Excellent Job Descriptions Means Excellent Restaurant Recruitment

Especially in a restaurant setting, each person you hire will be influential in making restaurant service as courteous and seamless as possible. Have one outlier, one chink–and what was supposed to be a Friday night of “Thank Yous” will turn into your nightmare of “I’m Sorry”s. But in order to have a great team in the first place (like us Frogs), you want to make sure your job descriptions are flawless.

By SarahStierch (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

In today’s age, you have eight seconds to get your audience’s attention on the internet–eight seconds. And if your website (whether you’re using your website to recrit or a job search provider, we’ll cover in a minute) is slow, it goes all downhill from there. If you look at your average job description and go from there, you’ll probably bore the reader from death. Instead, give your prospective candidate a small idea of how working your restaurant will be like and set expectations from there.

But make sure you give a realistic outlook of what your job is. If you just sprinkle a few words here and there, you’re ultimately misleading your candidates and you might get a recruitment pool you’re not looking for (which ultimately, can be a huge waste of time). And also if you don’t provide enough information, you might be setting yourself up for disaster when you host your job interview. If you want a clearer idea of what other companies do for job descriptions, here are some great examples from Google, Square, and

Make Your Descriptions Realistic

According to Quartz, the average job description is more like a wishlist than it is a real job description–a profile of the dream candidate rather than an a good candidate. In an industry where you’re working with both part-time teenaged after-school dishwashers to your thirty-year executive chefs, making an ideal wish-list might deter job-seekers than most.

Instead, try to incorporate your company culture to your descriptions as much as possible. This not only creates a better of idea of how working at your restaurant might be like, you’ll weed out applicants who might not be culturally fit for your company (which culture is a HUGE thing for us Frogs).

A day-to-day descriptions works well in that case. If you’re hiring servers, describe how much service you might see in an hour (and don’t just see a night as a busy night…unless your restaurant is truly busy night-to-night). If you’re hiring a pastry chef, describe what dishes you might be making and describe what kind of relationships you might make with other chefs (if you allow that).

Answer Questions in the Job Description That You Don’t Want to be Asked During the Job Interview.

Vacation? Pay? Insurance? Those and other similar questions should have been answered already by the job description (here’s one from Columbia University from example). And if you write that you offer vacation, you (as the owner) should offer vacation in your workplace. If you say you offer vacation and actually your culture shuns (which one of the Frogs found out it was a HUGE trend in 2014), then you are not indicating trust between management (including yourself) and your employees.

And if you have written things such as pay or vacation but you find out that your interviewees haven’t read them, then it’s time to rethink how your description(s) are written.

But keep in mind that job descriptions are only a part of the process. Just because you wrote the description doesn’t necessarily mean you got the staff you need–especially when you interview your potential candidates.

And as always, keep your employment equal opportunity.