How to quickly find staff for a restaurant, café or hotel
A venue does not work without a shift
In the hotel and restaurant business a vacancy almost always fills a gap in the schedule. A waiter drops out for the weekend or a cook for the evening shift, and guests feel it at once. So speed matters here, and so does whether the person is ready to work to your roster.
Put the schedule in the first line. For a café it may be “2/2 from 8:00 to 20:00”, for a restaurant “evening shifts, Friday to Sunday”, for a hotel “24-hour shifts”.
Who a venue needs
- Kitchen: cook, kitchen assistant, sushi chef, pizza maker, baker, pastry chef, dishwasher.
- Floor and bar: waiter, bartender, barista.
- Hotel: housekeeper, receptionist.
- Managers and tourism: restaurant or hotel manager, tourism manager.
Most often people look for a waiter, a barista, a kitchen assistant and a receptionist or manager. For restaurant kitchens there is a separate page for the cook.
What to put in the vacancy
- Type of venue — restaurant, café, fast food, sushi bar, hotel.
- Cuisine and menu — which cuisine, whether experience in a particular style is needed.
- Schedule — shifts, hours, days off, whether there are night shifts.
- Pay — salary, percentage of sales, tips and how they are shared.
- Documents — whether a food-handling health certificate is needed.
- Experience — from scratch or from a year, whether there is on-the-job training.
- Extras — meals, uniform, discounts, accommodation for hotel staff.
Example vacancy: “A café in Bandra, Mumbai is looking for a barista on 2/2, shifts from 8:00 to 20:00. At least six months of experience, able to work an espresso machine and make alternative brews. Salary plus tips, a health certificate is required, can start from Monday.”
For venues with an evening schedule, it helps to warn about late shifts and how people will get home. It is a small thing, but it often decides whether a person replies to the vacancy.
How searching on BlaBlaPrice works
You do not send out ads or answer dozens of calls: you write one request, and candidates in your city reply in the chat. The site works out the category itself, checks the text and suggests what else to add. In the reply the person writes about experience, when they can come in for a shift and what pay they want. Your phone stays hidden until you choose a candidate. A short description of the process is on the “How it works” page.
How to select candidates
For the kitchen, ask about previous venues and the volume the person worked at: forty covers and two hundred are different experience. For the floor and the bar, look at how well they communicate, which already shows in the chat. Check whether the candidate understands the schedule and does not plan to combine your job with another. Offer a one-shift trial, which is fair to both.
Ask separately about seasonality. Summer terraces, resort hotels and tourist seasons need people for a few months, and it is better to say so honestly in the vacancy than to promise permanent work. For a hotel it helps to know languages, and for bars and restaurants also the ability to work with a billing system and a card terminal. If you are looking for a shift supervisor, write at once what he will be responsible for: the till, the stock or the team.
If you are looking for work in a venue
If you are looking for work, register on BlaBlaPrice as a service provider, choose this category and region, and venues’ vacancies will come to you to answer. An employer can create a request on the home page.
