Explore how GenAI is reshaping restaurant hiring—from faster vetting to fewer no-shows. Including a free, data-driven eBook, The Landscape of AI in Hourly Recruitment.
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April 21, 2025
So, you’re a restaurant or hospitality brand owner who wants to get on board with Artificial Intelligence?
You’ve come to the right place.
While Artificial Intelligence is the buzz word on everyone’s lips, it’s also a powerful tool slowly making its mark in restaurant operations.
In fact, the current market valuation for restaurant AI is $9.68B, set to climb to $49B within the next 5 years.
Despite this staggering growth, the restaurant industry continues to lag behind global usage rates of AI across all business sectors.
At 47%, compared to an industry-wide 72%, the hospitality sector is slowly embracing AI at a year-over-year rate of 7%.
But, operator sentiment is slowly warming, with 54% of surveyed operators believing that AI will positively impact restaurants.
From the same survey, 94% agreed that AI is necessary to stay competitive.
And given that challenges in recruiting and retaining hourly workers continue to plague 77% of restaurant operators, what better place is there to apply cutting-edge technology than in building cutting-edge teams?
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the ways that Artificial Intelligence is the hiring assistant that you've been dreaming of.
Make sure you scroll to the end for an exclusive eBook about The Landscape of AI.
When we’re done, you’ll be ready to embrace the technology of the future and build the teams your brand deserves.
Before we discuss AI in any capacity, let's take a second to list out the hiring tasks that you'd like to pass off to an assistant.
Having spoken to hundreds of restaurant General Managers and Operators at industry-leading brands like Tao Group Hospitality, Torchy's Tacos, and Another Broken Egg Cafe, the answer is clear:
Admin work.
From sifting through resumes to chasing down no-shows, manual hiring tasks eat up time you could spend mentoring your team and creating great guest experiences.
In a survey by the Harvard Business Review, restaurant operators reported which tasks they wanted help with to streamline restaurant operations. At the top of the list were:
- 46%: Applicant Screening & Assessment
- 39%: Applicant Management & Communication
- 36%: Data Analytics
- 34%: Better Integration (with existing tools)
- 33%: Real-Time Application Status Updates/Alerts
It's clear that the restaurant industry needs to find a better way for GMs to handle tedious mundane hiring tasks.
In order to assess what AI is best at, it's important to know what it is.
Artificial Intelligence simulates human intelligence, using data and learning models to complete tasks that would typically require human cognition.
Generative AI does all of the above, but also understands patterns and structures in data, using them to generate new, similar outputs.
It's clear that Gen AI is more than capable of handling the tasks outlined above — and doing it with speed, at scale, and ensured quality.
Sure, you could spend hours of time pouring through resumes to find your perfect match. And when your brand opens a new restaurant, you can do it again — and again.
With Generative AI, you can trust that you are getting the best candidates for your brand.
The technology is constantly refining and evolving according to your data, preference, and needs. It also keeps your hiring pipeline moving along on weekends or evenings, responding to candidates instantaneously.
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.
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 custom parameters 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.
And if you want to get even fancier, consider AI-driven features like Dynamic Screening — that is, the ability to enforce stringent vetting criteria when you're shorter on interview hours.
The beauty of AI is being able to customize it to your brand's nice-to-have's and must-have's. Take advantage of GenAI's data synthesis abilities and use it to help you find your perfect needle in the haystack.
Did you know that hourly candidates apply to an average of 14+ jobs in one sitting? And that they're most likely to accept the option that responds to them first?
In the competitive game of restaurant and hospitality hiring, speed is key to securing the talent that you want. WeCruitr.io founder Jack Kelly writes,
“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.”
Speed the process up 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? After all, 38% of applicants apply “after hours." This number increases to 54% including nights and weekends.
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.
Given that 75% of the restaurant workforce are Gen Z and Millenials, it's crucial to have a text-to-apply option.
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…
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.
In a landscape where job posting platforms are prioritizing sponsorships over organic posts, it’s important to make every listing count.
Gartner reports:
“Recruiters find Language Learning Model-enabled content creation attractive in recruitment as it enables them to create contextual recruitment content for candidates and employees.”
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.
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.
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.
You may also be wondering...
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.”
Nobody in the restaurant industry is a stranger to teamwork — in fact, a single person trying to take on every responsibility in a restaurant would be a surefire recipe for disaster.
Remember that AI is there to assist you, not take away your job. Even if it wanted to, it simply couldn't.
At the end of the day, the restaurant industry is a people-first industry.
Even if a candidate is perfect on paper, the only way to confirm they’ll be a great fit for your brand is to meet them in person, get a sense of their personality and approach, and to see them in action.
AI ensures that the candidates who come in for an interview are the best ones that you should consider.
But at the end of the day, it’s up to you to determine whether they’re a good fit for your brand.
Ultimately, AI is a tool to help you save time and focus on what truly matters to your brand–mentoring your teams, connecting with customers, and creating an amazing guest experience.
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At LANDED, we're working with 500+ industry leading brands like Erewhon, Tim Horton's, and Domino's to help GMs and Operators to take care of all aspects of hourly recruiting.
Our Generative AI reads through candidate resumes, dynamically vetting and adjusting conversation flows to provide a best-in-class recruitment experience — for you and your applicants.
We respond to candidates instantly, answering their questions in real time. LANDED handles all of your additional vetting questions, ensuring that only top quality talent makes it to the interview round.
And to get the best results, we combine cutting-edge GenAI with a 24/7 human support team. Your dedicated Client Strategist collaborates with you to optimize your hiring strategy. With decades of experience securing top hires for industry leading brands, they’ll assess your analytics to provide best practices and recommendations.
Want to learn more about AI? We got you. Download our exclusive eBook on The Landscape of AI in Hourly Restaurant Recruitment for a data-driven look into how AI is the game changer that you need.
