Gear up for the holiday rush! Learn three proven strategies to tackle seasonal hiring challenges, boost staffing, and keep your restaurant running smoothly this festive season.
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November 26, 2024
Ho, ho…holiday hiring?
With the most wonderful time of the year right around the corner, having a strategy to support your success is crucial.
And no, we’re not talking about presents.
We’re talking about the holiday rush.
With a 20-25% uptick in dine-in and takeout orders at QSRs between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, it’s critical that your restaurant is prepared to meet increased customer demands.
Staffing, in particular, is a crucial piece of the puzzle that can make or break your success at dealing with the holiday rush. But the ongoing labor shortage and rising costs of inflation may have you scratching your head at how to solve the precarious puzzle that is high volume hiring.
But it’s almost December!
It’s way too late to hire holiday help.
I’ll just scramble to get my existing employees to cover more hours. That should work…right?
If this is you, you’re in the right place. Spoiler alert: the answer is you’re not too late.
Today, we’ll dive into three crucial strategies to hire faster and smarter for the holiday season. With a watertight seasonal hiring plan in place, you’ll be ready to soar into the new year.
Before we begin, let’s explore exactly what seasonal hiring is and why it’s so important.
We all know that December is the season to be jolly. But what, exactly, does that mean in this context?
For diners across America, it means eating at your favorite restaurant, or ordering takeout and catering for meals hosted at home.
In general, 72% of consumers plan to eat at their favorite local restaurants during the holidays.
Many plan to integrate this into their shopping plans, with 65% of holiday shoppers intending to eat at a QSR while on a shopping trip.
QSRs, in particular, seem to be the stop of choice. According to Nation’s Restaurant News, 47% of shoppers prefer QSRs for a mid-shopping trip refuel.
Seasonal hiring is the process of taking on extra employees for a limited period of time – in this case, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s – to provide support for the influx of business that occurs during the holiday season.
This influx isn’t just limited to dine-in–it also includes takeout. 64% of diners intend to supplement their at-home holiday meals with an order from their favorite restaurant.
At the end of the day, the bottom line…is the bottom line.
If those statistics haven’t convinced you of the reality of the holiday rush, know that this period can make up 20% of restaurants’ annual sales, or nearly 50% for fine dining concepts.
Now that you understand why holiday hiring is an absolute necessity, let’s dive into how you’re going to do it.
Every hiring process starts with a job description. And with a short time frame, you’ll need to optimize yours to attract the right talent, fast.
While a short timeline to hire may seem like a challenge, it’s actually a bonus that should be highlighted in your job description.
Most hourly job seekers want to secure a job fast; in fact, 17% of Gen Z job seekers expect an offer less than a week after their first interview.
Clearly state that you’re hiring for seasonal positions, and include interview timeline, start date, and end date.
When it comes to pay, check out what other restaurants are offering to ensure that you’re staying competitive. You’ll also want to highlight any additional benefits, such as flexible scheduling or overtime pay.
If the data is available to you, it’s also worth checking on what the tip percentages were like at your restaurant during the past years’ holiday rush. After all, 38% of holiday diners intend to tip higher during the festive season.
Including this information can be an additional incentive that helps you stand out above the competition.
As good as this sounds, I don’t have any time to write all-new job descriptions, you might be thinking.
Well, what would a holiday roundup be without a surprise gift?
In the spirit of the festive season, we’ve created a FREE AI Job Description Builder that can optimize existing listings or create a new, customized job description from scratch…in just two minutes.
➡️ Check it out HERE. ⬅️
Now that you’ve got your perfect job description ready, it’s time to get it out into the world.
In order to secure a high volume of candidates in a short period of time, you’ll have to get creative about exactly where those descriptions are going.
Considering Indeed’s recent policy change, you may need to consider increasing your hiring spend to boost listing traffic.
Another way to activate your hiring channels is to customize your strategy for Gen Z, who make up 49% of food service workers. Consider the following channels:
By activating new channels and optimizing existing ones, you’ll be able to secure the maximum number of top quality candidates before the holidays begin.
The key to hiring a large number of qualified candidates within a short period of time is to work smarter, not harder.
If you’ve followed the first two steps of this article, you’ll have a large pool of candidates to choose from.
This means more resumes to vet through, more applicants to communicate with, and more interviews to schedule and conduct.
This is the crucial point in the process that can either make or break your hiring for the holidays. Speed is key to securing talent in a competitive landscape and getting them interviewed, hired, and onboarded by early December.
Use emerging technologies, such as AI, to automate the hiring process for you. By using custom parameters, you can vet through resumes at the click of a button.
Similarly, using chat bots to communicate and schedule interviews with qualified candidates can help you save hours of time. That way, you can focus more on connecting with applicants in person.
The hours saved vetting, scheduling, and communicating with clients are particularly useful when you’re trying to onboard new hires quickly. Rather than getting bogged down in resumes, sprint through the hiring process so that you can get to training by early December.
That way, when the busiest days of the holiday season roll around, you’ll be well equipped to handle an influx of customers.
While you can certainly build your own bots for this process, doing so is an intensive manual process that requires technical skills.
Rather than spending your precious time figuring out the in’s and out’s of AI and machine learning, you can…
With 500+ customers and counting, LANDED is the definitive end-to-end high volume hiring solution for the restaurant and hospitality industry.
Our proprietary AI technology takes care of the holiday hiring headache for you, from sourcing to interview scheduling.
With up to 50% of your restaurant’s yearly revenue on the line, now is the time to deck the halls with smarter hiring. Our team of experts has helped brands like Erewhon, Tao Group Hospitality, and Union Square Hospitality achieve their hiring goals.
Schedule a demo today and let us help you make your holiday staffing wishes come true.
