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3 Steps to Hire Better Restaurant Employees​

You read it right. Today we are going to see how to hire good quality employees. Or improving the employees you already have.

These steps can also be applied in any industry. Not only restaurants. If there’s one thing business owners love to complain about, it’s their employees. So many of our clients and other business owners that we’ve spoken with always say the following thing:

“my employees are idiots”

Or

“they can’t get anything done right!”

“If only they could follow some simple instructions, I could afford to take some time off!”

“or I can go and work on some other things I need to work on, instead of always having to be here.”

Well, we hate to break it you. But here’s the reality:

Your employees aren’t idiots. It’s you.

You’re not hiring the right employees. You’re not setting them up the systems for them to achieve the success they need.

Well, not to worry. We are going to show you a tested system on attracting and hiring quality people for your business.

Really quick. Before we get into those steps, write down the 5 most important things you look for in an employee for your business.

Whatever position you recently hired for or any position that comes to mind.

Go through the list and see how many hard skills you’ve written as opposed to soft skills.

Chances are that you’ve got mostly soft skills like honesty, punctuality, or neat and orderly.

You see, most of the time we look for ‘good’ people when hiring.

But a lot of times when we run ads, we are looking for a good cook or a great accountant, rather than a good person that we can make a good cook or accountant.

See, if you have a good cook but they’re not honest or irresponsible or can’t get to work on time, or there’s always chaos in their lives, you’re never going to retrain that or you could but it’s going to take way more time.

Step 1 Hire on Soft Skills

So, the 1st step is hire on the soft skills.

Find people that are good people that fit the criteria that you need.

Find the people who are honest, that have integrity and can show up on time. And teach them the skills. Develop systems. Develop procedures to teach them the skills they need.

Now you’re still going to need some general skills. But go back and read the ads you’ve been putting online. Chances are you’re listing things that are hard skills that you need.

There was a guy who had a HVAC business who never had any problems with his employees. What was his secret sauce to hiring?

He doesn’t look for HVAC techs. See, everyone else was looking for licensed or experienced hvac techs.

Then, the chances are if someone is an experienced hvac tech, and doesn’t have a job. It’s probably because they had some issue in their last job. Either in their soft skills or their hard skills. And so, they got fired or they’re looking for a new place to work. That’s how another company ends up with such a person.

That’s probably what’s happening to you.

So, this guy says that’s not how he hires. “I hire for honesty, integrity and the way that I find that is, I tell everybody that I meet, I tell my customers, we have surveys on my website, anywhere there’s an interaction, I say, ‘do you know any men or women between 18 to 25 who are really honest and hard working, coz I’m looking for people like that. If they’re not making enough money or if they aren’t happy with their career, could you have them come talk to me?”

So, he was getting a flood of people who never even thought about a career in HVAC, but they were honest people.

The point is, he took those people and got them trained and they became very loyal employees.

So the 1st step is start looking for softer skills.
Start looking for the skills that are most important. Not necessarily the hard skills.

Step 2 Always be Interviewing

Now, you may think interviews take a long time because you’re doing them one on one.

But what we are suggesting is you do group interviews.

You can post online or have ads running or you bump into someone who had a great personality. You should always have interviews at least once or twice a month. Even if you don’t have any openings.

Now, we’re not going into the specifics of group interviews in this post.

But should always invite people into your company. It shouldn’t waste a lot of your time. If they show up, great. If they didn’t, that’s also fine.

Some people will impress you, some won’t. But the point is every time you’ll be interview 2 to 3 people even if you don’t have positions.

But guess what? Sometimes people are fantastic and you will find positions for them, because people will always be changing in your business.

Thing is there will always be employee turnover. At least this way you’ll have a steady flow of people coming in.

Step 3 Have an Epic Onboarding Process.

Once you find these people, you better be able to onboard them: 
Fast
Efficiently
And get the information from your head into them

Part of your success in your business is going to come down to how quickly and how effectively you get a new employee up to speed.

Now we can put together all the processes and procedures to keep the employees longer in your business.

The better your business is the more systems you have and the smoother your operations are.

Your employees will stay longer. But remember that the nature of the restaurant businesses is that people are going to come and go. You are going to have a lot of staff turnover.

Now, you can complain about it or you can do something about it.

Remember this, you can have money or you can have excuses. You can’t have both. So, pick one, right now.

