Hiring Quality Employees

 

Hiring Quality Employees

 

The hiring process starts when the candidate comes into your hiring quality employeesrestaurant and wants to fill out an employment application.

It is best to have on hand a candidate interview scheduling form to be used to schedule interviews. Schedule interviews only when applicants come into your establishment during peak times.

It is ideal that interviews are performed during the off peak times.

Use a telephone reference form to ask certain questions about the previous employer.

If you have time to interview a person than do it instantly. Have your greeter seat the applicant in an area away from customers.

Give the applicant a cold drink or a cup of coffee while they wait for the manager to interview them.

Give the applicant an application to fill out ahead of time before they are interviewed.

If you are scheduling applicant interviews it is best to screen the applicants by conducting past work experience and personal reference checks prior to the interview.

This process will allow you to weed out individuals that have bad reference checks, this saves time and money.

Ask open ended questions. The interviewer talks 20% and the applicant takes 80% of the time.

To get a second opinion have another manager conduct a second interview, two eyes are better than one.

Make the applicant as comfortable as possible.

After you decide if you are going to hire the applicant, you should schedule an orientation to explain the restaurant policies and procedures (Hand Book).

Have the applicant sign a form indicating that they understand the policies and procedures. By signing the form it will act as a paper trail in case it is needed in an unemployment hearing or a civil suit.

Always use employee warning notices, document employee related issues will create a paper trail if needed.

How to write up employees will help you in the long run especially in unemployment hearing and civil suits.

Before hiring an individual, make sure you are clear that following your rules, policies and procedures is a requirement of employment.

Hiring Quality Employees

You can not ask:

  • Ancestry, national origin, descent, or national
  • Private organizations
  • Religious affiliations
  • Date of birth
  • Ancestry, national origin, parentage, or nationality
  • Names and addresses of relatives other than a spouse and dependent children
  • Marital status or Sex
  • Height or weight, unless you can show that information is justified by business necessity

When conducting interviews it is very important that you ask legal questions:

Hiring Quality Employees

Questions that you can ask:

  1. Addresses – past and current.
  2. How long have you lived in your specific city.
  3. The applicant’s home or cell phone number or how can we reach you.
  4. If the applicant looks under aged than you can say can you furnish a minor permit to show proof of age. Never ask an applicant their age.
  5. After the applicant is hired than you may have the applicant fill out a I-9 Employment Verification form to verify their identity and age.
  6. You may ask language skills only if it pertains to the position.
  7. You can ask if they are a US Citizen. If the applicant is not a US Citizen than they must have US Visa status.
  8. You can ask about convictions and misdemeanors. You cannot ask about the specific conviction.
  9. It is illegal to ask the applicant about disabilities. However, you can ask if they are fit to perform the specific position.
  10. You can ask the applicant about office skills and professional schools that they may attend.
  11. You can ask about their writing and reading skills, only if they pertain to the position.
  12. You may ask about his or her employment history, names and addresses,  dates, salary and why they left the job.
  13. After you hire you can ask about their marriage status for I-9 and W-4 purposes.
  14. They applicant may need to prove that they can perform the job position, heavy lifting, standing for long periods of time.  A physical examination may be required.
  15. You can ask an applicant about normal hours and days of work required by the job to avoid possible conflict with religions or other personal convictions.
  16.  You can an indicate that your restaurant is an equal opportunity employer.

Restaurant Consulting Services – Labor Laws

 
Human Resources and Labor Laws

Restaurant Consulting Services


You must follow the law in your state in regards to running your restaurant.  Some restaurants are not following local, state or federal laws pertaining to hiring and paying employees. Potential employees may not fill out applications or once hired the manager/owner may not fill out any W-4 or 1-9 paperwork on the new hires.

Some managers/owners pay their employees a base amount or straight cash from the register. These managers/owners also do not keep records of payroll time and dollars.


Usually all it takes is a disgruntled employee to file a complaint with the labor department in reference to the above. Once the state or other agencies are in the picture it will be up to you to prove the employee wrong.

The labor department or other agencies will come to your restaurant looking for all records pertaining the complaint such as:

Believe me, you don’t want to travel that path, it may cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines and or imprisonment.

Let’s weigh this out, breaking the law or complying with the law. Yes, it is true, if you are breaking the law, they may not find out. On the other hand, you have a greater chance of getting caught.

Do you want to take that chance of losing your business or your reputation all because you tried to save money or because you decided not to have the correct documentation on hand during the hiring process?

As the old saying goes, it is better to be safe than sorry.

Restaurant consulting services are the best way to ask for help in regards to your restaurant. Let us do the work for you, you have enough to do with your restaurant.

Do what you got to do to stay safe and legal. If you are a small business and in need of help with information on the above then you can contact Workplace Wizards, a restaurant consulting service, with experience that can help you in staying legal.

Our Restaurant consulting services are available 6 days a week with the first consultation on us. Contact us at (800) 753-0657.

