Retention Mastery Unveiled: Attract And Keep The Best Staff!

Stop struggling to find restaurant staff. Now sit down and take notes because I'm about to show you a four step plan for getting top talent for your restaurant starting this week. Hey. Donald Burns, the restaurant coach. And if you're like most restaurants and bars in your market, you've been struggling to find staff. Some restaurants are struggling to find any staff. It's almost like, oh my God, they're breathing. They can form a coherent sentence. Yes, yes, they're hired. Well, new hires like this, they only stay for a few weeks, but end up leaving. And then this cycle of anxiety just begins again. If you feel like you're desperate to find people, if you feel like your staff treats your restaurant like a revolving door, you need a new plan to put an end to your state of panicking anxiety. But first, if you find this video helpful, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button or share it with someone you think needs to hear the message. Okay. How did we get here? Well, honestly, we did it to ourselves. The first step to fixing a problem is admitting that we have a problem. Our inability to find staff. Great staff. Great staff who buys in and stays, stems from one simple premise. We don't treat people as well as we should. We are the result of years of poor management, treating staff like a line item and not an asset. That outdated mindset really needs to be erased. We have a few outdated beliefs that we must remove from our culture if we ever want to attract and retain the best. With that mission in mind, I'm going to outline a four step recruiting plan. You need to build a high performance team and succeed this year. Step one, you gotta change your mindset. Now, this step seems easy, yet it's gonna be the one that makes or breaks the other. So let's really address it first. You've heard that there's a war for town out there. Well, the truth is there's a war with talent. Like 90% of all the bar and restaurant problems, you are your own worst enemy. The good news is you're also your best solution. Here's a myth buster I'm sure you've heard before. Treat people like you want to be treated. That's a bunch of bs. Honestly, most people don't treat themselves very well. So stop saying this. You need to treat people better than you treat yourself. And this goes back to embracing what hospitality really means. You're the host to other people's experiences. We love to throw around the word hospitality in reference to our guests in this industry. Well, I'm going to tell you honestly, you need to apply that same enthusiasm towards your team to start winning the war with talent, you must treat them better. Does that mean more money? Not necessarily. You'd be shocked at how far some genuine appreciation goes. That means just saying please and thank you. Yes, manners maketh the culture. I I have a steadfast rule all my coaching clients must follow. We call it 100% thank yous. Everyone on the team must say thank you to each other at the end of every shift. We tend to take people for granted when we work with them day after day. Psychologists call this the law of familiarity. Please don't let it infect you and impact your culture. A little appreciation and gratitude have a long lasting impact on the culture of your business. And here's the very best part. That stuff's free. You should be using please and thank you a lot more. Step two is you have to be actively recruiting. The key word here is actively. What's the biggest difference between job ads and recruiting? One is passive and the other is active. When you place a standard and when I say standard, it means boring job ad on your favorite online job forum. Craigslist post. Indeed. LinkedIn. What you're doing, you're just being passive and you're waiting for people to see it and come running, which they never really seem to do. And then you get bummed out because not many people applied that you had envisioned. And then you panic and you feel desperate for a warm body to feel a blank spot you have on your schedule. And that, my friend, is a bad call. Placing job ads is passive. It relies on hope. If your main recruiting strategy is hope, you're totally screwed. Besides, it's a safe bet that your ad really doesn't inspire people to rush down and apply. Sad to say, but your job ad probably sucks. Your job ads more like a mini version of a job description when it's like that. And they only motivate the bottom feeders who need a job because their parents are on their butt to do something more than sit in the basement and play video games all day. Struggle is real, my friends. So instead of being passive, you need to play offense. It's time to kind of stroke the recruiting fire and start acting like a talent scout. That means no more sitting on the sidelines. You're going to have to take the fight to the talent. If you sit around waiting for top performers to come find you, you are missing the opportunity to find them. Why? Because top talent doesn't last long in a competitive market. That's why they're top talent. So how do you actively recruit? I'm glad you asked. Now, many top job sites like Indeed and LinkedIn allow you to actively search resumes in your market. That means that you can pre screen people ahead and if you like one that looks promising, you can send them a message. So yes, that means you're going to need to put yourself out there a little bit and ask people if they're interested. Don't worry about rejection. I'm sure you've heard the word no before. Now here's a great example of a very, very short script that I would use now. I would say something like, hey, I saw your resume here on let's say it was Indeed. I'm looking for a rock star. Whatever the job is, I'm looking for a rock star line cook to join my team at Acme Hardware. Okay, whatever your restaurant's name is, message me back if you're interested to have a quick conversation to see if this is a good fit for both of us. And then sincerely and then you put your name. Pretty simple, right? Pretty straightforward. Here's the secret. You need to send a lot of messages to get responses. It is purely a numbers game. Some people try it and then they get discouraged