How to Recruit Restaurant Staff and Keep Them

Sometimes, staffing your restaurant feels like filling a bottomless cup: You hire a new team member today, then lose them a few months later when they stop showing up. You can’t keep a reliable and complete team, and it’s not your fault.

The labor shortage makes finding the right people almost impossible. When you do find a new team member, they don’t last long because they soon burn out from the harsh reality of working in a fast-paced restaurant.

As a restaurant owner, you need a complete team if you want a healthy business. The good news is, you don’t have to let the labor shortage control your reality.

Learn how to recruit restaurant staff without spending too much time and money, how to retain your workers longer, and why you might not need as big a team as you think you do.

Understanding the challenges of restaurant staffing

Restaurant owners aren’t just competing for sales—they’re also competing for talent. 

Today, 82% of businesses in the food industry are actively hiring, and with a labor shortage, it’s an uphill climb for owners to staff their small businesses.

To add more gas to the fire, labor is more expensive than it was a few years ago, and retention remains a huge challenge.

These obstacles raise three realities:

• Labor costs continue to rise.
• Keeping staff will always be problematic in the restaurant industry.
• The labor shortage prevents finding high-quality restaurant workers.

If restaurant managers can’t solve these issues during the restaurant hiring process, they face stressful setbacks:

• Margins are thinner due to hiring new staff at higher wages, not to mention the never-ending recruiting caused by high employee turnover. This pressure means you risk burning out as an owner.
• Owners face employee no-shows and overwhelmed workers, making it a struggle to operate the restaurant. It feels like a never-ending cycle.
• Insufficient team size means restaurants can’t provide quality service and food. Over time, your reputation changes, and sales go down.

Here’s the good news: These bad outcomes don’t have to be your reality. You can have a thriving restaurant business by adopting proactive strategies to recruit, keep, and nurture your team.

Practical strategies for recruiting restaurant staff

You can improve the process of recruiting employees by implementing the following strategies:

1. Make use of online job boards and social media

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A generation ago, employees would look through newspapers or go to hiring events to find jobs. While those still exist, the primary way for job seekers to find opportunities is through social media and online job boards.

You can recruit new employees by job posting on platforms and communities such as local Facebook groups, or even your company’s Instagram page. Job boards can be helpful, too. You can also try hospitality industry-specific job boards such as PoachedJobs.com.

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2. Tap into local networks and employee referrals

While it’s much more difficult to hire the younger generation because of the tough realities of working in takeout restaurants, it’s still possible to find restaurant employees through familiar channels.

Whether it’s asking family members, checking with your local community clubs, or visiting with other restaurant owners who seem to be doing well, you can let people know you’re hiring and actively looking for a staff member. 

You never know—maybe a relative recently immigrated to the country and needs a job, or perhaps a restaurant owner an hour away knows a former employee who has moved to your area and is looking for a job.

Restaurant owners can send emails, call friends, hang up signs, and actively promote the need for a qualified restaurant job candidate.

3. Build a positive reputation for the workplace

One of the best ways to attract new restaurant workers is by building a reputation for having a great work environment.

The more employees enjoy their jobs, the more likely they’ll let others know. Over time, it gets much easier to find people willing to work for you. Better yet, the more likely it is that candidates will come to you looking for a job.

Sometimes, creating a positive restaurant workplace and company culture can feel like it’s out of your control. Between the tight margins and craziness of restaurant operations, it’s hard to overcome burnout and exhaustion. However, there’s a way to overcome that barrier.

4. Outsource talent so you need fewer employees

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One way to eliminate most recruiting challenges is to control the need for labor. That means you don’t have to worry about labor shortages and employees who leave.

There are plenty of ways to outsource operations, but the most effective is through a restaurant answering service.

A restaurant answering service like Tarro handles all your phone orders, deliveries, and marketing. You can outsource just one category or all of them.

A customer can call your restaurant and place their order with the call center service, and your team gets the ticket. You don’t need staff to answer the phones or even team members with high English proficiency.

This small change helps you:

• Turn a burned-out workplace into a thriving workplace by getting rid of the pressure
• Hire fewer employees
• Keep the employees you do have since they’re happier 
• Increase sales when the answering service takes more orders regardless of how busy you are,  with 24/7 availability, 365 days a year

How technology can reduce the need to hire restaurant employees

Modern voice ordering services look different from traditional outsourcing. These services can make use of technology to streamline orders for efficiency. For example, Tarro’s human agents use AI (artificial intelligence) to receive many calls simultaneously on the same line. 

Each customer speaks to a professional human agent in three seconds or less. Your customers get a better experience, you make more orders, and you do it all without feeling like you’ll pass out from exhaustion.

When you’re less stressed, your staff is, too.  

It’s much easier for you to lead your restaurant team and provide a better experience for them. Since they can focus on fewer roles, they can do a better job.

