Recruitment should always be pro-active, not reactive. My bar Recruitment plan will be to rotate the managers weekly so they have to interview three potential members of staff every week, no matter how well staffed we are. Having new blood in the team is just as important as having a strong core team.
The best Recruitment exercise I have been a part of, which is a huge example of the issues currently within Recruitment was when we had a big Recruitment drive for December 2018. This involved going through over 750 emailed in CVs, removing everyone that was visibly ineligible whether that was due to radius, time restraints, age or just minimal effort in presentation of their CV and the occasional person that had emailed in twice.
That cut us down to 400 CVs. The next step was to reply to all 400 of these applicants to confirm that they were of age, willing to work the hours, and had thought of adequate transport in terms of late night travel and that they were available over the holidays. Of these 400, 200 didn't reply and a further 100 were too young or couldn't commit to the hours that we had on offer.
So there we were, 650 applications down before we even started the interview process. The next step was to invite that 100 in for interviews across the same evening, the interviewers consisted of me, 3 other managers and one member of HR.
So 5 managers, a 4 hour window of an interview every 15 minutes. Of the 100, only 60 turned up and then after the 60 interviews we sat down to discuss candidates. Of the 60 we broke it down to 10.
So that's over the span of 7days we went from 750 CVs to 10 eligible candidates. Of those 10 that were offered jobs, only 6 took them, and then over the first 4 weeks, 4 of them either failed probation or quit.
Leaving us with 2. All of that effort for 2 candidates, and that was the best Recruitment exercise I have ever seen.
That was the state of Staffing and Recruitment then, which will be even worse now in a post covid world and looming recession.
The 2 sides of Recruitment are mind numbingly painful as people are either saying their are no jobs out there or their are no candidates out there. Both of which, must be lies. I've been made redundant a couple of times over the last 10 years which I will discuss indivually in later blogs but I am mentioning it now because it is important to let people know I have been on both side and that although I have never had to drop all the way back down to Bartender, I was more than willing to due to my love for the industry. My career essentially went from Bartender to Bar Manager to Bartender to Duty Manager, to Deputy/ Holding Manager to where I turned down the GM position in order to take a below minimum wage Assistant Manager position 200 miles away from anyone that I knee, I then worked my way up to Deputy and then moved another 200 miles to take a GM position within the same company, I then left that chain to work for a smaller company as Deputy Manager, 2 months later was promoted to General Manager in another one of their Venues. That Venue was then closed 9 months later as it was brought by Brewdog so I took a step down and moved again, another 150 miles to step down to Restaurant Manager to work with a GM I had previously worked with and had an amazing working relationship with, also the main feedback I had was that I did not have enough Restaurant experience on my CV. I have now rectified this through that job. I was there for 12 months, including 4 months Furlough. So I have been through a fair few Recruitment processes from both sides.
Obviously I'm still at least 12 months away from starting the Process of buying my first bar so my Recruitment plan will change through time however, the way I currently intend to recruit my first team is to recruit for the future of the business from the get go. So outside of the previous Recruitment exercise I am going to look for skills and interests in bartenders that can balance out some of short comings/ gaps in knowledge. For example, I will be looking to hire Bartenders that are at University studying subjects that will be benefit the business a s a whole, such as; Accounting, Employment law, marketing and maybe even some business management. My hope is that they can assist me with the business and then hopefully once they graduate that will either take up those roles with in my business or at the very least I will have built strong relationships with people that I can hire on a consultancy basis. Outside of that I will be looking at people on an individual basis and will focus more on work ethic/ transferable skills than I will experience with in the industry itself. I will also be looking for a full time Barista as I have a very basic coffee knowledge which I know is a weakness in the industry and it is super important to me that I have the best Espresso Martini in the city, which relies more on coffee quality than anything else.
Let me know what you think in the comments
Comments