September 24, 2024

4 Ways to Overcome Small Business Hiring Challenges for Restaurants

Restaurant owners sometimes deal with the challenge of finding the right balance between hiring more staff and maximizing the capabilities of their existing staff. Let’s look at a few ways that savvy restaurant operators can find quick solutions to the challenges in restaurant hiring.

1. Combine restaurant marketing with restaurant recruitment

An Indeed survey found that 71% of job seekers want to know more about company cultures when deciding where to work. Sharing the stories of the people behind the scenes at your restaurant can help show why your business is a great place to work.

For example, ads that show real on-camera interviews with actual employees can be a subtle way to showcase your business as a friendly, forward-thinking place to work. Your restaurant could adopt this strategy to combine marketing with restaurant recruitment.

2. Utilizing digital platforms for small business hiring for restaurants

If you’re not already using online job boards to find new restaurant employees, you should consider starting now. Taking advantage of online job boards and social media are ways that can help you to reach a broader audience. Browse offers for business owners and take advantage of saving on various tools and platforms.

3. Use Resy to help facilitate managing your restaurant operations current staff’s workload

Is your front of house restaurant staff spending too much time on the phone, managing reservations?  Free up time for other important tasks by with ResyOS, a restaurant technology platform owned by American Express. The Resy OS platform provides many advantages for restaurants to help streamline operations. For example, automated confirmation texts help reduce time spent manually confirming reservations.

Here are a few ways the ResyOS platform can help your restaurant streamline operations:

• Custom reservation inventory - Make your regulars feel like VIPs by providing them exclusive access to reservations during certain hours. Guests can also choose where they want to dine (patio, chef’s counter). 
• Notify & Mobile Waitlist – These features extend your waitlist beyond the host stand and allows guests to add their name to your waitlist for the current shift or future dates.
• Real Time Course Statuses – Integrate Resy with your point-of-sale system to link checks to reservations and assess your dining room at a glance. This helps free up time on your door team and enables them to give more accurate quote times to people on the waitlist. 

4. Get creative about new hire referral bonuses

The average cost of hiring a new employee is $4,700, which can make employee retention an important priority  for  restaurants.  Prospective new hires can sometimes come from referrals from your existing employees. What’s it worth to your restaurant to get a new hire – and have that person be reliable, efficient, and willing to stay in the job?

Are you offering new hire referral bonuses to your current restaurant employees? Take it a step further and consider offering new hire referral bonuses to your most loyal customers. People who love eating at your restaurant might know people who would love working at your restaurant. It’s a win-win-win.  

Hiring great restaurant employees in a competitive industry is not always easy, but restaurant owners don’t have to go it alone. There are a range of resources for business owner that offer tools and services to help with restaurant hiring. Get inspired with recruiting and marketing strategies from the American Express Business Class for Merchants resource hub.