Did you know more than 40% of restaurant employees fall between the ages of 16 and 24? This means a large number of restaurant staff are millennials, who are just entering the workforce and are re-shaping the world of work.
What does this mean? That you need to develop a recruiting and hiring strategy to attract these workers. To do this, first take a look at some of the perks and benefits millennials want, and expect:
Clear growth opportunities and career paths: Career progression is a top priority for this generation — even above competitive salaries. Millennials are committed to their personal learning and development.
Flexible and lenient work conditions: Millennials believe strongly in work-life balance, and many are enrolled in school. They want flexible working hours to fit those needs. Luckily, the industry is one of the few that offers flexible work schedules.
A fun and open environment: This generation wants to work in an enjoyable environment where they can have fun and build friendships.
Brand is everything: Millennials want to be proud of where they work, which means your brand is key. They want to do something that feels worthwhile, and need to believe in the values and vision of the company.
How do you attract millennials?
It’s apparent from their “wish list” above that millennials are motivated by more than just money. Attract millennials by offering more of what they want!
Put them on rotational assignments more frequently to gain a variety of experiences and give them a sense that they are moving toward something. Offer flexible work conditions so they can balance school and other social activities.
Offer fun incentives like work outings and friendly workplace competitions.
And remember, your brand and what it stands for matters. This means sharing your brand voice and workplace culture everywhere: in your establishment, on your website and social media, and in job listings.
How do you recruit millennials?
First and foremost, know that mobile is the device of choice for younger job seekers. So, make your jobs accessible via phones and tablets. Posting your jobs to social and mobile-enabled job sites allows applicants to react quickly to new postings and apply quickly with less barriers. At Sirvo, we’ve found that posting to social media increases the number of job applications and overall engagement.
Every unnecessary step or click in the application process is a barrier and reduces engagement.
This generation is tech-savvy and will spread their love for their workplace through word-of-mouth and social media platforms, which can help recruit local talent. Social recruiting has some benefits that the traditional, print classifieds lack, such as targeting your jobs to those that are likely to be interested in that position/industry/location. To cash in, be as specific as possible in your job listings.
This will enable you to reach a higher number of candidates that are qualified for the position you’re advertising, with the skill set and experience required, making it easier for you to hire in the long run.
Read more about why Sirvo is right for your restaurant here →
If you were to poll your neighborhood foodservice managers or restaurant owners and ask them what their biggest challenges are, you’ll likely find that hiring and keeping the best staff members is at the top of their list.
Turnover is high in the Food and Beverage industry, particularly for restaurants – averaging 66.3% annually, according to the National Restaurant Association – and all that turnover is expensive.The payroll cost standard is 30-35% of your restaurant’s total sales, according to Baker Tilly’s Restaurant Benchmarks. On top of that, training falls into the hands of not only your managers, but your strongest staff members as well, taking valuable time away from their own tasks.
While it may sound daunting, you’ll find that your money and time will be well spent when you can suss out the candidates who will reflect the culture of your establishment and who are dedicated to giving your guests a fantastic experience that keeps them coming back again and again.
So, how do you find someone that is worth the investment?
Get to the heart of your potential new hires by asking these questions during your restaurant hiring interviews:
1. Why do you want to work in the food and beverage industry?
The best restaurant employees take pride in their ability to provide guests with a wonderful experience. Whether you’re hiring a server to handle a white-tablecloth dinner service or a line cook to make pizzas during a busy lunch rush, the desire to make people happy is a must!
Are your candidates having trouble coming up with an answer? Or are they excited to tell you why they want to be a part of this challenging industry? Hopefully, it’s the latter!
2. What does “hospitality” mean to you?
The dictionary defines hospitality as “the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.” A great candidate will sum this up in their own words, giving you a warm and fuzzy feeling.
3. Tell me about your most memorable hospitality experience.
Tack this on to question #2, and see how it connects. Do you feel the candidate is being genuine in their answer? Does the person go into great detail? This should give you insight into what type of service they feel they should provide to your guests. A thoughtful, detailed answer, be it a positive or negative experience, shows that you’re interviewing someone who will put a lot of thought into their job.
4. If a customer presents you with a coupon that clearly states “not valid with other offers,” and they try to use it with another offer, how would you handle that?
