Hiring from the Labor Puddle

It was tough finding good help for a restaurant of our caliber in Fort Bragg.  And I don’t mean for that to sound snooty.  First of all, I always try to have high standards so, even if we were slinging hash, I wouldn’t have hired the vast majority of people that applied.  If someone’s going to fill out an application for employment and be sloppy, and make grammatical and spelling errors, I figure they’re not going to make much of an effort at a job, either.

At one point, I coined the term “labor puddle” to describe the availability of help.  It wasn’t a pool at all.  It was a puddle.  Not too broad and not too deep.  It’s funny, because I used the term with a fellow chef on the coast, who later used the term with a reporter, and I ended up reading it in the paper.

Beyond the ability to fill out an application, the skill level for fine dining in a town like Fort Bragg, where fine dining for the most part doesn’t exist, is pretty much itself non-existent.  Few people have had the exposure to either the type of cuisine involved--and thus lacked both the palate and the vocabulary--or the style of service.

Beginning with the application...  If you answered the question “Where did you hear about us?” by saying “an add in the paper,” you had little chance of getting an interview.  That was all too common a mistake.  I remember one person who was already waiting tables at a restaurant, and she misspelled the name of the restaurant at which she was working.  And if you didn’t fill out the application completely, it just showed us a penchant for laziness.

Even with those whom we invited for interviews, we ended up wasting a lot of time in the interview process.  Often after the first few minutes, we’d realize the candidate wasn’t for us, but we’d be polite and finish the whole interview.  Finally, we got smart.  We devised a waitstaff questionnaire.  Five pages of brain-picking concerning, food, wine and service.  It was fun devising it.  It was fun (for the most part) reading them.  Best, 90% of the people who picked up an application and a questionnaire never returned.  Ultimately, we got much better candidates to interview, and wasted far less time.  Too, it gave applicants a taste of what we were all about.

Somewhere, in the deep, dark recesses of a storage unit, are all the questionnaires we ever got back.  I wish I had quick access to them now.  From memory, though, here are some of the better answers, though not verbatim.  Question:  A person drops their napkin.  What do you do?  Answer:  Kick it to the side.  Or, pick it up and hand it back to them.  Question:  The restaurant’s closed, and there’s one table lingering.  What do you do?  Answer:  I tell them we’re closed, and suggest a place they can go that’s open later.

One of our more complicated questions was this:  A four top comes in for dinner--an older and a younger woman, and an older and younger man.  The older woman is hosting the dinner.  In what order do you serve them?

Many people did well on the questionnaire, and that’s nice.  Others rose to the occasion and researched a lot of the answers, because they didn’t know.  And that was really cool, and very much appreciated.  You were asked to draw a table setting, showing the placement of silverware and glassware.  One applicant found a photo of a vase of flowers in a magazine and carefully cut that out and pasted it on as part of the table setting.

The questionnaire backfired only once (that we are aware of), when we had an applicant feel it was beneath him to have to fill it out.  And it was, but he did.  He was one of the best waiters we ever had.  He had worked in San Francisco.  He was polite and amiable.  He could make the guest experience a superb one.  He could up sell in a very polite and knowledgeable way.  His name was  Abdellatif.  We nicknamed him the “Rockin’ Moroccan.”