Hiring managers are busier than ever. Restaurants continue to grapple with the age-old challenge of high employee turnover. This can make hiring and retention both time-consuming and costly. Fortunately, the technology for hiring staff in restaurants continues to evolve, providing new and innovative ways to recruit restaurant employees.
Perhaps most notable among these technologies is the full-service staffing solution created by Landed. Landed provides restaurants with a hiring platform that is custom-built for the food and retail industries. Landed uses personality assessments, video profiles, and AI technology to offset the manual burden that hiring managers face when recruiting, vetting, and interviewing prospective candidates. As a leading edge technology for hiring staff in restaurants, Landed demonstrates the power of technology to streamline the hiring process and produce better long-term candidates.
We wanted to learn more about Landed and everything the tech innovator is doing to advance restaurant staffing today so we chatted with founder and CEO Vivian Wang.
Below, we share some of Vivian’s insights, and discuss how you can apply these lessons in your own restaurant.
According to Vivian Wang, Landed is the first mobile app connecting hourly food and retail workers with local employers. Landed is tailor-made to help restaurants find and hire better-quality candidates. The app guides candidates through the process of creating video profiles, then instantly matches these profiles with compatible employers using a proprietary AI-based technology.
Below, we discuss some of the ways that this technology is helping restaurants hire with greater efficiency, precision, and cost-effectiveness.
AI technologies are helping to improve productivity in every industry. So it should come as no surprise that the leading technology for hiring staff in restaurants leverages advanced AI solutions to help bring qualified candidates and employers together.
As Vivian Wang explains, “Landed has one app for candidates, where they create a profile and then match with employers. And then we also have an employer app where we match candidates to employers using that same AI-based technology.”
This approach dramatically reduces the lag between the time a candidate creates a profile and the time this candidate is matched with a suitable opportunity. And the use of advanced machine learning algorithms improves the accuracy of these matches, which can ultimately result in greater long-term retention.
One of the more innovative ways to recruit restaurant employees is to use sophisticated personality tests in order to seek out candidates with the right traits for your restaurant. Wang notes that Landed “evaluate[s] candidates on 50-plus data points like communication skills, body language, work longevity, etc., to determine fit for specific jobs.”
This can make it easier to distill the candidates who demonstrate the skills required for the open position, possess the qualities needed to work in your restaurant, and exhibit a personality that is compatible with your company culture.
The ideal assessment tool will also be customizable to your various hiring needs. Wang points out that “Landed can prioritize different attributes in candidates depending on each employer’s focus. For example, each of your restaurant operators might have different things that they are looking for and we can prioritize that accordingly.”
Personality assessment tools can be used for more than just data-gathering. As Wang points out, Landed also uses its questionnaires to shrink the pool of candidates only to those most suitable to your hiring needs.
As Wang notes, the Landed app will “pre-vet candidates on those 50-plus data points, and only the qualified candidates move forward to an interview. So rather than going through 300 resumes…we can sift through and find the 20 that you should really be spending time with.”
This automated pre-vetting process can dramatically reduce the time your restaurant will spend reviewing resumes, checking references, and interviewing unqualified candidates.
The personality assessment questionnaire is just one of several innovative ways to recruit restaurant employees with Landed. As Wang notes, Landed is also the first hiring platform to feature video profiles of prospective employees.
Wang explains that “our candidates have video profiles, which allows you to get a sense of candidates’ personalities and attitudes before you even meet them…It’s not meant to take out the in-person piece — as we know, that is very important to restaurant operators. It’s just meant to make sure the time you're spending is time well spent with the best-quality candidates.”
So how exactly does Landed ensure that the best candidates are finding their way into your hiring funnel? Today, the best technology for hiring staff in restaurants will drive the recruitment process by both amplifying your hiring messaging and tailoring this messaging to specific posting platforms.
Wang notes that “our candidate acquisition team hails from the likes of Lyft and DoorDash, and they are very well experienced in all the digital channels including Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. And we integrate with 70-plus job boards.”
For busy restaurant hiring managers, this type of third-party digital marketing management can help streamline, simplify, and organize the otherwise tedious, time-consuming, and costly process of cross-platform job posting.
Wang warns that one of the biggest impediments to hiring is the lapse in time between a candidate’s first outreach and a prospective employer's response. Highly qualified candidates may be lost to your competitors in the intervening time.
Landed prevents this potentially costly delay in communication by leveraging automated technology for hiring staff in restaurants. As Wang explains, “we automatically engage candidates the second they respond via dynamic two-way text messaging, because candidates are not checking their emails, and text message is where they're going to be more responsive. Restaurant operator clients will say “I get back to candidates within five days” and we tell them that the best candidates are gone by then. The second candidates indicate interest and we automatically engage them so that it buys more time for your hiring managers.”
In addition to providing this initial auto-response, it’s important to remain in ongoing communication with prospective candidates. Landed automates the next several steps in the recruitment process as well, both auto-scheduling interviews and ensuring that all relevant parties are invited to attend.
Moreover, Landed transmits “automated text reminders before interviews. So,” says Wang, “when an interview gets scheduled, we make sure that everyone gets a calendar invite.”
Landed also makes it possible to outsource the entire hiring process from start to finish with a combination of job description templates, pre-vetting, interview scheduling, and even automated on-boarding.
As Wang says, “we get your account set up…and then you just basically turn on the faucet and we start getting candidates ready within that day. All we need to know is when are restaurant operators available for interviews and we can actually auto-schedule those and take care of that process. Then ultimately from a restaurant perspective, they can just hire with one click.”
Today, the best technology for hiring staff in restaurants will not only automate several key steps in the process, but it should also provide you with measurable outcomes. Seek a solution that provides advanced data on the performance of your hiring campaigns, the resources spent on recruiting, the retention of new hires, and more.
For instance, says Wang, “our customers are…seeing results and metrics including the number of hires, time to hire, hours saved in recruiting and a reduced turnover rate. Those are some of the metrics that account for success, and we're seeing improvements across those types of metrics.”
These metrics can help your restaurant better understand which recruitment and hiring tactics are effective and which can be improved upon.
Even the best technology for hiring staff in restaurants is better with strong human support. Whether your restaurant is implementing new technology, integrating this technology with existing operational systems, or looking for ways to leverage the full power of your hiring platform, the level of personal customer service offered by your third-party hiring technology vendor can be a difference maker.
For instance, says Wang, Landed built a “helper” feature into its employer app. Wang explains that helper “is a top feature where you're chatting with a real person who can respond to things in real-time. This person is who you can ask to add jobs, change job descriptions, change pay rates, as well as give feedback on candidates or ask for more of a specific type of candidate — all that stuff can be done within the app with Landed helper.”
Choosing the right technology for hiring staff in restaurants will depend on the size of your operation, your resources, and your needs. Start your search with a look at our top vendors and schedule a consultation today!