You can come up with all the excuses in the world as to why hiring on soft skills won’t work. Why doing group interviews won’t work. As to why systems aren’t right for your business.

You can say this post is too long. You can say we’re full of it. You can come up with all the excuses in the world.

But you can have excuses. OR you can have money.

The reality is people are going to turnover in your restaurant. There’s not much you can do about it. But the one thing you can do about it is create a great, fast, efficient onboarding process to take an employee from ground zero to fully trained and competent in their position as fast, and as simply, and as effectively, and as efficiently as possible.

So to recap,
We’re going to go back and hire people on soft skills.
We’re going to be always interviewing
And have an epic onboarding process.

We hope you enjoyed this post and hope this helps you out in your business.

Ant & Bee Stories can help you create a solid Onboarding Process so your employees stay longer and new hires are upto speed quickly. Contact us for more details.

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Types of People Who Have No Business Doing Business pt.2

Types of People Who Have No Business Doing Business pt.2

When it comes to business, there are attitudes that win, and then there are those that lose.

This series of posts is dedicated at looking into those that don’t work in a business.

Our last post looked at how it’s important to not be complacent. If a certain business model worked in the past, it doesn’t guarantee success in the future.

In this post we are going to cover another type of attitude that doesn’t belong in business.

There’s an art to cutting costs. But if an expense is going to add value to the overall service, then it’s not a cost. It’s an investment.

Penny wise; pound foolish

Nishad is the owner of Rich Fabrics, a linen supplier. He started the business nearly 4 years ago. Since the leisure industry was booming, he was sure that this would be a success.

Nishad is a one man show, a ‘my way or the highway’ kind of guy. He’s also hardworking. A good fella.

He started out small, and worked his way up to establish Rich Constructions.

Nishad has 2 showroom locations, and employs 8 staff.

Since Nishad is a hard worker, he does all the purchasing, negotiating with the suppliers and clients, and checking the accounts at the end of the day.

He’s very careful with each penny being spent. The business depends on minimizing costs.

The 8 staff are school leavers. The showrooms are minimal. Product brochures were made on MS Word. He took the pictures with his camera phone. Leaflets are printed in black and white. He does all the marketing materials and content work.

The sales staff clean the showrooms when they’re free.

There’s no uniform or formal dress code policy for the staff.

Staff take leave as they see fit. Not all of them come to work on time.

Worst of all, no one stays for more than a year. Rich Fabrics is the place staff come to gain ‘work experience.’

Nishad hires new staff through word of mouth. Vacancy ads are too expensive.

The website hasn’t been updated in quite a while.

The accounting package is MS Excel, and inventory quantities are anyone’s guess.

Nishad has to close shop for a day or two for stocktaking.

Things have been the same for the last 2 years. And try as he might, Nishad is unable to scale the business, to grow it. He feels stuck.

His kids haven’t seen him in days, since he gets home very late, and is out again before first light. His wife is very supportive, but she also urges him to spend more time at home.

Nishad thought of hiring a few more people so he could assign some of his roles and responsibilities. But at this stage, he doesn’t want to do that. Most of all, he was afraid.

There were many competitors and sharing details of his business with staff was a risk he didn’t want to take.

He’d also thought of hiring a consulting firm, who were in the business of fixing the problems people like Nishad have found themselves in. But, he saw it as a cost, as opposed to it being an investment. And he didn’t have the time to get in touch.

So, he went on like this.

Gradually, the accounts and inventory started to look funny. 8 employees became 3.

Then the number of customers and clients began to drop.

New customers weren’t just coming in.

His suppliers don’t answer his calls now. The last shipment of goods from a supplier was 3 months ago.

Clients start to return purchased goods. Something about quality issues.

Who’s to blame here? Why aren’t new customers coming in?

Why aren’t employees staying?

What Nishad doesn’t understand is that without investing in infrastructure, systems or the people to run them, everything is just kanashot. He saw it as a cost to invest in systemizing his business. He saw it as a risk to delegate his tasks and responsibilities to others.

The Point…

Anyone going into business shouldn’t view spending on structuring the business or investing in services/personnel as a cost or expense. If that’s the case, might as well shoot yourself in the foot while you’re at it.

Create a business that adds value, that exudes class, where people come to work not to leave in 6 months. Create a legacy, not just a business. Ant & Bee Stories can you help you do all that and more. Contact us for more details.