That's right. Today, I want to teach you three steps to hiring better quality
restaurant employees or
improving the restaurant employees that you already have.
Hey, everybody. Ryan Gromfin here – author, speaker, chef, restaurateur,
and the founder of the Restaurantboss.com,
as well as clickBACON.com.
And that's right. Today's about employees. Now,
I used to, I remember way back in the day early in my restaurant operating career,
when I was having a conversation with a
partner or with some friends or something and I'm like, oh my gosh!
All of my employees are idiots.
They can't do anything right.
If they could just follow simple directions, I'd be able to take some time off,
or I'd be able to go work on some
other things that I need to work on instead of always needing to be here.
Well through a whole series of events,
I got pretty sick and this whole big thing, I'm not going to bore you with the details here.
It hit me like a ton of bricks one day and I realized
my employees aren't idiots,
it's me not hiring the right employees.
I'm not training them properly; I'm not setting up the systems for them
to achieve the success that they need.
And so, I started thinking about this, doing some research on it,
working on it, and I worked with my coaches on it
and I came up with a better system for attracting better quality
restaurant employees.
So really quick, before we get into those three steps,
I want you to quickly pause this video when I tell you to,
pull out a piece of paper and write down
the five most important things when you're looking for an employee
in your restaurant.
Even if it's a specific station, let's say that you're looking for a sous chef,
or for a kitchen manager, or a front-of-the-house manager,
I want you to just pause the video right now and write down the
five most important things that you're looking for in that employee.
Did you pause the video? No, I'm serious.
Pause it right now and do it - five most important things you're looking for.
Okay, good. You're back.
So now what I want you to is, I want you to go back through that list really quickly,
no need to pause it and circle the ones that are hard skills.
See, chances are, you may be wrote down one hard skill if you even did.
Chances are, you don't have anything on your piece of paper like
great knife skills or knows how to clean a fryer
or something very specific, some very specific hard skills.
Chances are you have things like honesty, integrity,
timeliness, able to show up on time, right?
Timeliness. You have more soft skills, good communication skills,
you have things that we're looking for in a good person,
in a good employee,
but a lot of times, we run our ads and we're looking for specific
job skills,
a lot of times we're looking for a cook
rather than looking for a great person that we could make a great cook.
See, if you find a great cook but they're not honest
or they don't have integrity or they can't get there on time or they're not
responsible or they're always chaos in their lives,
you're never going to be able to retrain that or you could,
but it's going to take way too much time.
So the first 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 and have integrity and can show up on time
and teach them the skills, right? Develop systems,
develop procedures to teach them the skills they need.
Now, you still need some general skills, I'm not going to deny that,
but go back and read a lot of your ads that you're putting online and chances are,
you're listing things like hard skills that you need.
Go out in the community and talk to people.
I love, I heard a story once about a guy who had a HVAC company,
it was part of a franchise, and one of the franchise meetings,
everyone was complaining about staff,
and this guy is like, what do you guys talk about? I have no problems with staff.
So he kind of put together this
forum and he started talking to the other franchise owners
and what he told them is that he doesn't look for HVAC techs.
See everyone else is looking for people who are licensed HVAC techs.
Well chances are,
if you're licensed to repair air conditioning and heating units and do commercial repairs
like that and you don't have a job,
it's probably because you weren't very good at your last job,
either your soft skills or your hard skills,
and so you got fired, or you're looking for a new place to work,
that's how this other company ends up with you.
That's probably what's happening to you.
The people that are looking for jobs are looking for jobs likely
because they're not very good at their other job.
So this guy said, that's not what I hire for.
I find people who have honesty, who have integrity,
and the way that I find that is I tell everybody I meet,
I tell every customer - we have surveys on our website.
Every time we have an interaction with a customer
or anyone in the community, we say,
do you know any men or women between
18 to 25 who
are really honest and hard-working and
probably grew up on a farm? Because I'm looking for people like that.
If they're not making enough money if they're not happy in their career,
will you have them come talk to me?
And he was getting a flood of people who
never even thought about a career in HVAC, but they were honest people.
Now he said, he happened to be in a small town in Texas.
He liked people who grew up on farms because people who grew up on farms
work hard, but the point is,
he took those people and he trained them
and sent them to school and got them licensed
and they became very loyal employees,
and he had a steady flow of great employees.
So the first thing is, start looking for softer skills.
Start looking for the things that are most important,
not necessarily the hard skills.
The second thing is always be interviewing.
Now, you may think that interviews take a long
time because you're doing them one-on-one.
I don't suggest that. I suggest you do group interviews.
We used to always have ads running on all the websites
and we would always be talking to people and everywhere I went,
if I was at the grocery store, if I was at Starbucks,
if I was at another restaurant and I bumped into someone who had a great personality,
even if I didn't have positions available,
we always had an interview once a week at the restaurant.
It was a group interview, it was an open interview,
and I'm not going to get into specifics of how you structure this,
but I was always inviting people into that group interview,
so it didn't waste a lot of my time.
If they showed up, great. If they didn't, no big deal.
But there was always this steady flow of people coming into the restaurant.
Some people really impressed me, some didn't,
but the point is this, every single week,
I was interviewing 2 to 3 people even when I didn't have positions,
and you know what? Sometimes people were fantastic
and we found positions for them
because people are always changing in your restaurant.
So, tip number two is, always be interviewing.
Tip number three is, you better have an epic onboarding process.
Once you find these people,
you better be able to onboard them fast, efficiently,
and get the right information from your brain into their head.
Your success in the restaurant business,
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.
Now, we can put together all the processes and procedures to
keep employees longer in your restaurant,
and the better your restaurant is, the more systems you have in place,
the smoother your operations are.
If it is true, your employees will stay with you longer,
but the nature of the restaurant business
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.
In this world, you can have money, or you can have excuses,
but you can't have both, so pick one right now
because you can come up with all the excuses in the world as to why
hiring on soft skills won't work,
as to why doing group interviews won't work,
as to why systems aren't right for your restaurant,
you can say this video is too long, you can say that I'm 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 turn over 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. Right, we're going to go back,
we're going to higher on softer skills,
we're going to higher on more people skills,
we're going to always be interviewing, right? 1, 2) Always be interviewing.
And 3) Have an epic onboarding process.
I hope you enjoyed today's video and I hope this
helps you out in your restaurant. This has been Ryan Gromfin with the Restaurant Boss.
Have a wonderful week. I look forward to bringing you a new video
just like this next week.
Have a wonderful day.
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