It’s a given that the candidates probably don’t know the policy when it comes to special offers at your restaurant, and you may not even have offers in the first place! The “correct” answer lies in their reaction. Do they clam up, get nervous? Or do they stay calm and keep a smile on their face?
How they react to this question is a great indicator of how they’d react under pressure; if a candidate can’t keep their cool here, how are they going to do so in the middle of a busy service, when the level of pressure is much higher?
5. What do you do when you’re not working? What are your hobbies?
This is a great question, especially when hiring a server or bartender! The ability to build a relationship with guests throughout their experience can make the difference between a one-and-done guest or a loyal advocate for your establishment. Having interests outside of work is essential for making small talk, as well as maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Any of us who have worked in F&B can attest to how easy it is to burn out when your job is to make others happy!
6. Tell me about a conflict you’ve had to deal with involving your co-workers, and how you handled it.
Much of the focus on hiring is on guest satisfaction, but being a team player, behind the scenes, is just as important. With this question, you can judge someone’s maturity level, and the ability to overcome difficult situations and hold themselves accountable for their relationships in a team setting. Patrons absolutely love to be taken care of by a staff that is clearly having fun and enjoying the time spent with their coworkers.
While the best answers to these questions will depend on your food business’s specific needs, they will certainly help you gain much better insight into a candidate that you won’t be able to get from a resume.
The truth is that service is not really a transactional act, and therefore, it can’t be given. Service is a byproduct of consistently executing the other key processes that make a business successful—like hiring right, training well, suggestive selling and practicing servant leadership.
Hospitality or Customer Service?
Most restaurant owners and their customer-facing team members confuse service with hospitality, but they’re different: Service fulfills a need, but hospitality fulfills people. You can get service from an ATM or a vending machine, but you can’t get hospitality. Hospitality is the key deliverable that distinguishes great food service operations from average retail ones.
“Service fulfills a need, but hospitality fulfills people.”
For instance, if you buy a vacuum cleaner at a store—no matter how hard you looked for someone to help you, or how you were treated by the employees—you still have a vacuum cleaner when you get home. So even if there was no discernible service accompanying the purchase, you still have a tangible something after the transaction.
But when you patronize a restaurant, what do you have after you eat? Only memories. While menu, value, décor and cleanliness all play a part, it’s service and hospitality that makes that memory positive and drives customer loyalty and repeat business.
The Core of Great Customer Service
So what are the key drivers of customer satisfaction? Here are the three basics that every industry, not just the food industry, should follow.
1. Focus on ROC, not ROI
Repeat business is the linchpin of profitability in any successful business. Everyone is familiar with ROI, but a lesser-known and more critical metric is ROC—Return of Customer. “Will you come back?” and “Would you tell your friends to try us?” are the two most important questions relative to the customer experience. If the answer is yes to both, you’ve delivered on expectations and achieved ROC. If not, you haven’t. It’s that simple.
2. Hire Great People
Repeat business will always be dependent on the weakest people you allow on your teams. Make your customers’ experience consistently exceptional by hiring and developing great people. When you hire great people—despite the cost, despite the effort, despite the commitment—great things always happen. Compete first for talent, then customers.
When you hire great people—despite the cost, despite the effort, despite the commitment—great things always happen.
3. Consistency Is Key
Know what customers hate about patronizing your business? Inconsistency in quality, service, speed and accuracy. So when customer service problems reoccur in your business—before you blame your people—evaluate the likelihood of a short-circuit in a system or process. Bad service issues routinely arise when you hurry-hire the wrong people, cleanliness isn’t a priority, an understaffed or undertrained team messes up orders, or inefficient scheduling causes you to be short a server at peak hours. This makes customer-facing team members stressed, swamped and snippy, so they smile, serve and ultimately sell less.
Habitually consistent good service is the result of systems that:
Foster a caring culture
Make positivity and fun part of the core business practices
Educate and encourage teams daily to be better than they were yesterday
Don’t forget that excellent service begins with leadership and the notion that, “My customer is anyone who isn’t me.” The fact is that the way you treat your team members determines how they’ll treat your customers. Model the way, every day. Apply constant, gentle pressure every day to improve.
Restaurant operators are stewards of special moments in customers’ lives. The food service industry’s shared goal of giving care and sustenance to strangers and regulars alike as part of our business model is what sets us apart from retail and manufacturers. Service is our invisible product.
