Hiring and Recruiting Strategies for Restaurants

In today’s world of employment, restaurants must rely on a combination of both high and low tech strategies to recruit and hire employees. Along with tradition methods of managing, recruiting, and hiring in-house, there are a variety of web-based employment services that can be utilized as well. Some of these offer a full suite of hiring services – from recruiting to onboarding – and use tests and assessment tools to help find your business optimal candidates.

The fact that much of the employee life cycle (from hiring to onboarding to training) can now be digitized ends up saving both time and money while producing higher quality applicants. Here are a few strategies to put into play while looking for that next best employee.

Make Sure Your Restaurant’s Recruiting Materials are Targeted and Compelling

Regardless of what vehicle you’re using to post your hiring opportunity, it’s critical that all of your recruiting materials are targeted towards the demographic you’re seeking to hire. It’s also critical that your recruiting materials are compelling. Focus on using language and visuals that speak to the crowd of prospective employees. The Millennial crowd in particular (those currently around 18-25 years old) are visual learners who are highly dependent on technology to get their information so it makes sense if you are recruiting from this crowd to have materials which speak their language.

For instance, this crowd will respond far better to a headline which says, “Get a job that doesn’t suck,” than they will to one which says, “Start your career today.” Post videos of current employees talking about what it’s like to work with your business, use lots of pictures and visual content, and ensure that the entire application process can be completed electronically.

Utilize Existing Relationships and Social Media Outreach to get Quality Staff

Posting an ad on Craigslist about your hiring opportunity is going to garner a lot of responses, but typically yields very few people who actually follow through and show up for the scheduled interview. A more cost-effective approach to notifying the public about your employment opportunity is to tap into your existing relationships – such as your social media crowd and professional contacts.

Along with posting your opportunity on your own social media pages, ask your industry contacts if you can post on theirs as well. Make friends with HR offices in culinary schools. Offer a “finder’s fee” to anyone who refers an employee who stays on board for at least a month. Using the people and professional contacts in your life to help find employees is often a better approach, because you’re working with people who already have at least some level of vested interest in your business.

Save Time and Money Using Digital Assessments

Along with being able to speed up your own hiring and training process by making it all digitally available, you can save time and money by using digital assessments to pre-screen your applicants. As you well know, an employee’s ability to be successful at their job often has less to do with their work history and more to do with their personality and work ethic.

Fortunately, you can now use online job boards to pre-screen your applicants according to aspects like personality or work ethic, because the vast majority require prospective employees to fill out personality profiles before they can search for jobs. These profiles typically include everything from work history to personality questions and can be very instructive in terms of finding employees that are well suited for your restaurant’s particular work environment.

Tags: employee relations, hiring and recruiting, recruiting strategies, restaurant management, technology