The explosive growth of restaurants has increased the cooking opportunities for cooks and chefs and this has left many kitchens understaffed. A growing frustration with the lack of quality cooks put a spotlight on the long hours and chronically low pay that professional cooks face. As the restaurant bubble expands towards its bursting point with each new restaurant that opens, the job opportunities for aspiring chefs and line cooks continue to grow while the talent pool evaporates.
The traditional method of staffing cooks was to hire novice hands willing to endure long hours and low pay in exchange for experience. But a new bounty of opportunity and an unwillingness to sacrifice pay for de facto apprenticeship has made that method obsolete. So what do restaurants do now? Where can restaurants find cooks and kitchen staff to hire? Luckily, there are many new services and resources for hiring cooks, and some old methods that still apply. Read on to find out where.
Though the shortage of good cooks has kept many restaurants in hiring mode, there are more options than ever to post jobs and seek talent. Online job boards and service-based sites like Craigslist killed the classified sections of many newspapers, but this just means that there are new places online to hire kitchen staff and build out your hiring pipeline. Here are some of the best websites for hiring cooks.
The kitchen and restaurant industry focused Culinary Agents was founded in 2012 by former IBM executive Alice Cheng. The website design is clean and easy to navigate. The website describes Culinary Agents as "a professional networking and job matching website designed for current and aspiring professionals in the food, beverage, and hospitality industry."
The site is dedicated to matching qualified candidates with jobs in the food and beverage industry. For those who are seeking jobs, the site also offers networking opportunities, industry focused events, and mentorship resources to help with career development.
Poached is similar to Culinary Agents with a focus on hiring in the restaurant industry. But the number of cities that Poached services is smaller than CA. Poached currently services culinary hubs like Boston, Portland, and Washington D.C. The site won't currently help restaurants in smaller cities without the culinary pedigree, but these restaurants in these culinary hubs face the stiffest competition for business, so it can be really useful tool depending on your city.
A robust site with a similar focus to the previous job finder sites but with a larger pool of cities and towns to search in. The site isn't quite as sleek as Culinary Agents, but it's still user-friendly and allows you to search by state, city, and job title. iHireChefs doesn't mess around with any other hospitality industry jobs, and is solely dedicated to hiring kitchen staff from part-time cooks to scratch bakers.
We've all tried are hand with these job boards. In the grueling search for a new career, or simply a better paycheck, many modern job seekers have signed up for sites like Monster.com and had their inbox besieged by job alerts for entry-level sales positions at insurance companies and data admin gigs whose prospects are dreary enough to stomp the optimism out of a sunflower. But alas, they do offer opportunities for restaurants to hire chefs.
Indeed surpassed Monster.com as the highest-traffic job board on the internet nearly a decade ago. Indeed pulls job posting from thousands of other websites and it is actually a job-centric search engine than a job board.
The restaurant biz is social one, and as such, some operators can be adverse to online and digital means of networking and connecting with potential hires. There are still many opportunities to work with people over the phone and meet people in real life.
The great debate in kitchens is whether or not you need culinary school to become a kitchen professional. The answer is undoubtedly "No." But the better question is "does culinary school give you an advantage?". The answer certainly changes on a case-by-case bases. Regardless of your opinion on culinary school, they can be a great resource for hiring young cooks.
Many schools will have a job center that connects restaurants with potential cooks who are throwing their toque blanche into the labor pool. Kids from culinary school are especially useful for filling part-time or seasonal positions that coincide with their school schedule.
These schools focus on teaching students pliable trades and ready them for working life post-school. Many vocational schools have culinary programs that give knowledge and experience to young chefs looking to make a life in the kitchen. While these programs don't get the attention that culinary schools like Le Cordon Bleu, they are a great place to find young cooks who are ready to work.
A great way to fill cooking vacancies is to promote staff from within the kitchen. There are countless cooks today that started as dishwashers, slinging suds in the dish pit. Promoting from within the kitchen has a great number of benefits: Management is familiar with the worker, you understand their strengths and weaknesses, you know their work ethic, and you already have built a positive work relationship.
From the employees perspective, a promotion is a huge positive. It is positive affirmation and acknowledgement of a job well done. It comes with higher pay, more responsibility, and respect in the kitchen. Promotions can help build loyalty between and employee and employer, and help slow down employee turnover.