3 Top Tips for Hiring Restaurant Staff

Make sure you have a recruiter on your team.

Managers are busy. Yes, they will be the ones supervising new staff, but by putting the responsibility for hiring new employees solely on them, you will overburden them and find yourself with an overwhelmed team leader in the restaurant in addition to a scrambled applicant reviewer. Instead, bring a recruiter into the mix to support your manager and understand their needs. Let the managers take part in key touch points like interviews and onboarding, but otherwise leave them to do what they do best: manage their team.

Have a clear game plan before you begin.

Although it’s easy, and tempting, to say “we need more manpower” and throw a job post onto a few job boards right away, there is a lot of benefit to pausing first and laying out a game plan. First, outline the way your restaurant works. Where is there a lack of human resources? What skills and capacity are needed to fill that role? Who are your most successful employees currently, and what about their attitude and skills makes them so?

Use these insights to write a transparent job description that will attract the right talent from the get go. Next, write a core set of interview scripts that your recruiter or manager can use to more objectively compare each interviewed candidate. By starting your hiring process with clear expectations, you will increase your chances both of finding just the right fit, and of keeping the people you hire by presenting them with a realistic depiction of the demands of the job.

Try batch interviews

Not only will interviewing more than one candidate at a time save you time, it will also give you another perspective of your applicants. Not only will you interact with them one-on-one, you will also get the opportunity to see them interacting with others, strangers, just as they might be doing as a new hire or in a service position. Create scenarios for applicants to play out together, or allow them to ask one another questions. Make clear from the beginning, however, that the group interview is not a competition, but an opportunity to meet and interact in a group dynamic.