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5 Reasons Why You Need Generative AI in Your Restaurant Hiring Strategy

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Explore how Generative AI transforms restaurant and hospitality hiring. Save time, improve candidate quality, and streamline your hiring process with AI-driven solutions.

Kai An Chee

August 29, 2024

In today’s technological landscape, you’d be hard pressed to find a buzzword that comes up more often than Generative AI. 

According to Forbes, “AI is expected to see an annual growth rate of 37.3% from 2023 to 2030.” When it comes to recruitment, Generative AI is a powerful tool that can help filter out time intensive tasks, allowing you to focus on what you love most about your job. 

In this article, we’ll explore the benefits and applications of GenAI in the restaurant and hospitality hiring process. 

TL;DR? Skip to the good part and learn how McDonald’s used cutting-edge Generative AI to receive 150% more applicants per month, hire 230+ employees, and schedule 800+ interviews by clicking here.  

Are hiring managers going to be replaced by AI? 

Before we begin, let’s discuss a question that may be at top of mind. 

Is Generative AI going to replace human hiring managers and GMs? 

In short: no. 

As Sunkee Lee. Ph.D. and Associate Professor of Organizational Theory and Strategy at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, writes: 

“By striking a harmonious balance between the capabilities of AI and the expertise of human decision-makers, organizations can truly unlock their potential in building strong, diverse, and high-performing workforces for the future.”  

GenAI is an important tool that will supercharge your hiring and general managers. By saving time spent on tedious manual tasks, they can be more strategic and tactical in creating stable, high-performing teams. 

How is Generative AI used in restaurant and hospitality recruiting? 

Identifying which facets of the recruiting process are best handled by human intelligence versus artificial intelligence should be a crucial part of your hiring strategy. 

Ultimately, the best process is one that leverages and amplifies both.   

GenAI is here to make your job easier and more enjoyable, not nonexistent. 

Read next →  How Five Guys leveraged AI to hire fast in NYC’s competitive job market

What are the benefits of GenAI in hourly recruitment? 

According to Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle for Talent Acquisition, “GenAI built on top of Language Learning Models can enhance hiring manager efficiency, enhance talent attraction and engagement, and improve the quality of hires.” 

Here are some ways that GenAI benefits your restaurant hiring strategy.  

1. Save Time and Find the Best Talent   

Think about how many hours you spend combing through resumes to find the ideal candidate. How long does it take to get a conversation started, ask some qualifying questions, and schedule an interview? 

At scale, the time cost to hiring managers, GMs, and restaurant managers is exponential. And that’s not even taking into account the time spent trying to retain employees. 

Maybe you’re struggling with job hoppers, hourly workers who have moved from position to position multiple times within the past few months.

Set up a custom parameter to filter out candidates who have held multiple jobs in the past six months. Filtering with GenAI not only allows you to find the best talent, but you’ll also be able to minimize the chances that the candidate you hire will quit a month into the job. 

Gartner Quote about Generative AI from Hype Cycle for Talent Acquisition
via Gartner

2. Optimize Your Job Listings 

Examples of job posting platforms used to secure candidates
via LANDED

In a landscape where job posting platforms are prioritizing sponsorships over organic posts, it’s important to make every listing count. 

“Recruiters find Language Learning Model-enabled content creation attractive in recruitment as it enables them to create contextual recruitment content for candidates and employees,” Gartner reports.  

Using GenAI to create job listing copy and content is a key way to optimize each post for the best candidates. Leverage existing data to see which posts have performed better than others and feed this information to the AI to craft the perfect description. 

GenAI can also be a powerful tool when it comes to multi-generational hiring. In today’s competitive hiring market, it’s not enough to have a single hiring strategy. Remember to customize your approach across all candidate verticals – after all, Gen Z resonate with different content than Boomers and Millennials do. 

For multinational franchises, another important candidate vertical is location. Certain wording may or may not resonate when placed into different geographic contexts. 

In order to maintain a constant stream of candidates, you’ll have to refine your approach for different populations. 

3. Fill Hourly Positions Faster  

In the competitive game of restaurant and hospitality hiring, speed is key to securing the talent that you want. 

“The life of a headhunter is intensely competitive. They must race against time to find the best candidate before all of their competitors, or the company itself,” writes WeCruitr.io founder Jack Kelly for Forbes

Speed the process by engaging candidates right after they submit their application. This ensures that you stay top of mind and kicks off the hiring process ahead of your competitors.

But what happens when an applicant hits submit at 2 a.m. in the morning? Or on a Saturday? Are you, the hiring manager, supposed to drop everything to strike up a conversation? 

This is where Generative AI comes in. 

According to Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle report, “GenAI…has the potential to provide enhanced personalization in candidate UX and reduce recruiter intervention due to chatbot handoffs.” 

Set up a response system that triggers immediately after an application is received. This can come in the form of an email, chat bot, or, most effectively, a text message chain

Create parameters for AI to handle it all for you. That way, you’ll wake up on Monday with a streamlined list of qualified candidates already scheduled to interview, not a mountain of unfiltered applications. 

And remember, time is money. Which leads us to… 

4. Lower Cost Per Hire 

A speedier process means that you can shorten the life of your paid job listings. 

This significantly reduces ad spend on platforms such as Indeed, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor, where sponsored posts receive the most traffic. 

By utilizing GenAI, Tim Horton’s saw an 83% more efficient cost per hire and a 73% improvement in interview attendance rates. 

Tim Horton's saw an 83% more efficient cost per hire with LANDED
via LANDED

5. Improve the Employee Experience   

via Freepik

Creating a strong employer brand is key to recruitment and retention. 

Let's face it – hiring isn't easy for anyone. And when candidates are submitting on average 14 applications at a time, it’s easy to feel like every submission is just another drop in a bucket.   

Use custom AI parameters to engage candidates in a way that acknowledges their efforts. This creates a foundation of empathy, understanding, and appreciation. 

Once employees begin their jobs, this will translate into a positive team culture that they’ll want to invest in for the long haul. 

Reduce Interview No Shows

Improving the employee experience with AI-powered communication can also help minimize interview no-shows.  Set up an interview reminder flow that pings each candidate before their interview. You can customize this cadence to a week, day, or even hour before. 

Next Steps 

It’s clear that Generative AI can be a transformative tool in the hiring process for hourly restaurant and hospitality workers.. 

As hiring managers continue to navigate the waters of post-pandemic hiring, it’s crucial to leverage AI to maximize results. 

LANDED’s all-in-one GenAI integration takes the burden off of hiring managers and GMs and handles quick automated responses, customizable vetting, and interview scheduling

Our technology has helped… 

  • McDonalds receive 150% more applicants per month, with a 25% reduction in interview no shows and 20% reduction in turnover. 
  • Chick-fil-a reach 124% of their original hiring goal, sending out over 40k+ text messages to candidates with an average 7 minute response time
  • tru by Hilton increase successful housekeeping hires by 500%.  

Ready to harness the power of Generative AI? 

📣 Our team is here to answer your questions today. 

LANDED takes care of all your recruiting to save you time and money.
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