Call us local at: (717) 774-3698

Email us at: Workplacewizards@gmail.com

 

Why Restaurant Cleaning Checklists Are Important

Why Restaurant Cleaning Checklists Are Important

When you go to a restaurant, as a guest what are your expectations? You expectrestaurant-cleaning-checklist to be given excellent customer service, to have an exceptional meal and to enjoy your experience at the restaurant, but what about the restaurants cleanliness?

Many people go out to eat to avoid the hassle of cooking and cleaning. As a guest you expect the restaurant you are visiting to be clean; that includes:

  • Table your dining at
  • Floor around the table
  • Chairs or Both
  • Menu cover
  • Bathroom
  • Foyer or Entry Way
  • Windows
  • Door Handles
  • Kitchen – Certainly the area visible from the dining room
  • Condiments containers
  • Clean covers to HVAC in dining room
  • Light Fixtures
  • Parking Lot

The Buck Stops With The Manager – YOU

As a manager it’s your duty to ensure all areas of the restaurant are being properly cared for by all employees for guest satisfaction. The easiest way to divide out cleaning duties is to use a daily, weekly and monthly restaurant cleaning checklist. The normal is dividing the task between employee type and day of the week. For example Servers on Monday do the Menu Covers. Hostesses on Tuesday day shift do the foyer walls. Kitchen staff on Wednesday afternoon do the fryer grease and meat slicer, etc.

Another way I liked to divide the task is assign an area to one person such as John. John would have the walls at the back of the restaurant and front of the restaurant. It allows the employee to own up to the task and someone is ultimately held accountable.

What Gets Checked Gets Done

Managers should grab one of the checklists that was signed as completed and follow up with each item that was marked as complete. If often takes a close look to ensure the task was complete as expected. 

Lead By Example

It’s also very important for all managers, including the General Manager to have some type of cleaning task assigned. When employees see the General Managers and other managers getting their hands dirty it often helps improve moral and motivation.

Concerned about getting dirty at work especially for the big involved monthly restaurant cleanings? Bring a change of clothes, heck keep a set of old clothes in the office for just the time you need to jump in and get the job done.

It Starts With Proper Training

It’s the manager’s duty to ensure all employees are properly trained on the assigned cleaning task and the manager training should complete the specific task fully with the employee the first time. You can’t just expect the employee to perform cleaning or any other task with out the proper guidance and encouragement.

Keeping A Clean Restaurant Is Just Good Business Sense

Proper cleaning will ensure your restaurant is kept in shape at all times and will keep you prepared if the Department of Health comes in for an inspection. Cleaning checklists also help eliminate eye sores that guests can see and provides a better working environment for all employees.

Save Money

Cleanliness of your restaurant can also help reduce the amount of money you’d need to pay for equipment and supplies in the future. Just like in your home, keeping up with daily, weekly and monthly chores can cut costs in the long run. Having clean areas that guests can visibly see, e.g. bathrooms, dining areas and outside upkeep are important to welcome them every time.

Guests like the convenience of being able to enjoy a meal out at a restaurant. Keeping your space neat, clean and organized will allow them to have a good experience and will surely bring them back time and time again.

Quick Self Promotion

We have restaurant forms for most areas of your business. If you have a quick question to help your restaurant succeed, use our contact form and we will be sure the get back to you quickly. We love to network with other professionals in the food service industry.

Starting a Restaurant – Do’s and Dont’s

Starting a Restaurant – Do’s and Dont’s

starting-a-restaurant-do's-and-don'tsUnbeknownst to many entrepreneurs-in-training, opening a restaurant is one of the riskiest endeavors one can undertake. From finding exactly the right locale to investing in the freshest of ingredients, a host of elements must be considered. From a restaurant consultant standpoint, the primary importance is to ensure enough capital is available for the venture – on average, anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 is required to open the doors of a restaurant, that figure being reduced if existing kitchen equipment and the like is readily available. However, many costs go into that figure – food enough to last for that initial six months to a year, enough labor dollars to pay a staff (in that same six months-to-a-year time frame) and of course garden variety bills. All this must be considered very carefully by the prospective restaurateur beforehand because initially – and this is just fact – revenue won’t be streaming in with any sense of urgency; typically, restaurants just don’t turn a profit right away and clientele must be built to make this happen.

In what’s a rather alarming statistic, 75 to 80 percent of restaurants go out of business in their first year. As an increasingly difficult business to master and succeed in, owning a restaurant is a prospect that should be carefully researched, according to master restaurant consultants. Factors such as location, knowledge of PNL and control of laborers and food cost are really just the beginning of what needs to be taken into serious consideration. According to professional restaurant business consultants, most people fail in this arena because they feel they could open up a restaurant just because, say, they could cook or perhaps have simply eaten in a restaurant. To the contrary, this is more a science with only 20 to 25 percent of attempts actually succeeding due to the sheer fact that these folks actually did their homework.

©2012-2024 Copyright Workplace Wizards Restaurant Consulting Schim Enterprises LLC