For restaurant and hospitality businesses, the winter season means ramping up staff to handle the holiday rush. Hiring is hard in general, but when it’s the seasonal sort, things can go bad fast. So, we put together an easy guide that will help lighten the load.
Use prior year sales and current volume to plan ahead
To ensure a successful holiday season, carefully consider what your company’s needs will be in the weeks and months ahead.
Do this by comparing last year’s numbers to current data while taking into account growth and upcoming specials.
Start by reviewing your previous year’s traction prior to and throughout the winter months to give you a sort of baseline. Then compare it to the current year’s highlights that could impact your anticipated volume such as reservations, sales, events, social media presence, press, etc. Another aspect to take into account are any holiday promotions, events, and campaigns that may drive volume in the coming months.
Marry the data you gathered to plan ahead for potential gaps in coverage, departments, jobs, and days of week/times of day. This will then give you the information you need to successfully hire additional staff for the season.
Be diligent and detailed while hiring for the season
When managers, operators, and owners approach seasonal hiring as just a temporary adjustment, there is often little consideration given to the long-term effects this will have on the company, permanent employees, and customers. Although the positions and those filling them may indeed be temporary, making hiring decisions on the fly rarely works out well.
With coverage needs thoroughly identified, job descriptions and postings can be very specific and detailed in terms of the experience, qualifications, and skills required for each role you need to fill.
This helps to ensure that applicants are aware of your needs and if they are a match. This will inevitably lead to higher quality applicants thereby making it significantly easier on you and your hiring staff when making the final decisions.
When it comes time to actually hire, don’t be hasty in the decision. To be confident that your seasonal employees will only help your cause, not hurt it, get all the facts before making the call. As you would with permanent employees, check that their experience, skill-set, and personality are appropriate for the position and your company. It can be hard to do all this in the limited time you have to hire, so use all of the resources available to you.
Ensure fair treatment of seasonal talent
As the holidays approach and volume starts ramping up, it can be easy for both managers and long-term employees to get caught in the storm and lose sight of the fact that quality customer experiences are an outcome of employee experience, including those of seasonal employees. If seasonal hires are treated like machines and given little respect by superiors and coworkers, performance and profitability will suffer.
When employees are treated fairly, they can better focus on performing well on the job.
Avoid this by treating seasonal employees with the same care as their non-seasonal counterparts. To do so, cultivate a positive culture and implement the appropriate systems and solutions that acknowledge the importance respect in the workplace. This includes ensuring that permanent staff of all levels give the same support to seasonal employees as they would to each other, properly scheduling all staff as to allow for maintained work-life balance through the busy season, and being consistent in regard to managing the changes that come with the seasonal nature of the industry.
Think of the seasonal employee as a long-term investment
You’ve done all this great work in sourcing additional talent for the season, so don’t let it go to waste. Be deliberate about keeping in touch with your seasonal hires so that you can recruit them in following years, or, if the situation arises, you can hire them permanently in the future.
A great way to establish continued communication is by having an exit interview of sorts.
It doesn’t have to be formal, just a way to initiate a dialogue. Provide feedback on performance and ask for it in return. Inquire about their interests and potential availability in the future. If nothing else, it will reinforce the positive experience they had while working for you, which is the impression they’ll share with their communities and networks. It’s great press!
The turnover rate for employees in the restaurants-and-accommodations sector rose for the fourth consecutive year in 2014, though it remains relatively low in historical terms. Restaurant employee turnover is higher than the private sector due to several factors, including higher proportions of teenagers, students and part-year employees in the industry workforce, according to the NRA’s chief economist Bruce Grindy. His Economist’s Notebook commentary and analysis appears regularly on Restaurant.org and Restaurant TrendMapper.
The overall turnover rate in the restaurants-and-accommodations* sector was 66.3 percent in 2014, up 10 percentage points from the recent low of 56.6 percent in 2010.
Despite the increase, the turnover rate remains relatively low in historical terms. In 2007, prior to the economic downturn, the turnover rate of the restaurants-and-accommodations sector was 80.9 percent. This was generally on par with turnover in the previous five years (2002-2006), when the annual rate averaged 80 percent.
In comparison, the average turnover rate for all private sector workers stood at 44.4 percent in 2014, up four percentage points from the 2010 low but still below the average turnover rate of 50 percent during the 2002 – 2006 period.
