Hiring restaurant staff for the first time can feel daunting. Restaurant roles may seem like a job anyone can do, but in reality, they take particular skills and talents to be performed well. On top of that, restaurants have been facing a shortage of workers that was brought about by the pandemic. The talent pool has become limited, making hiring more challenging and time-consuming.
But hiring underqualified people can hurt your operations. So what qualities should you look for in a restaurant staff member? What are the roles you need to fill?
We’ll guide you in forming a solid restaurant staffing plan, helping you identify the individuals who will make your restaurant operate successfully.
A Breakdown of Restaurant Staff Members
1. Front-of-House Roles
Restaurant staff in the front-of-house are the ones who directly interact with customers. The common front-of-house roles are:
- Server
The server is your restaurant’s main customer service representative. Aside from taking and serving orders, their responsibilities include refilling spice containers, stocking condiments, arranging the table setting, and updating the promotional displays on the tables.
A good server shouldn’t just be quick on their feet and calm under pressure. They should also be people-oriented, organized, and professional. A persuasive personality will also give them—and your restaurant—a plus.
For example, if a server doesn’t recommend anything from the menu to first-time customers, you might miss out on selling your high-profit items. On the other hand, if a server makes recommendations, your high-profit items may not be ordered, but at least they’ll gain attention.
- Host
The host is the staff member that will welcome customers into your restaurant. They monitor table availability to ensure that every customer will be seated.
You can offer this role to entry-level candidates interested in the hospitality industry. Look for candidates who are people-oriented, organized, and good at multitasking. They should also stay composed during peak business hours when they will be entertaining many customers at a time.
- Busser
The busser (AKA busboy) is responsible for clearing the tables after the customers have eaten and left. Like the host role, it is also a good entry-level position.
A busser should have an acute awareness of their surroundings and attention to detail. Their job is more than cleaning tables because they help your restaurant provide a great dining experience for customers.
- Bartender
The responsibilities of a bartender are pretty self-explanatory, so when hiring one, you can be more particular about each candidate’s skills and background.
An outstanding bartender must be experienced and preferably a bartending school graduate. If not, they should at least have formal training in a bartending program in any hospitality school.
People-orientedness and management skills are also a plus. A bartender should be good at reading customer body language; for example, if someone sits at the bar, your bartender should instantly be able to tell if they need to be alone or someone to talk to.
A bartender may also have to carry out a few management duties because they usually close the restaurant every night. They tally the restaurant’s sales and perform bar inventory.
- Barback
A barback is a bartender’s assistant. They also perform cleaning duties like a busser. You can offer the barback position to aspiring bartenders. They can use their role as a training ground for becoming qualified bartenders.
2. Back-of-House Roles
The back-of-house team includes cooking roles, kitchen workers, and other employees that don’t directly interact with customers. The restaurant staff in the backend are:
- Chefs
Depending on the restaurant concept, there can be different types of chefs in a restaurant. Fine dining restaurants are usually run by an executive chef. Their main role is to lead the sous chef and line cooks. An executive chef may also run a casual dining restaurant or just manage the kitchen if they don’t own the business.
The responsibilities of a chef go beyond cooking. They also help design the menu, create the specials, and manage the entire kitchen staff.
A good chef has leadership skills, multitasking abilities, attention to detail, and thrives naturally in a fast-paced environment. This is no role for a novice, so focus on candidates with several years of experience under their belts. A culinary degree is also a must.
- Sous Chef
The sous chef assists the executive chef and takes over the operations when the executive chef isn’t available. They can be involved in all cooking tasks or focus on a particular station during busy nights.
Though they are primarily assistants, a sous chef should have the same educational background as an executive chef. They should also possess the same skills as their superiors.
- Line Cooks
Line cooks are the most common employees in a restaurant kitchen. Depending on the concept of your restaurant and its scale of operations, you may need two to eight line cooks. They take on different roles, such as the sauté chef, grill cook, or fry cook.
Line cooks don’t need the same background as sous and head chefs, but their experience is crucial. Hire line cooks who have experience with your restaurant concept to ensure smooth kitchen operations.
