Opening a new restaurant? Our guide has you covered with hiring tips, timelines, and a free tool to help streamline the process and set your team up for success.
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October 11, 2024
Congratulations! You’re getting ready to open a new restaurant. This is an exciting time in the life of your business, and the possibilities for success are endless.
But as the excitement and adrenaline begins to fade away, you might be left with anxiety and confusion over the nitty-gritty of what it takes to open a new store.
Staffing, in particular, is a complex puzzle made all the more confusing by the fact that you’re starting from scratch.
For those opening a new location of a franchise, you might have slightly more infrastructure to play with. Small businesses, on the other hand, might be looking at a blank canvas.
Whichever end of the spectrum you lie on, hiring for a new restaurant initially seems like a complicated, lengthy, and expensive process. You might be stressing over questions like:
What’s the right number of employees to hire?
My store is located in a rural area, how am I going to find candidates?
I’ve never used job posting boards like Indeed or Glassdoor before, where do I even start?
How do I know that these candidates are the right fit for my restaurant when we haven’t even opened yet?
Take a deep breath. We’re here to help.
In this article, we’ll dive into exactly what you should do when hiring for a new restaurant. With best practices, actionable timelines, and even a downloadable checklist, we’ll ensure that your new restaurant is set up for success.
PS - Make sure you read until the end for a completely free tool that comes with expert insights, a customized hiring budget, and more!
First things first – you’ll have to know your market.
Before diving into creating your first job posting, take a moment to research your competitors and the job listings that are currently live.
How much are they paying? What benefits are they offering? Which positions need more applicants?
Take a look at least 2-3 other companies in your area and consolidate information. This will serve as key data to ensure that your job listings are competitive and current.
Now that you know your market, you’ll have to figure out how to apply it to your brand. This is a crucial preparatory step to ensure quality talent that brings your restaurant’s vision to life.
This is where you get to dream big and have fun. Think through the kind of experience you want anyone who steps inside your restaurant to have.
Are they greeted at the door with big smiles and a chatty team member who asks them about their day?
Or do they approach a refined host stand, where an employee seamlessly pulls up their reservation?
Thinking about your end goals will help to determine what kind of qualifications you need in potential candidates. For example, the chatty team member might have experience working in family-focused restaurants, while the refined employee might have experience in fine dining.
Then, take this a step further. Are you interested in candidates who’ve been in their previous position for more than 6 months? Would you like to speak to applicants who would like to be promoted in the near future?
This is also a great opportunity to step into the shoes of your potential applicants. Think of ways to keep the career pool more open – this is important for all restaurant hiring, but especially when it comes to new store openings.
For example, maybe you’re looking to hire a General Manager. But what if a hard working assistant General Manager with aspirations of being promoted applies? If you were to restrict the parameters of your job search to only apply to those who have held the GM position before, you might be losing out on great candidates.
Lastly, try to have a general idea of headcount. While this may fluctuate as hiring continues and the needs of your restaurant change, find a baseline that you can start from. At the beginning of your restaurant’s life, it’s a good idea to slightly overestimate your headcount – it’s possible that employees may become unavailable or things shift around.
In the event of construction delays, have a game plan for how you’ll continue to move the hiring process along.
Think down to the granular details of the interview process. For example, if you’d like to have in-person interviews, where will you conduct them if the store isn’t ready yet?
If you’ve hired your staff but construction delays continue to push their start date out, communication is a must in order to retain your staff.
Keep them updated with the latest news, and provide an honest projected start date. Take advantage of the waiting time – consider starting onboarding early, or sending remote training materials for employees to view at home.
Timeline is a huge part of the hiring process for a new store opening, which brings us to…
Now that we’ve identified what you should keep in mind to hire for your new store opening, let’s break it down into an actionable timeline.
Working backwards from your anticipated store opening day, you’ll want to begin hiring 3-5 weeks out from your anticipated training date.
This means that phase 1, preparation, will begin 2-3 weeks before your hiring starts.
Market research and vision casting will live within this phase. You’ll also want to get job postings ready to go live, and to identify your hiring ad spend.
As part of your preparation, you’ll also want to consider the intensity and the details of your hiring process. After a candidate submits an application, what happens? How many stakeholders need to review each applicant? Do you want to have multiple rounds of interviews? All of this is crucial to know in order to structure your hiring phase.
Now that all of the prep work is in place, you’ll get started with hiring.
As we mentioned above, hiring begins 3-5 weeks before employee training begins. While this might seem like cutting it too close, hiring months in advance is too early. If an employee finds out that the job only begins in 4 months, they’re likely to quit and find another job that begins immediately.
If you’ve decided that your brand requires a more rigorous hiring process, you’ll want to begin 5 weeks out. If you need minimal touchpoints, 3-4 weeks out from training should do the trick.
Begin with hiring General Managers, as these team members will likely be a key part of building the rest of the team. Management roles may also have a more intensive hiring and training process than hourly roles, so make sure to allot extra time to fill these roles.
A big part of hiring is, obviously, creating job posts.
To save yourself time, use technologies like Generative AI to help write job listings to post on Indeed, Glassdoor, or whichever other platform you prefer. Leverage your market research and ask AI to write you a job listing that's competitive with those in your area.
Another thing to consider when writing hiring posts is age ranges. Cultivating a multigenerational workforce is crucial to success; after all, >40% of the restaurant workforce are Gen Z's, >35% are Millenials, >21% are Gen X, and 3.4% are Boomers.
Ask AI to customize job listings with benefits and wording that resonates with different generations.
Because every restaurant is so different, there is no 100% right answer to what your hiring budget should be. The only common denominator is that you should have some form of hiring ad spend.
Boosting your top of funnel job postings is crucial to getting the volume you need to staff a new store. As you’ll be competing with different restaurants in the area who already have existing job listings, you’ll want to post across multiple job boards for maximum exposure.
Indeed’s Oct 1 policy shift means that no indexed organic posts will be allowed to remain on their platform. Creating a clear ad strategy is crucial to ensuring that you’re not pouring countless dollars down the drain.
But how can you do this?
Using cutting-edge technology can be a big time-saver when it comes to creating tailored job listings, determining your new store opening budget, and sifting through and scheduling applicants.
Time and volume are of the essence when it comes to new store openings, and we’re here to help you through it.
LANDED’s Generative AI cuts administrative time spent in half by handling candidate vetting and scheduling. Every candidate is responded to within 15 minutes with customizable conversation flows, saving you time while ensuring candidate quality.
We've given you a lot of information in this article. And, chances are, you might not have time to implement all of it. After all, hiring is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to opening a new store.
We're here to take that piece off your plate.
As promised, our New Store Opening guide is a completely free way for you to take advantage of our expert insights!
Simply complete a 2 minute questionnaire and our team will send over a customized budget and personalized best practices for your store. No strings attached – we’re here to help your opening be the best it can be.
When you’ve got your team in place, post a picture with your new hires on LinkedIn. Tag us @LANDED so we can celebrate your new team – we can’t wait to see how you’ll succeed!
