Rethinking Restaurant Interviews
Hire better with two simple adjustments to how you interview
In today’s newsletter, I’m going to cover:
What might be wrong with your current interview process
Two ways to make your interviews stronger & more consistent
Free templates to interview questions for FOH, BOH, and managers
I was never formally trained on how to conduct an interview as a restaurant manager. I’m sure I’m not the only one here. When I was coming up in our independent restaurant environment, interviews were very shoot-from-the-hip and often casual, especially for hourly positions.
Questions like:
Where have you worked before?
What’s your favorite part of the job?
What do you like to do outside of work?
Who was your favorite boss?
Not terrible questions, but also not incredibly effective. I mostly interviewed and hired based on gut reactions, and whether or not I clicked with the person. My gut instinct, like most restaurant operators, is pretty good after years of experience, but not as reliable as I once believed. It certainly wasn’t great early in my career.
What was actually happening was a lot of inconsistency. With some candidates, I struck up an easy conversation based on similar life experiences. With others, I struggled to connect. While conversation skills are important for front of house positions in particular, they aren’t actually that telling in an interview. When you start hiring on the quality of conversation or personality alone, you risk several pitfalls.
First, we tend to hire people like ourselves. For example, renowned organizational psychologist Adam Grant shares a story about interviewing a young man named Ari for a phone sales position that wouldn’t make eye contact. They had nothing in common and struggled to connect in the interview. His supervisor, however, saw something different and moved Ari forward through the hiring process. Ari turned out to be one of the best salespeople on Adam’s team. Since then, he has studied how to make interviews help companies make better decisions.
Oftentimes, the way we interview leads to a similarity bias – hiring people that think and look like us. While that doesn’t sound too bad on the surface – who doesn’t want to work with people like them? – diversity of opinions and backgrounds actually strengthens a company. Too often we mistake a “good cultural fit” for someone we’d like to hang out with.
Instead, a good cultural fit should be based on aligning with company values. But how do we do this consistently? The answer is by combining two evidence-based strategies: structured and situational-judgement interview questions.
First — why structured questions? That sounds so boring and corporate (gasp!), especially for those of us that are independent restaurant operators. Research shows that using a structured format helps companies be more consistent and fair with how they evaluate candidates against each other. That means asking the same questions in every interview so that you are always comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges. It also is a critical way to reduce personal biases.
Second — what the hell are situational-judgement questions? These are questions that are mostly based on hypothetical situations ("What would you do if..") rather than past-behavior based ("Tell me about a time when..."). Current research shows that these types of questions can be better tailored to the actual job requirements and to reflect your company's core values.
Essentially, by using situational-judgment and structured questions - you can get a better sense of how a person would handle everyday situations that crop up in the restaurant world, and by using the same questions for every candidate you can compare their answers to make the best decision.
There is a third effective piece to the interview puzzle that I’ll tackle separately - and that is a practical interview. Or as we call it in our industry - staging. This is typically used for chef candidates or similar, but can be incredibly effective for all positions throughout the restaurant. More on that later, though.
If you have no idea where to start, here are a couple of templates you can steal from the Out of the Weeds google drive library. For access to the full library, subscribe to the Substack here.
And what if you don’t have clear company values? Start here.
These aren't simple adjustments but any investment in improving the hiring process that leads to reduced turnover (and loss of knowledge) is worth the time.