Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Avoiding Employee Turnover In The Restaurant Industry With Video Interviews

While consumer demand for restaurants is looking up, retaining great employees at your establishment is always a challenge for the food services industry. Whether you're running a five-star restaurant or an ultra-convenient fast food establishment, it's a good bet you're losing a lot of your best people to turnover.

If you're spending all your time on hiring, odds are you're losing valuable time and money which would be better spent elsewhere. You need to find great employees who fit into your corporate culture and will be excited about growing with the company.

Utilizing the video interview, hiring managers in the food services industry can find employees more likely to stick around with less time wasted. This is good news not just for your bottom line, but also for your customer service and employee morale.

What Hiring Challenges Face the Restaurant Industry?

Hiring great managers, servers, and staff for your restaurant isn't always easy. The harder part, however, is retaining good employees once you have them. Using a video interview can be a better way to connect with interested applicants without wasting tons of time interviewing applicants who just aren't right for the job.

Why should you be looking for a better interview method for your restaurant or fast food establishment? Let's look at some stats:

  • In 2011, employee turnover numbers increased for 47 percent of the restaurants surveyed by Nation's Restaurant News.
  • This number increases even more when you look at management, where employee turnover was an issue for about 50 percent of dining establishments.
  • Things are even more dire for fast food restaurants: As much as 50 percent of the staff at any given fast food establishment will turn over within a year.
  • At two years only about 25 percent of the staff you spent time and effort recruiting for your fast food establishment will still be working.
  • This ends up costing the fast food industry about $3.4 billion in recruiting and training. This is certainly not a negligible sum of cash!

Why Utilize The Video Interview?

So how can you avoid some of this costly employee turnover while still hiring the best people in the food services industry? Utilizing the video interview could very well be the answer.

Many restaurants rely on walk in applications, online postings, and in-person meetings when looking to hire a new worker. A formal sit-down interview can take plenty of time and resources from busy managers, and all without a guarantee these job seekers will be the right fit for the job.

A one-way virtual interview, however, allows hiring managers to see job seekers before spending real face-to-face time in the their presence. One of the main reasons for the high employee turnover in the food services industry is because employers end up hiring for skills instead of for corporate culture fit. Just because you're not hiring a 9-to-5 office dweller doesn't mean the applicant shouldn't fit both the job and the overall corporate culture.

Instead of wasting time talking to job seekers who just won't fit in, using a one-way virtual interview is a fast way to tell immediately if a candidate is right for your company. In the one-way virtual interview, employers pose written questions job seekers answer on film. If you know the potential server or manager is all wrong for the job, you can click out of the video without having wasted any scheduling an in-person interview.

Plus, if you just don't have the time to have a stream of job seekers traipsing into your restaurant, you can connect with applicants in real time using live video interviews. You still get the face-to-face connection you crave, but you can schedule the interview around the dinner rush.

What Restaurant Interview Questions Should You Ask in the Video Interview?

You're looking to find great talent for your dining establishment, but what questions should you ask to ensure you’re hiring the right people? These restaurant interview questions will help you weed out the best and brightest from those you won't be sorry to see leave your establishment.


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