when they don't get a lot of replies. Here's the thing you have to understand. For every 20 messages you send out, only five will probably actually reply. And then only one or two will actually schedule an interview. Now, those results are far better than sitting around waiting for people to find you. Now you want to dedicate at least one hour a week, break it into 20 minute blocks, to just playing offense and actively recruiting in your market. Step 3 Scout for personality Over Skill okay, don't take this the wrong way, but you're hiring people for the wrong reasons. You need a line cook and you have a bias to look at those resumes that have a lot of experience. Now, I'm not saying that experience isn't important. It's critical for certain positions. However, personality needs to be 51%, sometimes 80% of the your hiring equation. So how do you uncover someone's personality? Ask better questions that dig into their character. Now here are a few of my favorite ones. One might be what's a common misconception people have about you? Here's another one I really like. If you saw someone stealing something, either an employee or a guest, how would you handle that situation? How about if you could only have one written word on your tombstone, what would it be? One of my favorite ones is how do you Continue your learning. I'm always looking for people that have this kind of desire to learn and become better. Here's another great one. I'd like you to tell me something about yourself that you think I should know about you. Something I wouldn't know unless you told me. Now, here's the thing. If the applicant seems like a good fit in terms of personality, that means team dynamics and skills. Then you want to take it one more step and you want to back it up with a behavioral assessment. The tool that really cuts through all the BS and will give you an inner look of how a person will lead, communicate, accomplish tasks, handle feedback. And what stresses them out is a behavioral assessment. People know how to interview. Many will say whatever they need to say to get the job, and then two weeks later, it seems as if someone else showed up at work. It's not the same person that you interviewed. Can you relate? A behavioral assessment can save you a lot of drama and money that comes from bad hires. The most common assessments on the market are DISC and the Predictive Index. Both measure the the four cornerstone traits that everyone has, we just have in different amounts, which makes everyone unique. Now, the one I like to use is called the Pro Scan, and I like it for restaurants because it measures another element that the other ones don't, and that's kinetic energy. Why is kinetic energy so important? Because it tells me how much I can put on your plate before you snap like a rubber band that's been stretched too far. Also, when you're using behavioral assessments, get a professional that's trained and certified to interpret those reporters before you start making big decisions. A lot of people, when they're first introduced to these behavioral assessments, they tend to stereotype people. You don't want to do that. Behavior predicts performance, so you want to have a pro to help you ensure that you have the right person in the right position on your team. Step four is you need to market yourself as the employer of choice. Here's another tough pill to swallow. If you don't have top talent applying at your restaurant or bar, you you might not be considered a worthwhile place to work. Now, I know that might sting a little. However, that may be more perception than truth. You always have two markets that you want your brand to be in front of at all times. Your guest and your future staff. Maybe give all those great pictures of food and drinks that you post on social media a rest every now and then. And remember to throw in some pictures and videos of your team having a great time working at Your restaurant being the employer of choice means that you are seen as the place to work. You earn that status in your market by showing people on your team enjoying themselves at your bar or restaurant. Share their stories, share their testimonials about why they choose to work there. You want to put some energy into showing that your team experience really, really stands out. This year. I really want you to make a shift and I really want you to focus just as much on your team experience as you do on your guest experience. Take care of your team and your team will take care of your guest. It's a trickle down effect of culture that really creates an extraordinary experience. You can't bypass the team and expect everything to run smoothly in your restaurant. So let's wrap this up. Remember that recruiting is a year round endeavor. It's not a part time thing. You have to do it all, all the time. I have four things I tell my clients to be doing all the time. Always be recruiting, always be marketing, always be training, always be learning. You must keep that marketing machine and that recruiting machine well fed and going full steam all year round. And just like you do for marketing, you got to think of this recruiting machine as that's my machine for talent. You need to be at the top of mind. For future talent that's looking for a job, you always want to be on top of mind because when they need you, they want to come work for you. And P.S. if you ever need to update your entire hiring system, then join my number one group accountability coaching program for independent restaurants called Restaurant Masterminds. We meet on Zoom twice a week and you have 24, 7 access to my complete online training library called the Restaurant Coach University, which currently has 28 on demand courses and contains over 400 hours of training, 380 downloads, templates, spreadsheets and PDFs so you can actually start making more while working less in your restaurant. Stop settling and join restaurants from around the world. We've got like 23 countries and counting that really are learning how to work on their business and not in their business. Head over to restaurantmasterminds.com to sign up. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to really create that culture of excellence.