Restaurant staff recruitment

What is good restaurant recruitment?

The quality of your recruitment can have consequences for your entire business, with positive or negative repercussions for your internal teams, but also for your customers.

Upstream, it’s important to think carefully about your search. Taking the time to clearly define the scope of a position and the profile expected in terms of experience and qualifications, will save you time and be more successful. It’s also advisable to take care when describing the job you’re offering: a chef de rang will not have the same responsibilities as a maître d’. You need to be as clear as possible, and avoid any discrepancies between the job description and the actual duties involved.

To make your job offer attractive, you need to mention :

• Salary
• Type of contract (permanent, seasonal, etc.)
• Career development
• Interest of the position
• Geographical location (permanent position in Paris or mobile, for example)
• Organization of working hours
• Company reputation

If this is the case, also specify in your ad any benefits in kind: packed lunches, transport reimbursement, accommodation, etc. Seasonal jobs, for example, will attract interest in addition to a competitive salary.

Finally, when it comes to processing applications, it’s important to do so quickly and transparently. Once you’ve informed candidates about the recruitment process, it’s vital to take the time to respond to candidates you’ve interviewed who have given negative responses: it’s a question of looking after your company’s image.

Our best practices

There are a number of recruitment advertising platforms, such as APEC, Indeed and LinkedIn, which attract a lot of traffic and reach a wide target audience. However, these platforms are not specialized in the hotel and restaurant sector. It is therefore advisable to contact recruitment agencies with expertise in the hospitality sector. They generally offer support and pre-screening of candidates, thus increasing your chances of finding qualified and suitable professionals.

You can also make use of social networks, whose use has become standardized. All you have to do is publish the advert on your company pages. This will enable you to reach more candidates, but also perhaps approach future employees who are already interested in your company.

Depending on the position and profile you’re looking for, it’s a good idea to approach training centers and hotel schools. If you’re looking for staff in several different professions (second chef, chef de rang, waiter, maître d’hôtel, etc.), particularly for a new establishment opening, job dating can be an effective way of meeting a large number of candidates in a short space of time.

Beyond the recruitment stage, it’s important to take care in welcoming staff to the company and building their confidence, for example by creating a welcome booklet, appointing a reference tutor and drawing up a standardized job description containing headings such as working hours, meal times and breaks, standard daily organization, etc.

Keeping teams motivated is essential to good human resources management and minimizing the risk of staff turnover. Motivated staff in a friendly corporate climate are conducive to better performance. Retaining staff by giving them access to training to enhance their skills is one of the levers of this. In fact, there are a number of training schemes available to finance continuing professional development for restaurant and hotel staff. We recommend that you contact your funding body to find out about training opportunities for your restaurant’s front-of-house and kitchen staff.

To sum up, we recommend that you :

Think ahead (don’t prepare a recruitment ad a month before the need arises).
Write hard-hitting, detailed advertisements
Disseminate the ad using the right levers (recruitment agencies, social networks, personal networks, etc.).