October 4, 2024
The Future of Hiring in Dining: Empowering Small Businesses through Gen AI
1. What's the problem?
The restaurant industry is a mosaic of unique small businesses that are often facing the common challenge of hiring. In a small operation, like an independently-owned restaurant, each individual can be tasked with carrying significant responsibility, so it becomes crucial to quickly find the right fit. More than 80% of restaurateurs face staffing shortages, and this challenge is particularly exacerbated by two key factors:
- High Turnover Rates: The industry average is 28% YoY, climbing to 34% for multi-unit restaurants.
- Diverse Talent Pool in Workforce: Minorities, including immigrants, comprise more than 50% of the restaurant workforce, often marginalized from technologies.
These realities create a complex hiring landscape for small restaurants. The question becomes: How can these businesses streamline their hiring processes to stay competitive while ensuring they find the right talent?
AI has emerged as a potential solution, offering ways to expedite and enhance the hiring process. However, its implementation requires careful consideration. Restaurant operators must understand the industry-specific use cases, ethical considerations, and best practices to responsibly leverage AI in their hiring strategies..
2. How is AI currently used in Hiring?
AI is changing hiring in the industry through two primary avenues:
- Streamlining the hiring process: AI can help automate time-consuming tasks, allowing small businesses to operate with the efficiency of larger corporations. AI can generate tailored job descriptions, screen resumes, and draft communications throughout the hiring process.
- Enhancing job matching precision: Advanced AI models provide better context for job recommendations, analyzing not just skills and experience, but also cultural fit and other factors. AI can generate personalized job recommendation messaging, tailoring outreach to each candidate's unique profile.
While major staffing platforms like Indeed are adopting these AI use cases, there are still few AI solutions tailored to the complex hiring landscape of the restaurant industry, especially for small businesses.
3. What is coming next in Restaurant Hiring?
The future of hiring with AI for the restaurant industry should address the unique challenges faced by small independent operators.
- Simplified, Easy-to-use AI tools for Small Businesses: The next wave of AI innovations seems to have a focus on user-friendly tools that disrupt the entire hiring workflow, rather than just streamlining individual stages of the current process. Imagine a restaurant owner finding a suitable candidate by simply asking an AI agent, "I need a prep cook for my restaurant."
- AI as a Catalyst for Inclusivity: Just as fintech innovations enabled leapfrog advancements for unbanked populations in Southeast Asia, AI has the potential to break down barriers for underrepresented groups in the hospitality workforce. AI tools can overcome language and technology barriers, functioning as a bridge to connect employers with a diverse talent pool. This is particularly crucial in an industry where minorities make up a significant portion of the workforce.
- AI Literacy and Empowerment: As AI becomes more integrated into hiring, there will be a growing emphasis on AI literacy. On the job seeker side, AI agents could serve as personal career assistants, helping candidates navigate job searches, optimize applications, facilitate connections with peers, and find career advancement opportunities, regardless of their technical background.
4. Challenges ahead - AI and Human
While AI presents exciting opportunities for revolutionizing hiring in the restaurant industry, several challenges must be addressed to ensure its responsible and effective implementation:
- Ethical AI and Bias Mitigation: Ensuring AI systems are ethical and free from bias is an important foundational step. Algorithmic bias, lack of diversity in AI development process, and transparency issues in AI decision-making (the “black-box” nature of algorithms) can plant seeds of distrust in these tools that should be addressed. AI should function as a bridge to close opportunity gaps, not as a mechanism that exacerbates existing inequalities.
- Privacy Concerns: The use of AI in hiring raises concerns about data collection, storage, consent, and retention. Secure and compliant handling of personal information is crucial.
- Overreliance on AI: There's a risk of overlooking human judgment and intuition in hiring decisions, potentially losing the personal touch crucial in the hospitality industry.
In the era of abundant AI solutions, it's crucial to remember that AI is a tool, especially in hiring where human interaction is paramount. The restaurant industry, at its core, is about human connections - both among staff and between staff and customers. AI should enhance, not replace, human decision-making in the hiring process.
To strike the right balance, we should preserve human judgment in final decisions, use AI to free up time for meaningful human interactions, provide opportunities for candidates to demonstrate qualities AI may miss, like empathy and adaptability, and focus on potential that only humans can assess, such as ambition and resilience.
By addressing these challenges thoughtfully, the restaurant industry can harness the power of AI to enhance its hiring while maintaining the human-centric approach fundamental to hospitality.
Disclosure:
This article was adapted from content originally written by Circle. Learn More About Circle. This article contains general information and is not intended to provide information that is specific to American Express, or it’s products and services.
