Service industries like restaurants have difficulty hiring adequate staff—and some are starting to get creative, changing descriptions, hours, and pay.
Key Details
- More remote job options mean that workers have a greater number of opportunities to choose from, and the restaurant industry is struggling to compete.
- Though turnover rates have always been high in restaurants, rates have increased since the pandemic.
- To attract more applicants employers are getting creative with methods to attract applicants to restaurants.
- Some are raising wages, crowdfunding healthcare, helping employees with housing, and creating flexible work hours.
- Ahead of “burrito season,” the company’s busiest time of the year, restaurant chain Chipotle is launching a new hiring campaign targeting the “leaders of tomorrow.”
- The “pull back the foil” campaign highlights six employees who started as crew members and rose to managerial positions. The company plans to emphasize how easily an employee can climb to a higher-paying position.
Why it’s news
Restaurants, among many service industries, are struggling to find enough staff to fill the available roles. To entice new applicants to join their teams, restaurants are coming up with creative benefits.
One of the simplest ways to attract new employees is raising wages. A recent survey of restaurants from the publication TastingTable found that hourly wages have increased 20% from 2020 to 2022.
Other restaurants are providing their employees with health care, which restaurant jobs often lack. One Texas restaurant is tacking on a 3% charge on all customer checks. This additional fee goes to a healthcare fund for restaurant employees.
In one Colorado restaurant, owner Erin Eddy has decided to help his employees by subsidizing housing. Eddy leases out rooms to his employees. Each employee has a different agreement with Eddy, so the amount an employee pays for housing varies. Even with this assistance, Eddy still has difficulty finding enough employees to staff his restaurant.
Additional time off is another way employers hope to draw in employees. Some restaurants are adjusting their work schedules so employees can have three, even four-day weekends. Other restaurants are simply working to ensure their employees have a more predictable schedule so that they can make plans without worrying about work conflicts.
Chipotle has started a new hiring campaign emphasizing how easily employees can receive promotions. In 2022, nearly 90% of Chipotle’s manager hires came from internal promotions. Around 22,000 employees were promoted last year.
Backing up a bit
The service industry isn’t the only area seeking more employees. Skilled technical and labor employees are increasingly hard to find.
Despite skilled labor positions offering higher pay, fewer adults entering the workforce are prepared to fill the technical roles. The shortage of young adults entering these fields seems to be driven by a lack of interest.
While the tech industry is experiencing an uptick in layoffs, the cybersecurity industry is still looking to hire experts. Demand for cybersecurity experts grew by 25% in 2022, according to the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education.
While the cyber industry isn’t booming, it isn’t declining either. Companies are still on the lookout for cybersecurity engineers, cybersecurity analysts, penetration testers, and network security architects, Axios reports.