The JOLTS program breaks turnover into three components, with the sum of the parts representing the overall turnover rate. The quits rate in the restaurants-and-accommodations sector was 46.5 percent in 2014, while the layoffs-and-discharges rate was 17.2 percent. Other separations, which include retirements, transfers, deaths, and separations due to disability, comprised 2.6 percent of the sector’s turnover rate in 2014.
Most sectors of the economy saw their overall turnover rates decline during the challenging economic environment of 2008 – 2010, as workers were less likely to quit their current jobs with fewer other employment opportunities available. However, the quit rate rose in recent years, which indicates that workers are becoming more confident in the labor market and are willing to jump to another job.
Restaurant industry turnover tends to be higher than overall private sector turnover for a number of reasons. First, the restaurant industry is the economy’s largest employer of teenagers, as one-third of all working teenagers in the U.S. are employed in a restaurant. Many of these 1.5 million teenage restaurant workers are getting their first job experience, and will go on to start a career with a different employer, either inside or outside the restaurant industry.
Second, the restaurant industry employs a high proportion of students, who typically don’t work on a full-year schedule. Twenty-eight percent of eating and drinking place employees are enrolled in school, versus just 11 percent of the total U.S. employed labor force, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2013 American Community Survey (ACS).
The restaurant industry also boosts seasonal staffing levels at various points throughout the year, which adds to the normal cyclical turnover numbers. For example, the restaurant industry is one of the economy’s largest creators of seasonal jobs during the summer months, adding more than 400,000 jobs during an average summer season. Overall, 31 percent of the eating and drinking place workforce are part-year employees, compared to 19 percent of the total U.S. workforce, according to the ACS.
Full-year employees also contribute to the industry’s comparatively higher turnover rate, as upward mobility in the restaurant industry often happens when employees move from one restaurant to another. More than any other industry in the economy, the existence of multiple restaurants in nearly every community gives employees additional opportunities for upward mobility and career growth.
*Note that the turnover figures presented are for the broadly-defined Accommodations and Food Services sector (NAICS 72), because the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not report data for restaurants alone.
It may be easier at the time to post one listing for ‘All Positions’ in need of filling instead of listings for specific positions, but will it pay off in the end? Probably not, and here’s why.
Let’s start from the top of the hiring game: attracting talent.
This begins with discovering your open job(s), which Sirvo strives to make as easy as possible; with our Search feature, candidates can simply type in a keyword and see all relevant results.
In most cases, the keyword will be a job title, which means that “All Positions” with no mention of actual positions won’t be shown as a result. This drastically decreases your chance to reach potential employees right off the bat.
Beyond the title, the description and requirements are even more important!
To make a smart hire in less time, attracting the candidates you’re looking for, from personality to skill-set, is a necessity.
The specifics you require for each position are must-haves in the job listing because it tells candidates exactly what you need in an employee, so they know whether or not they fit the bill. Without them, you’re more likely to receive applications from those who don’t possess the necessary credentials required to fill the position instead of those that do.
Plus, in the future, Sirvo will offer job-candidate matching based on how qualified candidates are according to the details in the job listing, but you won’t be able to take advantage without including specifics about experience, skills, and requirements.
When it’s time to review applications, let Sirvo help.
To make it easier for employers to hone in on qualified candidates, Sirvo provides an applicant tracking system, which assists in organizing and managing candidates.
Every job listing has its own ATS Inbox where, upon receipt, applications are stored by default. From that point, after reviewing applications, candidates can be moved to Qualified or Declined based on whether or not they are still in the running for the position.
This way, applications are automatically sorted by position, making it easy to review and compare candidates. This is also helpful if hiring is conducted by several people. All applications to ‘Position A’ are separate from applications to ‘Position B’.
However, job listings for “All Positions” will negate this first level of organization built into the ATS, making it more difficult to review and manage candidates for each position.
The bottom line: hiring for ‘all positions’ is harder than the alternative.
Although it may take some additional time up front to create job listings for individual positions rather than lumping them together, you’ll definitely make up for it when it comes time to review applications and hire.
Not only are you increasing the odds of engaging professionals that have the specific qualifications that you’re seeking, you’re also making it easier for you and your staff to manage the entire process.
It all boils down to making your hiring process as efficient as possible, meaning the resources you spend attracting candidates, reviewing applications, and ultimately hiring are just what’s necessary to find the right person for the right position.
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