel recruiting campaign, don’t post the same messages on every digital job board. Different details will resonate with different audiences and provoke different responses. As you build your team, you’ll gradually learn to craft job listings designed to draw impressions and great-fit applications from various outlets.
Don’t Rely on Templates for Job Descriptions
Google “job description template” for any of your open roles and you’ll undoubtedly find plenty of options. Lean too heavily on these premade documents, though, and you’ll struggle to stand out from the pack or inspire genuine passion in applicants. It’s OK to start with a templated description, but fill in details that describe your restaurant and staff.
Be specific with your headlines too. Listings that are too general won’t just get buried, Graves warns, they may run the risk of being removed. He cautions operators against trying to save money by lumping multiple roles into a single listing. Short-term savings could come with serious costs as you wait longer and longer to find new employees.
Introduce a Referral Program
Data from noted tech provider Toast suggests that word of mouth is the number-one driver of restaurant applications. Employees are even more likely to learn about jobs from friends than from posts on social media. A referral program will encourage your team to discuss opportunities with friends they’re willing to vouch for, potentially helping you poach top-notch talent from competing restaurants.
While you shouldn’t skip important interviews and skills assessments, you may be able to consider these candidates pre-approved. The employee who made the referral can fill you in on some basics and ensure early conversations focus on questions that will offer genuine insights.
Need some help getting team members to take part? You might sweeten the deal by offering incentives, such as bonuses or gift cards, for new hires who stay on board for a certain period and the employees who recommended them.
Share Employee Testimonials
Your job listing can only say so much about what it’s really like to work in your restaurant. Reports directly from your staff will come across as more authentic and capture the intangible details that don’t always come across on paper.
Think of it this way, you probably wouldn’t hire an applicant based on their resumé alone — you want to talk to them. Written or recorded testimonials from employees help you fill out the picture of what it’s like to work at your restaurant, just like interviews do for candidates.
Try it out on social media. Don’t settle for linking to a page on your website or listing out the job requirements and some contact information. Hand over posting duties to a staff member and let them introduce themselves and talk about everything they enjoy about your restaurant’s culture.
Send a Text
Voicemails and email messages can all too easily go ignored or unnoticed. Text messages are different. They tend to gain attention and spark an immediate response. “Ninety percent of text messages,” Delgadillo says, “are read within three minutes.”
Contacting candidates via text adds a personal touch – even when the messages themselves are automated. Potential hires will feel an instant connection to operators who reach out directly and won’t hesitate to move on to the next stage in the process.
Teach Your Managers How to Interview Applicants
Your general managers boast plenty of skills, but they’re probably not trained interviewers. Help them to confidently play their role in the hiring process by investing in teaching these skills.
When you involve your GMs, you do two things:
- Have more time slots available to schedule conversations with applicants, which ultimately makes for a faster, more efficient hiring process for restaurants
- Shows the GM you’re committed to them and their career growth, which deepens their commitment to your operation
Leverage the Right HR, Recruiting, and On-Boarding Technology
Historically, hiring a new restaurant employee would have meant collecting dozens of paper resumés, fielding phone calls, and trying to find space in your busy schedule to conduct interviews.
Digital systems for attracting and tracking applicants can eliminate all of this manual work. They make it quicker, simpler, and more cost-effective to find candidates who’ll make great additions to your restaurant.
It’s hard to overstate the time-saving power of digital solutions that consolidate essential documents and applicant data. Graves says it best, noting, “Time is money.”
You’ll save time and headaches for applicants too. They’ll appreciate the ability to put themselves up for consideration without the need to drop off their resumés or navigate complicated systems.
Once applicants have become new employees, Graves says, “There’s no comparison to using an on-boarding solution.” After all, successful on-boarding is the final step in an efficient hiring process for restaurants.
Need a Sounding Board? I'm Here to Help
If you need help finding the right solution or suite of tools to improve your hiring processes, I'd love to chat. Book a 15-minute conversation with me or another Back of House expert to serve as a sounding board for your current labor challenges. From hiring and recruiting to your goals for future growth, we can dive in and determine the best technology to deploy so you can start attracting the best possible candidates.