3. Specialty Restaurant Jobs
You may also need restaurant staff members who specialize in a particular service or dish if your concept calls for them. These specialty roles include dessert chefs, pastry chefs, and salad chefs. Upscale restaurants often hire dessert chefs, while restaurants serving different types of bread usually need a pastry chef. A pastry chef also makes desserts.
If you want to serve salad but not build a self-serving salad station, you need a salad chef.
4. Non-cooking Roles
Employees who neither cook nor serve food are also part of an operational restaurant team. They may go back and forth between front-of-house and back-of-house.
Common non-cooking and non-serving roles include:
- Restaurant Manager (RM)
The RM oversees the entire restaurant staff, both frontend and backend. As such, they need strong leadership skills, experience in the hospitality industry, and multitasking skills. They wear many hats, from human resources to inventory, so they must be able to manage their time and responsibilities well.
Although their role doesn’t involve cooking, RMs can be chefs or at least someone with vast culinary knowledge. You can take on this role yourself if you’re passionate about culinary arts and have mastered business management.
- Bookkeeper or Accountant
You need an in-house bookkeeper or accountant to create your financial reports. You can assign yourself this role if you have accounting knowledge, but hiring an expert might be best. That being said, many restaurant owners actually act as the accountants of their team.
Note that bookkeepers aren’t the same as accountants. A bookkeeper handles the day-to-day recording of financial transactions, while an accountant provides financial analysis and generates financial statements.
- Dishwashers
You can offer the dishwasher role to novices in the hospitality industry. This may not be anyone’s dream job, but dishwashers are actually crucial to restaurant operations. Without them, the rest of the kitchen team will be slowed down, affecting your customer service.
- Maintenance Personnel
Lastly, a restaurant needs maintenance personnel to ensure that all equipment and appliances are in good working order. But this is a role you can also assign to yourself. If you don’t have much on your plate yet, you may have some time to do daily equipment test runs. If something needs repairs, you can leave it to the RM to make the calls for repairs.
5. Delivery Personnel
In the age of online ordering, having delivery personnel on board is no longer an option but a must. Hiring an in-house team of delivery drivers is a choice, though.
If you run an online ordering page on a food aggregator app, you may no longer need your own delivery drivers. Instead, you can just pay commission fees to your delivery partners to let them do the heavy lifting for you. You can recoup the costs by slightly increasing your menu prices on the apps.
But if bumped-up prices will turn away customers, allowing them to order online directly from your restaurant is worth considering. You can save more costs if paying each driver around $26 per hour will be cheaper than the commission you’d pay to food aggregator companies.
Save on Labor Costs With a Full Restaurant Team
Most of a restaurant’s expenditure is actually spent on labor, not necessarily food. Executive chefs are often paid the highest. The average head chef in the US makes $85,800 a year, but their typical pay range is $73,900-$99,000.
Sous chefs can make over half of that with their average yearly salary of $49,193. Their pay range is $41,724-$58,894 a year.
Many servers are often paid minimum wage, and sadly, restaurants that need to cut costs tend to lay off servers first. If you’d like to avoid doing the same, you can let technology do some of their work from the get-go.
A QR code menu may let you rely on fewer servers because it allows customers to order and pay straight from their smartphones. And if your concept permits, you can also use a self-ordering kiosk to cut lines. The kiosk may even reduce order errors because customers can double-check their orders before placing them.
A Kitchen Display System (KDS) is another cost-efficient upgrade. Traditionally, restaurants have a caller, a staff member who calls out orders to the kitchen staff. With a KDS, you don’t need a caller. Your chefs and line cooks only need to glance at the KDS to see all incoming orders. They can also use it to alert servers on finished orders.
If you have trouble finding an accountant or bookkeeper, you can find a cloud-based POS system that you can connect with an accounting software. A cloud POS can also generate real-time sales reports, decreasing your accounting tasks. You can then concentrate on boosting your marketing plans to increase sales.
While labor will always be costly, investing in a powerful restaurant management system can give you more control over your spending. All your staff members can focus on their primary tasks and feel less burnt out after their shifts.
But even if technology has taken some of their responsibilities, it’s still restaurant staff themselves that help makes sales and delight customers. Thanks to their dedication, your restaurant can exceed its KPIs and thrive in a highly competitive industry.