When you’re trying to hire and find restaurant staff, you need to think about many factors, which can be complicated. However, if you’re trying to grow your restaurant, you’re eventually going to have to make time to hire employees for your restaurant.

What is this hiring process? How do you get job seekers to submit a resume? What is a job offer letter?

This guide to restaurant staffing will help you find the right workers for your restaurant.

Narrowing Down What Is Needed For Different Positions

First, you need to know the qualifications for different positions in your restaurant. You probably know this information in your head already. Especially if you managed your restaurant primarily by yourself. But have you ever actually written them down?

Restaurant staffing can be complicated. Even if you’re the restaurant owner, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have the same skills as a kitchen manager.

First off, write down all the positions that exist in your restaurant, as well as any that you wish you could have. That includes both front-of-house staff and back-of-house staff, which means the people your customers see and the people they don’t – all falling under food service staffing.

From head chefs and sous chefs to line cooks and food runners, write down your entire restaurant team.

Then, determine which ones you’re hiring for. That may include more crucial restaurant jobs, as well as jobs that just help you manage your business a little more easily. A bar manager, for example, might not be strictly necessary, as floor managers can often cover the bar, but they can help you increase the income from that bar.

Getting the Word out About Your Needs

Next, it’s time to begin telling potential employees about your job. That means putting up a job listing on restaurant job sites and platforms that might have an appropriate pool of job seekers.

These job sites can help you with restaurant recruiting because anyone interested will come to you, and restaurant job boards will specifically contain people trying to find the position you’re offering.

Of course, this means you have to write a job post. In the job description, highlight anything that might entice someone to sign up for the job. If you provide hiring training and don’t require that applicants complete their own training programs, for example, mention that. Mention any growth opportunities and benefits that people might receive through the onboarding process.

If you need employees to have certain skills for the hiring process, it’s also a good idea to mention that. For example, if you’re hiring for an assistant restaurant manager, you probably need them to have leadership skills and attention to detail, and you likely want them to have previous experience in the restaurant industry. That way, you can more easily weed out anyone who doesn’t meet your needs.

Browsing Through Different Restaurant Applications and Choosing a Candidate

After some time, your process of posting jobs should have resulted in several potential job seekers who are interested in your offer. At this point, you have to go through and decide which job seekers you’re going to bring in for a restaurant interview. At this point, you’ll mostly just have resumes and general information, which means you’re going to have to make a choice based on their qualifications and previous experience.

Once you’ve narrowed down the job seekers to only a few, you can bring them in for an interview. Make sure you write up some interview questions before they come in. Questions you might want to ask include:

• Have you ever been part of a restaurant kitchen before?
• Which restaurant position do you feel most comfortable in?
• Have you had experience with front-of-house restaurant staff?
• Do you stay up to date on restaurant industry trends?
• What do you think is important for hiring restaurant employees?

Of course, be sure to adapt your questions depending on the job you’re filling and the qualifications of the person who’s applying. If your restaurant dips into other important areas of the economy like the hospitality industry, you should ask about the applicant’s qualifications for those areas of the economy.

Additionally, if you’re interviewing a lot of people, it’s always possible to do a phone interview rather than an in-person interview.

Managing Your Restaurant Staff Moving Forward

One of the most important things you can do to increase your restaurant’s efficacy is to reduce turnover rates. It’s much easier to retain restaurant staff than to hire restaurant staff.

Even if you’re only working with an hourly employee, it costs a lot of your time and therefore money to replace a restaurant worker with a new one. Instead, you want to retain as many of your restaurant staff as possible.

This is why you should definitely treat your current employees well. Of course, this should be a priority because they’re people (even if they’re working minimum wage, that doesn’t mean you can treat them badly). However, when you focus on reducing employee turnover, you’ll also retain your top talent, which means you’ll be more likely to have a great set of employees to help you steer your business toward restaurant success.

Ideally, you should also be looking at restaurant promotions from within. When someone’s moved from a food runner to a floor manager to an assistant manager, they’ll feel like they have more of a stake within the company than a hired employee who came into the business from outside. That makes them more likely to try to push your restaurant to succeed.

Conclusion

As you can see, finding restaurant staff isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s possible. This complete guide is just one method with which you can find the staff you need and depending on your specific needs, you might have other requirements.

Historically, it’s recommended to use a good job board, ask the right questions, and make sure you reduce turnover. That’s been the best way to go about restaurant recruiting. In today’s economy, you can actually use a food service or restaurant job app to find workers! Try ShiftPixy for virtually all restaurant staffing and food delivery needs.