Thinking of restaurant rehiring and training can be overwhelming. As an operator preparing to reopen your restaurant doors, you’re probably asking yourself things like what is the right business model and how am I going to know how to staff if I don’t know what my turnovers or average check sizes will be?

Treat these next months like your grand re-opening. You will likely have a lot of new best practices to put in place, new employees to teach, and staff doing multiple jobs that they didn’t do before.

Here are 3 ways you can crush your restaurant rehiring and training and welcome back staff:

Bring BacK Key Players

Staffing in the restaurant industry has always been a competitive game. Your teams are made up of full timers, lifers, part-timers, second jobs, college students, teenagers and sometimes even your own family.

Think about your previous operation and staff before the pandemic. Start to reach out to your employees that are not working. Bring back key players on your team that are already or can quickly become cross trained in various roles within the operation.

Encourage your new staff to be as nimble as possible. It’s very important to start out small and minimalistic to be as profitable as possible.

Safety First

For an operation that handles food and beverages, safety should be at the forefront of all your employees’ minds. ServSafe has long been the industry’s trusted provider of safety trainings to teams for cooking temperatures, safe storage, cross contamination, hygiene, sanitation, and other risk mitigation activities. Because of the challenges presented by COVID-19, they have developed several free resources aimed at keeping your workers and the dining public safe. These free online training courses and assessments from ServSafe can help get new staff up to date on the number of new best practices and safety rules foodservice operations should be implementing.

It also doesn’t hurt to get returning employees a refresher course on what should and shouldn’t be done when handling food and beverages.

Dining Alliance Can Help with Your Restaurant Rehiring

At Dining Alliance, we understand there is so much that goes into the process of reopening your doors – and staying open. Use the checklist below to bring back your staff and get them ready for opening day.

• Determine the Projected list of employee needs for each station
• Develop pay scales for all crew work groups and job descriptions
• Prepare a rehire salary agreement with new job responsibilities
• Review staffing manual, adding in any Covid-19 protocol and rules
• Arrange for interview site, furniture, phones & supplies
• Identify dates of training allowing for “dry run” or “soft opening” time
• Validate service sequences
• Develop bar opening checklist
• Develop kitchen-opening checklist & for all departments: open, close & managers
• Document and train management and staff
• Develop side work schedules for all FOH
• Set up POS training for management & crew
• Organize any necessary management training such as:
  • Updating best practices for sanitation and safety
  • Interviewing and hiring (legal vs. illegal questions, ADA etc.)
  • Restaurants standards and systems processes