The Secret to Good Hiring
Defining Talents that Fit in Your Restaurant Culture
No matter how great the decor, the location, the bar menu, or the quality of food ingredients, at the end of the day, no more and no less than the sum of the people who work in them. So how do you decide whom to hire and not to hire a candidate or an applicant? What criteria should you use in selecting your team? Clearly, these are some of the most critical decisions any manager can face. All too often the answers to these questions vary from manager to manager, and are often subjective as to be useless: “He was very nice”, “She seemed smart”, “He dressed up for the interview”, “She has worked in some good restaurants”, “He has a lot of wine knowledge”, etc..etc. While all of these answers are positive, and certainly none would be considered bad qualities in a prospective employee, none of them are adequate filters for determining how you select your teammates. Instead, you must begin with a clear definition of what your model employee looks like.
The first step in defining the qualities of who you should be looking for in a potential employee is to separate “technical” talents and “emotional” talents. Technical talents are very easy to identify, and also very easy to train for. In time, nearly anyone can learn how to properly saute a piece of fish, deglaze a pan, crumb a table, or open a bottle of wine. Emotional talents, on the other hand, are nearly impossible to train for are instinctive, and (of course) are much harder to identify. listing the technical skills that a given job will require is the first step in identifying which potential candidates will make the cut, but beyond that, we need also to list which emotional talents our potential employees must also have. While there are various emotional talents that may work well in different job settings, in a restaurant dedicated to hospitality the ability to work in a positive manner with other staff, to work with a sense of urgency, to be respectful of other people, to genuinely enjoy making other people happy and to hold high internal standards are just a few of the emotional talents we are looking for. In Setting the Table, Danny Meyer lists five core emotional skills that define a potential champion of hospitality.
They are:
Optimistic Warmth - genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full.
Intelligence - not just “smarts” but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning.
Work Ethic - a natural tendency to do something as well as it can be done.
Empathy - an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel.
Self Awareness and Integrity - an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment.
Rich Melman, the owner of the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant group in Chicago defines his perfect candidate as having 51% emotional talents and 49% technical talents. This “51-percent solution” correctly places the five core emotional skills for hospitality above the technical skills necessary to simply execute a job. Please note that the recipe is not 90% emotional skills and 10% technical skills, however, what the 51-percent solution does is properly weigh the instinctive character and personality traits - the emotional skills - that are needed to create a positive and healthy work culture.
Selecting for the Right Talent
So, now you have a list of your core emotional and technical talents ready to match up against your job candidates. Now what? Recruiting and hiring can be a complicated process. The candidate has to learn about you, your company, their potential role in your company, and the details of their proposed compensation. You have to check their job history and references (never skip this step), you may need to make an offer and respond to their counteroffer, etc. All of these items are very important, but they must all be handled separately and apart from the first interview - the Talent Interview!
The talent interview should stand alone. It has only one purpose: to discover whether the candidates recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors match the requirements of the job. This is a very difficult task, and trying to accomplish the other tasks at the same time is close to impossible. Be sure to set aside enough time to mine through the emotional talents of the candidate. Be clear at the outset of the interview that you are not there to discuss compensation or references, but are only there to learn about the talents of the candidate. This means that the interview will be a little more structured than most: more questions, less banter, and decidedly different than a “typical” interview. Unfortunately, the typical interview does little to shed light on how a candidate might actually behave once they are inside of the business. Part of the problem with this is that people quite often say things about themselves that simply aren’t true. This may not necessarily be because the candidate intentionally misleads you, but also because people are often not the greatest judges of their own talents; some might believe that they possess great empathy, for example, when in fact they don’t.
The single best way to discover a person’s talent in an interview is to allow him to reveal himself by the choices he makes. In this sense, the questions you ask should try to mirror verbally what he will face on the job behaviorally. On the job, the employee will face hundreds, if not thousands, of situations every day to which he could respond in any number of ways. How the employee responds to these situations will be the definition of his job performance. Our job then is to ask questions that will give us insight into how the candidate will likely respond to those situations.
The right technique in asking these questions is to ask OPEN-ENDED or SCENARIO-BASED questions that offer many potential directions for answers. It is important not to telegraph the “right” answer. Choose open-ended questions such as “How closely do you think people should be supervised?” or “What do you enjoy most about bartending/hosting/cooking?serving?” The direction that the candidate takes in answering these questions will be predictive of his future behaviors. Scenario-based questions are similar but generally involve a “what if” function. When an interviewer asks these types of questions, they will often describe a potential situation that is likely to come up during the candidates’ employment and then ask, “What would you do in that situation?” or “How would you approach that problem?” The beauty of the “what if” question is that there is no wrong or right answer, just a response that the person being interviewed has no choice but to answer from his or her own experiences and understanding.
