In the food and beverage industry, staffing challenges are consistently cited as one of the areas of greatest concern for owners and operators. This paper will discuss two articles discussing two different issues related to staffing in this industry. The first article, by Patrice Rice, discusses ways to attract high quality managers (2013). She begins by observing that the restaurant industry is rebounding from the recent recession, and jobs in this sector are being added at a record rate. This means that it will become harder to attract and maintain high quality leadership for food and beverage operations than it has been in recent years, when the job market was tighter. Attracting and keeping high quality employees is a consistent challenge in the food and beverage industry as these types of jobs are often perceived as transitory and not a long-term career.
The article discusses a number of human resource issues for the food and beverage industry that need to be carefully considered. Although in tough times restaurants are likely to find good employees even when demanding very high hours and not providing health insurance, the reality is that the quality of the available employee pool will slip as other industries that provide more benefits increase their hiring. In order to be competitive for the quality employee, restaurants will have to spend the money to offer these kind of benefits that are common in many other industries. Further, there is a general perception of the lack of a long-term career path in the food and beverage industry. Although it may be difficult to counter long-held beliefs, the only way to overcome this perception will be to actually offer decent career opportunities to leadership employees. Again, this will cost more money, but employee stability and its benefit to the business will likely counter the extra investment in a potential business leader’s future.
The second article discusses the use of video hiring in the food and beverage industry (Krummert, 2011). There is commonly a difficulty in finding high quality applicants in the large pool that a hiring advertisement may attract. As face-to-face interview time is necessarily limited, it is hard to know from the online applications that the right selection from the pool has been made to fill the limited number of in-person interviews that can take place. The process simply takes too much time and pulls the manager from other business that needs attention. Another recognized challenge is the need for good people-interacting skills to be a truly high quality food service employee. Often the online or paper applications do not do a good job of allowing an applicant to show they have these skills and thus high quality potential employees are missed using more traditional methods.
This article by Bob Krummert discusses a new method of advertising for employees that utilizes a website that allows the applicant to upload a video application that they can record using a smartphone or a webcam. The service is presented as overcoming the challenges discussed above, because the interview decisions can be made with even more information about the candidates that are key to hiring a high quality employee. The video information allows the manager to give the coveted in-person interview time to those candidates that will have the qualities that the manager is seeking. One issue is the question of the availability of video-taking gadgets for all applicants, although this issue is likely to decrease over time. Another issue, not mentioned in the article, is that video hiring does bring with it the possibility of appearance-based hiring discrimination that is not present in online or paper application practice, so training will need to be implemented to ensure this new tool is used legally. The article concludes with the claim that video-hired employees have a lower turnover rate than those traditionally hired.
This paper discussed two challenges related to staffing in the food and beverage industry – the attraction and retention of high quality managers and the need to make better selections from applicants for in-person interviews. The first article had very concrete suggests that challenged the generally held beliefs of what benefits a restaurant-based job should offer. The second article had a use of technology, specifically video applications, to help the manager make better interview decisions. Both of these articles addressed staffing issues within the industry that are timely and presented possible solutions that should be considered.
Works Cited
Krummert, B. A New Way to Streamline Your Hiring Process. 10 October 2011. Restaurant Hospitality. Web. 28 July 2013.
Rice, P. Four Ways to Attract High-Quality Managers. 19 June 2013. FastCasual.com. Web. 28 July 2013.
