Innovative ways quick-service restaurants and other small business owners are recruiting candidates for low-wage jobs

Almost inevitably, when I speak with owners and operators of quick-service restaurants or other businesses that rely on relatively low-paid, hourly workers, they complain about the shortage of talent and the resulting difficulty in recruiting employees. But when you scratch the surface, they actually don’t have a recruitment problem. They have a retention problem. They’re always recruiting because they’re failing to retain.

A typical quick-service restaurant (QSR) employee has a tenure of three months, which means that the employer must hire four people every year per role. If they could extend that tenure to even six months, they’d only need to recruit half as many people. So, rather than looking at how to better recruit and spending more and more money there, they should instead be looking at how to better retain. Which of their employees are with them for the longest period of time? Ask those employees what causes them to get out of bed and come to work, day after day, to a job that is almost identical to many others. Use that feedback to then find employees with similar traits. 

Spell out the traits of your successful employees in your recruitment ads. If flexible work schedules — where the employee and not the employer control the flexibility — are important to your longest-tenured employees, then emphasize that in your recruitment ads, your interviews, and your onboarding. Drill that in. If ability to advance is important, emphasize that in your ads, interviews, and onboarding.