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The restaurant industry has faced significant changes in recent years.
The rise of efficient door-to-door delivery apps had fueled a rapid shift in the consumption patterns of many restaurant-goers even before the pandemic started.
Today, the industry has overhauled many of its core processes and introduced new functions, such as app integrations, pre-pickup stations, and increased dine-in restrictions.
That said, one of the most pervasive and worrying of these changes is the labor shortage and staffing concerns. Exiting the pandemic, the restaurant industry is experiencing a distinct lack of workers.
This guide will specifically address critical issues and provide you with a comprehensive summary of everything you need to know to solve one of the more pressing problems affecting the restaurant industry– hiring and retaining new talent.
Before we can get into the main subject, let’s understand what’s causing the labor shortage.
Even before the pandemic, the restaurant industry had several concerns. The pandemic only exacerbated those problems, and now we’re left with several topics, new and old, that food service establishments will have to navigate going forward.
Here are a few issues to consider.
The factors that sustain the current labor shortage are essential because they can help us think about potential solutions to avoid the missteps.
Now that we know the drivers for the labor shortage, here are the five best places to find the best restaurant staff. Knowing where to look can mean the difference between an open position and a filled position in a tight labor market.
Job fairs are an effective, tried-and-true recruitment strategy. These events stimulate demand by making hiring more accessible to the typical job searcher.
Before the pandemic, companies used to hold job fairs by pooling representatives from multiple big corporations, setting up booths, and simply waiting for applicants to walk in.
From the applicant’s perspective, job fairs are a chance to be exposed to multiple companies in one place. Applicants typically complete numerous in-person inquiries or interviews in just one day.
However, physical job fairs today may not have the same kind of prominence that they once enjoyed.
New regulations brought by the pandemic and the general anxiety of being part of a crowd are likely to limit the turnout of physical events.
Even so, job fairs for restaurant establishments can still be conducted online.
These setups have their limitations, but virtual job fairs benefit from being cost-efficient and less risky than physical job fairs.
In today’s highly digitized environment, you can’t afford to underutilize this part of your online face.
In fact, today’s job applicant considers company careers pages to be the most important information to discover when looking for a new position.
Your careers page is one of the first places that potential applicants typically check when researching your company.
If you want potential job applicants to see you as a great place to work, ensure your website’s careers page has the following characteristics.
Employee referrals are extremely effective forms of recruitment in the restaurant industry.
Because employees are tapping into their existing networks, it increases the likelihood that the target audience is already similar to the employed individuals.
More than that, talent from referral programs also tends to have a better idea of the company’s policies and work culture. They’re also more engaged in the application process since someone they know has a personal stake in ensuring they’re undergoing a smooth transition.
That’s not to mention other benefits, such as:
It should be no surprise that, according to Erin, 82% of surveyed employers rate employee referrals as having the best ROI out of all other recruiting strategies.
If you want to leverage these benefits, follow these steps.
Specialty schools are some of the best places to post your job openings because the environment and content of these institutions are already somewhat aligned with yours.
Students in these schools will probably be more interested in applying to taste what their industry might be like when they graduate.
You can market to culinary and vocational schools simply by posting flyers on their physical grounds. You can also ask for permission to post on their social media pages and groups or arrange an official affiliation with the school.
For example, create a mutually beneficial after-school program for interested students, internship experiences, or activities where you can give on-the-job training.
Connect with your local high school, vocational school, or community college to learn about such opportunities.
Aside from general online job boards, you can also post to job boards specifically catering to restaurant jobs.
Some examples of these include the following websites:
It’s safe to say that staffing issues are some of the restaurant industry’s most pressing problems, and we need to do everything we can to either solve them or avoid them.
However, we shouldn’t just focus on hiring new employees.
Aside from upgrading your recruitment process, improving policies that help employee retention is also crucial in creating an environment where you’re not at the mercy of the highly competitive labor market.
Here are several tips and tricks that can help you keep your best restaurant employees.
According to Statista, in 2018, the hospitality industry had the highest burnout rate globally. About 80% of respondents employed in the sector reported being overwhelmed by the amount of work they do.
Burnout is one thing—but there are other factors that might add to their mental burden.
Pandemic uncertainty, increased workload, and a great job market create an environment where your employees can easily quit their position if they feel that your demands are too much.
Thus, one of your primary missions as a restaurant owner must be to optimize your kitchen processes. Here are some things you can do.
Your staff management model underpins your restaurant processes, so you must have the right one for your specific circumstances.
However, many modern restaurants neglect to create a new management model to adapt to current trends. Instead, many fall back to old practices that might not be the most optimal models anymore.