Once you have asked a question, do your best to pause and remain quiet. Try not to answer your own question or point the candidate in the “right” direction. If the candidate asks you what you mean, try not to answer directly. Instead, let him know that there is no right or wrong answer and what is important is what the questions mean to him. Most importantly, whatever answer the candidate gives you believe him. No matter how great your first impression may be, no matter how much you want to like him, believe him. A person’s unaided response to an open-ended question is powerfully predictive. Trust their answer, no matter how much you wish they had said something else.
Just as open-ended questions give us a window into predicting future behaviors, past behaviors are also a very good predictor of future behavior. Therefore, asking questions such as “Tell me about a time when you…..” can serve you well. These questions can be tricky, however. It is important when asking questions about past behaviors that you listen to specifics. In this case, specific means a specific time, place, person, or event. Sometimes, candidates will answer these questions with a “theory” about how important something is, but cannot provide a concrete example of past behavior of theirs that substantiates that this type of behavior is typical of them. Remember, we are looking for clues to help us predict future behaviors. What candidate says they believe is not as predictive as what they have done. If when asking these past behavior questions, the candidate does not answer in specifics or gives you an incomplete answer, it is common to push for more specificity: “Can you tell me more about that?” and then judge the candidate on the quality of this answer. Do not make this mistake. Regardless of how much detail the candidate eventually provided, if he/she needed two or three probes to describe a specific example. then the chances are that this behavior is not a significant part of their makeup and will not be helpful in predicting future behaviors. Remember, we are not judging the quality of the description or how articulate the candidate is; instead, we are looking for answers that are specific and top of mind and indicate how the candidate will likely respond in a given situation in the future.
Putting it All Together
Now you are ready to create an interview sheet that will record all of the critical information from each interview and will serve as your record of how well you feel each candidate matches up to your list of emotional and technical talents needed to be successful. Your interview sheet should consist of the following:
The candidate’s name, your name, and the date.
Each of your open-ended or scenario-based questions, with space afterward to take notes while the person is speaking and what you are learning from their answers.
A space for recording your immediate post-interview impressions about whether, and to what extent, the person has demonstrated the requisite talents - emotional and technical - needed for the job.
A list of the specific talents you are interviewing for, including both technical and emotional talents, with an area next to each for you to list an overall rating of one to five (five being the best).
Interview the candidate, asking your pre-determined open-ended and scenario-based questions. Write your impressions down during the interview itself. Once the interview is over, pause for a moment and gather your thoughts to write down a summary of your impressions of how the candidate matches up to the emotional and technical requirements of the job. Put the interview paper aside for 24 hours.
After a day, pull the interview sheet out of its file and look over your notes and scores. After this cooling-off period, do you still feel the same way? If you still feel positively towards the applicant ask yourself a series of scenario-based questions:
It is a busy evening in the restaurant and your most important VIP diner, or a food critic, has just walked in without a reservation. You must seat her right away but the only open table is in the candidates section. What is your gut reaction right now? “Great!” or “Uh oh”? (For the kitchen just replace the table scenario with an entree order).
Think of a close competitor, your biggest rival. Now imagine that yesterday you made a job offer to this candidate and today you get a phone call from the candidate saying that they just received a matching offer from your rival. What was your reaction? Do you think, “Damn it, we blew it!” or “Whew, that was a close call?” In other words, do you feel that this person has the capacity to make a substantial difference to your (or your rivals) team?
Check your gut. Put aside your interview sheet and for the moment forget about emotional and technical talents, job history, or references. How does this person make you feel? Is this person a paper tiger (great on interview but leaves you feeling empty) or someone you can’t imagine not hiring?
Unless you can answer all three questions positively, move on. Lastly, ask yourself - or your co-managers - if you think this person has the potential to become one of the three best employees on the team. If they don’t at least possess this potential, why hire them? Remember, it is not the over-whelmers or the under-whelmers that will cause you problems in the future. The problem comes in the form of the “whelmer” that employee who neither rises to greatness nor sinks to easy termination. Whelmers infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity and they send a dangerous message to your staff and your guests that “average” is acceptable.
One last piece of advice: ALWAYS BE HIRING!
Great candidates rarely pop up at a snap of the fingers, or at the moment you just need them. Instead, they may often appear at times when you don’t need anyone new. However, in this day and age, finding candidates who meet the criteria of both our emotional and technical talents is becoming more and more difficult to find. It is a smart practice to regularly run ads for new team members, and interview candidates regardless of your current staffing needs. Sometimes it even makes sense to hire a candidate who matches all of your criteria even if you don’t have room for them. Remember, however, that smart hiring (hiring 51 percenters) will help create a positive and caring, culture and that is often the best recruiting tool of all!
