Introduction:

Today I want to share with you three steps to hiring better quality restaurant employees or improving the restaurant employees that you already have. In the early days of my restaurant operating career I would constantly tell others that my employees were all idiots – that they couldn’t do anything right. If they could just follow simple directions I’d be able to take some time off or work on other things instead of always needing to babysit them.

Then after a trip to the emergency and time to reflect, I realized my employees weren’t idiots, it’s me not them.  I was not hiring the right employees, I was not training them properly, I was not setting up the systems for them to achieve the success that they need. I started doing some research, worked with my coaches and I came up with a better system for attracting better quality restaurant employees.

3 Steps to better employees:

Before we get into those three steps I want you write down the five most important things when you’re looking for an employee in your restaurant even if it’s a specific station. Then go back through that list really quickly and circle the ones that are hard skills. Chances are your wrote soft skills, things like honesty, integrity, timeliness, good communication skills – things that we’re all looking for in a good person or employee.

Yet, a lot of times we run our ads that looks for specific job skills (hard skills) we’re looking for a cook rather than looking for a great person that we could make a great cook. If you find a great cook but they’re not honest, don’t have integrity are unable to show up on time or irresponsible you’re never gonna be able to retrain that.  Who cares how good they can cook?

1. Hire on the soft skills – find the people who have good character/personality and teach them the skills. Develop systems and procedures to teach them the skills they need.
2. Always be interviewing – interviews take a long time if you’re doing them one-on-one, I suggest you do group interviews.  But most importantly, schedule a weekly interview and keep ads running non-stop.  ALWAYS be interviewing.
3. Have an epic onboarding process – once you find people you have to be able to onboard them fast, efficiently and get the right information from your brain into theirs.

Let’s face it, you will have turnover in your restaurant, so a big part of your success in the restaurant business is going to come down to how quickly and how effectively you can get a new employee up to speed.

Summing it up:

To recap hire on softer skills, always be interviewing and create an epic on-boarding process.

I hope you enjoyed today’s video and I hope this helps you out in your restaurant.