Instead of practicing the traditional front-end tipping policies or tip sharing, you can do your research on these new management models instead.
These new restaurant management models are taking the industry by a storm—but keep in mind that there’s no specific step-by-step guide you can follow.
To determine what model is good for you or if a new management model is needed, you must first be in tune with your business and your restaurant team.
If you want to optimize your processes, this is more practical advice that you can employ.
Self-ordering kiosks are electronic stands that automate a large part of your front-of-house staff’s workload, such as taking orders and payments.
Using these can improve your efficiency by reducing workload, minimizing human errors, and even improving the quality of customer experience. In today’s delivery-crazed food industry, you can even utilize:
QR codes are efficient methods of transmitting information.
With these images and a smartphone scanner, it redirected your customers to a helpful website page. There are multiple applications used for this, such as:
Restaurant technology has been on the rise for a couple of years, and scheduling tools are just one of the several accessible software platforms that you can use to improve your processes.
Scheduling tools allow you to set hours more efficiently. With one of these in your arsenal, you have complete control over the employees’ hours, allowing you to eliminate guesswork and drastically minimize human error.
Additionally, it gives you all the information you need for an efficient yet flexible scheduling strategy that works for everyone.
Your restaurant POS will most likely have an integrated inventory management tool, which helps you track all of your resources and even order from your vendors the moment you run out of supplies.
This cuts up a lot of administrative time in the long run, although you’ll need to invest some time while you’re onboarding to the software.
Maximizing your inventory management tool is a great place to improve your systems and lessen the burden on your employees.
Repeat customers are a restaurant’s bread and butter, so you need to continually market them with new and attractive offers.
Automated marketing takes this process off your hands.
An Interesting solution to think about when addressing your staff’s pay structure would be to invest in technology that can improve the overall efficiency of your restaurant. This would give you the opportunity to reward your employees with competitive wages, and you get to deal with less turnover.
Using voice AI ordering platforms will allow you to have an automated employee on staff that would make everybody’s job easier.
Voice Ai ordering could assist you and your restaurant in a variety of ways:
More than ever, employee needs are becoming more complex and urgent. Over the past few years, the average restaurant worker’s markets have become more difficult.
Aside from a bump in pay and basic healthcare insurance for restaurant employees (which isn’t mandated by law for small restaurants in most states), employees now value the following benefits.
With the lack of supply productivity, high labor costs, and increasing the cost of goods, it’s understandable that restaurateurs might find it challenging to spend more on employee benefits. These upfront costs are worth it since the employee turnover rate is much higher, estimated at $5,864 by Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research. Here are some tips for restaurants looking for ways to stay competitive while navigating the current market.
Employees think about their future, and if they don’t see a sustainable future in your establishment, they don’t stay for long.
Mindful and practical career development training won’t just improve your employees’ skills at their current job—they will also see their position as a long-term investment.
When employees feel they can grow with the organization, they become more willing to dedicate their time to you. There are many ways you can go about this—and not all of them have to be expensive. For example:
There are already many methods that allow managers to conduct these developments, such as the DiscoverLink, ServSafe, and opportunities from the National Restaurant Association.
A good amount of establishments in the restaurant industry were known for having subpar workplace cultures rife with overworking and low wages. If you want to stand out as a great place to work, improving your workplace culture would be an important incentive.
Here are some tips on how you can do that:
If you want to minimize turnover, you need to pour your efforts into designing a highly effective and sustainable training strategy. An excellent manual template is essential if you want to onboard new hires as efficiently as possible.
The best training manuals have these three main parts:
This section introduces the reader to the contents of the manual. You can include sections like welcome letters, content overview, table of contents, values (mission, vision, core values), and more.
Your overview and introduction will set the tone for the rest of the manual, so make sure it’s engaging.
This should comprise the meat of your manual’s content. This section should contain an in-depth discussion about what an employee will have to follow in your establishment.
Whether it’s about general workplace conduct, safety policies, anti-harassment, or more detailed, comprehensive, and compliant content.
Among everything else, your manual needs to emphasize:
The last part of your training manual should contain a wrap-up of the previous content and acknowledgments of those who contributed to its creation. Here, you can also add other messages, such as closing statements from critical people in your company.
The past years have brought unique challenges to the restaurant industry, culminating in one of the most challenging labor markets.
One way SoundHound is helping with staffing shortages is with Voice AI.
Voice AI can help automate tasks, such as ordering and customer service, which will free up staff to focus on other areas. This is likely to take pressure off your employees, thus creating a better work environment.
With this staffing guide for restaurant owners, you can navigate this new, labor-scarce restaurant industry and not just survive but come out on top.
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