Meeting the hiring & training challenge

Cheers, June, 2008 by Donna Hood Crecca

Seasoned restaurant operators know that the quality of service staff can make or break a restaurant, a fact that is especially true for the beverage piece of the business. Hiring, training and retaining the right employees is challenging today, however. Restaurant industry job growth not only is outpacing other industries--we'll add two million positions to our current 13.1 million by 2018, according to the National Restaurant Association--we're also outpacing U.S. population growth, particularly in the key demographics of teens and young adults.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Couple that worker shortage with the changing demands of the bar, such as higher skill sets required to hand-craft quality cocktails and increasing pressure to produce greater revenue at lower cost, and staffing the beverage program suddenly becomes a truly daunting challenge.

To tackle this issue, Cheers assembled a group of leading operators and supplier representatives at the flagship Hard Rock Cafe Orlando in February.

Cheers: Where are you sourcing new employees, and how does recruiting differ from five years ago?

Doug Zeif: When I was with Cheesecake Factory, we hired from all of you! We'd stand outside your doors at shift change and offer them jobs. Now, I'm on the hotel side, dealing with remote locations with a core staff and four or five months of seasonal staffing needs. So, we recruit from other countries, and we work to bring the same people back year after year.

Bill Irvin: We're also looking to other countries. We'll hire more than 700 employees this year from outside the U.S. It used to be they'd come from Ireland or Russia, but now they have no incentive to come work here because of the weak dollar. So, we're looking at Taiwan and deep in South America.

Christine Krenos: It's definitely harder today to find people, let alone the right people. We just rolled out liquor to all our stores, and we're not hiring bartenders, we're training current staff to pour cocktails. Turnover's been an issue [as a result], but we're turning it around and saying that we'll train them to become bartenders; they know there's good money in bartending.

Kevin Boyer: You can have unique sets of problems in different markets. In Orlando, there's no problem finding skilled labor. But if you tick them off, they'll just go across the street and get a job there. In markets that aren't booming quite the same way, they walk in with no prior training, but they'll stay.

Irvin: Craigslist works wonders for us. We've gotten great, quality hires from there.

Jim Knight: We're casting nets everywhere from MySpace to CD stores to comedy clubs, searching for people who fit our culture. That's our approach--hire people who fit into the culture. Everything else can be trained.

Boyer: Things have really changed. We used to hire for skill and train hospitality. But you need that hospitality bone in the body, so about 10 years ago we switched to hiring for hospitality and training for skills.

Cheers: Where are you sourcing bartenders?

Krenos: In-house, but we've found a good server doesn't always make a good bartender.

Stuart Melia: In a lot of casual restaurants, the bartender is the server who showed up when the bartender didn't. That comes from a general lack of focus on the bar.

Irvin: Which is amazing, isn't it, given that it's such a big revenue source?

Cindy Busi: Take that a step further and ask yourself: How much time do managers spend behind the bar? They'd never let a food line shut down--they'll put on whites and work the line themselves in a heartbeat. But if there's a bartender problem, they're not going back there. No way!

Bartending is a great job and we need to bring the career bartending found in Europe over here. We're now starting to get our managers behind the bar. During our marketing manager calls with GMs, we're asking, 'How did you change your bar?' The first call was scary--dead silence. Now they're learning how to make drinks and are getting [behind the bar].

Zeif: We need to treat the bar the same way we treat culinary; it deserves the same management approach. At LXR, we take our F&B folks on a New York City trip, and last time we hit Pegu Club to see how cocktails really should be made. That sent a powerful message.

Cheers: What about at Disney?

Michael Oswald: We do a lot of internal hiring. Keep in mind that we're in 90 countries and we're union. So, we've tiered our system and tied it to experience level. The labor market for us is all of our internal people, from the seating host to the server and the bartender.

Knight: Disney does a great college hiring program. As an industry, we need to get better at school-to-work, and need to telegraph that this is a profession.

Oswald: Colleges are important sources for us, but training really creates our workforce. Stuart McGuire [director of beverage sales and standards] has done a great job with standardized training; we're rolling it now to our California properties. In earlier years, F&B was not a big focus for us and we needed to refocus. Now, external hires into management go through 12 weeks of training, two of which are on the bar--written training, walk throughs and hands-on where they're learning to pour, mix drinks and so on. It's every aspect of the bar. There was a time when we had managers who couldn't find a "born on" date. We've really come a long way.