Restaurant owners not only make more sales faster but also cut costs with:

• Fewer employees, saving labor expenses 
• Fewer order errors—a service like Tarro can offer 99.5% order accuracy, saving the expense of having to redo an order and preventing food waste 
• Not having to recruit new hires constantly due to a high turnover rate

Technology isn’t designed to take control of your restaurant. Instead, tech gives you control with streamlined and efficient restaurant management.

Retention strategies: Keeping your best staff

While it’s difficult to hire in the face of a labor shortage, it doesn’t matter how good you get at recruiting if you can’t keep team members. You can improve employee retention with the following strategies:

• Provide ongoing training and development: Training shouldn’t stop after hiring a new employee. Provide consistent training sessions to teach team members new skills and refresh their knowledge. Employees are more likely to stay longer if they feel you are investing in them.
• Create a positive and supportive work environment: By outsourcing, you can help relieve stress, promote positive communication, and implement more streamlined operations. 
• Use technology to simplify staff workloads and reduce burnout: Technology and services that can take phone orders and delivery orders can help employees focus on the customers in front of them. 

When you’ve improved your hiring strategy and combined it with higher retention, you know that the employees you onboard will stay. That makes your return on investment (ROI) for hiring and restaurant staffing much more effective.

Retention and recruiting example: No workers for the front desk

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In 2017, a Chinese couple with 20 years of experience operated a restaurant in Georgia. However, they had problems recruiting and keeping their employees.

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At first, they thought they needed Chinese staff in the kitchen. But because the restaurant focused on fried chicken, they realized they could train workers who were used to cooking different cuisines. That didn’t solve the front desk issue, though.

How would these restaurant owners find employees with high English proficiency and manage the customer experience so that it wouldn’t lead to burnout?

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The owners chose to outsource phone ordering. This reduced their need to take so many orders on the phone, which made the job of the front desk staff more manageable. Since the phone ordering service took each order and sent it straight to the staff, the owners didn’t need to hire as many people.

Because of outsourcing, the Chinese fried chicken restaurant saw:

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• A 40% increase in phone orders: They improved from $100,000 to $140,000 in monthly volume
• Better work-life balance: The couple cut two to three hours off each workday and were able to take two days off each week to spend time with family
• More affordable operations: The front desk staff went from four to two people, saving labor costs

Technology has changed success, quality of life, and experience for the entire team. In return, customers have a better experience. 

Balancing recruitment and outsourcing

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Improved restaurant staffing involves three elements:

1. Recruitment: Adopt more efficient methods of finding and hiring team members.
2. Retention: Keep employees longer so you don’t have to spend time searching for new workers.
3. Outsource: Reduce the need for so many employees and increase worker satisfaction by eliminating stressful, overwhelming tasks.

But how do you know when to recruit and when to outsource?

You want to control the experience, not hand it over to some third-party corporation that treats customers like numbers.

First, you don’t need an outsourcing company. You need an outsourcing partner to increase customer satisfaction and run a restaurant you’re proud of.

Partners come from the restaurant business. 

Tarro, for example, is run by staff and leaders who know what it’s like to take hundreds of orders in a 12-hour shift. They understand how every missed sale, every poor customer experience, and any food waste can make a huge impact on thin profit margins. In fact, Tarro was started by two brothers who experienced their Chinese parents facing the same challenges owners face running a restaurant.

Outsourcing partners like Tarro will walk side by side with you to make customers happy on your terms.

Once you find an outsourcing partner that can provide personal, positive customer experiences, you need to decide which tasks to outsource.

You only need to outsource critical parts.

It’s most effective to outsource takeout orders, as doing so can relieve stress and increase sales. You can outsource your phone orders and your delivery.

For example, a customer can call your restaurant, and a Tarro team member can pick up the phone in three seconds or less. They can answer calls in English or Spanish so you can capture accurate orders from more customers. After the Tarro team member takes the order, they send it to your printer—wherever you need it to be—and your team can prepare it.

If the caller wants the food delivered, Tarro can organize the delivery. For many restaurants, that’s a brand-new revenue stream that improves their entire bottom line. Restaurants don’t have to juggle third-party delivery apps eating at their margins like it’s a buffet—they can keep this service in-house with Tarro.

Choose Tarro to reduce the need for recruiting and increase sales

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Outsourcing to a restaurant answering service means:

• Less stress and pressure for you and your team 
• Accurate orders and more sales since calls are answered quickly and simultaneously 
• Less need for recruiting staff thanks to outsourcing tasks, decreased requirements for English proficiency, and happy employees who consistently show up to work

Tarro’s answering service uses technology and professionally trained hospitality agents to take your orders and provide the highest standard of customer experience.

When a customer calls, an agent can walk through the menu, make requested customizations, and provide a positive ordering experience. Instead of your front counter staff juggling phones and a line of customers, your team can relax and focus on the customers in front of them with improved service.

Your customer satisfaction increases.

Your employee satisfaction increases, and workers stay longer.

And instead of chasing talent, you can trust Tarro to take orders and alleviate your employee needs.

Everyone wins.

Book a meeting to learn more about recruiting (fewer) restaurant staff, increasing sales, and reducing stress.