5 tips to succeed in hiring restaurant employees
Running a restaurant is tough. There’s so much more to it than cooking and serving a tasty menu. Not only is it about providing great food, but also offering exceptional service to your customers—and for that, you need a first-class hospitality staff to help you run the show.
However, hospitality, in general, is infamous for high employee turnover and other staffing challenges. Anyone who’s worked in the industry knows that it can be like a revolving door, with staff turning over all the time. With these challenges in mind, you’re probably wondering how exactly you should go about finding, hiring, and keeping great restaurant employees.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the few ways you can improve in your hiring efforts and employ a great staff at your restaurant:
- Find support for restaurant recruiting
Managers often need to take care of recruitment for their establishment/branch. However, they are not professional recruiters and they have a ton of other tasks to manage at any given time, from making weekly schedules to dealing with frustrated customers and everything in between.
Restaurant managers should seek to recruit support, whether from the corporate headquarters, other employees, or resources online. By learning the best practices for screening, interviewing, writing job descriptions, managing expectations, candidate selection, and other areas of recruiting, restaurant managers can improve the hiring process overall. A little know-how goes a long way when it comes to effective hiring!
- Determine which roles you need to fill
You’ll need to figure out which responsibilities need to be filled before you can construct a high-performing restaurant staff. A manager, shift supervisors, cooks, waiters, kitchen workers, and dishwashers are all likely to be required at your restaurant. However, depending on the type and size of your restaurant, you might also need to look for bartenders, hosts and bus persons. When staffing a quick-service restaurant, for example, you might look for a floor manager or just crew members.
You’ll need to figure out how many of each function you’ll need, as well as which ones you’ll need. For example, you’ll probably need more servers than shift supervisors or dishwashers.
- Identify responsibilities and requirements
You’ll need to establish the responsibilities and requirements for each job you’re looking for in addition to determining which roles to fill. Of course, each role will have its own set of requirements. While managers should have prior managerial experience and good leadership abilities, you may be open to hiring entry-level employees for some non-managerial positions.
As a general rule, you should look for people with customer service orientation. Because hospitality is all about delivering the ultimate experience, it’s important that your employees are naturally in tune to customer needs and inclined to ensure they’re met. Then, you can look for more role-specific characteristics and define benchmarks on what you’re looking for in candidates.
- Define the best places to find candidates
Of course, the hiring process starts with finding candidates—which is a lot easier said than done, especially when you’re competing with other establishments in your area. While some candidates may walk in on their own, you can’t rely only on putting a job posting on your door to find the right job seekers. Local social media groups, culinary schools, vocational schools, student career fairs, employee referrals, and restaurant-specific hiring sites are all great places to find candidates for your restaurant.
5.Provide a realistic job preview
Your candidates might think they understand all of your expectations for the role—but in many cases, there’s a misalignment of expectations that can lead to your new hires jumping ship. By offering a realistic job preview, you can make sure your applicants are fully aware of what the job entails straight away and hopefully avoid turnover.
On your online application, for example, you may include a video preview or a quiz. You may also invite candidates to come in for a trial day at your restaurant, which is a surefire method to see if they’re a good fit. If you go this approach, though, don’t treat candidates like slaves. Instead, to avoid miscommunication, set explicit conditions ahead of time.
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