5 Tips on Hiring The Right Restaurant Employees
The restaurant industry is labour-intensive and notorious for high staff turnover rates. Your employees are the heart of your business, whether they greet customers or serve Michelin star meals, they have the power to make or break a customer’s experience. We’ve listed our 5 top tips to help you to ensure that you hire the right restaurant employees:
- Recruit To Retain
In an industry with perennially high staff turnover rates, it’s impossible to retain every single member of staff for the long-term. However, that doesn’t mean that you should resign yourself to only having short-term staff. It is worth taking your time during the recruitment process and recruiting to retain, to avoid the stress that comes with high staff turnover rates.
2. Learn From Your Top Employees
Before you begin your hiring process, have a picture of your ideal employee. The best way to do this is by looking at your top employees. Which employees consistently exceed your expectations and are integral to your restaurant’s success? Evaluate the attributes that make your top employees great and look out for them during the recruitment process.
3. Structure Your Interviews
In the busy restaurant industry, employers usually don’t put much thought into their recruitment process. Some employers do not even have a standardized interview process and instead rely on short trial shifts to evaluate whether to take on a candidate. Although a trial shift is a valuable way of finding the right candidates, it is still important to have a standardized interview process where you are able to get to know candidates yourself. Generally, it is worth having a minimum of two interviews or one interview and a trial shift.
4. Follow-up On References
If you are looking for long-term employees, it’s worth following up on references. In doing so, you’ll be able to confirm whether applicants possess key competencies and that they have the relevant skills and work-related experiences that are listed on their CV. If an applicant passes the first interview, follow up with their previous employers and character references.
5. Trial-shift Future Leaders
Important roles require excellent employees. Whilst interviews are usually enough to recruit suitable front-of-house staff, testing the suitability of high-ranking back-of-house employees is a different story. Kitchen managers, sous chefs and line cooks will be in high pressured roles and should be tested with in-depth, trial-shifts.
As a restaurant manager, you’re unlikely to have the time and resources to devote to in-depth recruitment processes. But learning from your top employees, standardizing your interview process and giving future leaders a trial shift will not take up a huge amount of time. Familiarize yourself with these best practices and you can use them for the foreseeable future, saving them time and money spent on high staff turnover rates.