The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the restaurant industry in 2020 as more and more cities see hundreds of locations furloughing staff and closing permanently. However, for the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) vertical, the story has been quite the opposite. Sales are up, business is booming, and hiring has kept pace for QSRs throughout these pandemic months.
We at Workstream work with thousands of QSR owners and hiring managers so we have a unique perspective on this thriving industry, and it’s been eye-opening to see how different their hiring needs have been from the rest of the US workforce. So unique that we collected data from these QSRs to provide our audience with a look into the U.S. Hiring Trends for the fall of 2020.
It’s Harder to Find Good Candidates
The biggest takeaway from this survey is that QSRs are seeing increasing difficulty sourcing the right candidates to fill their open positions. One would think with high unemployment, filling open jobs would be a breeze, but that is not the case. For one, QSRs have always had a high turnover rate, and that has exacerbated with the pandemic due to fear or illness. Also, with more resumes coming in, finding the right candidate has become more difficult for many hiring managers.
In fact, over 56% of the 3000+ QSR hiring managers surveyed said they had issues sourcing hourly workers as a result of the pandemic. And now with increasing seasonal demand from all businesses for delivery workers as the weather gets colder, we predict it will be even more competitive trying to hire great hourly employees in the coming months.
New Hiring Problems Due to the Pandemic
Other aspects of hiring have also become more difficult for QSR hiring managers including scheduling interviews (47%), training on new safety protocols (30%) and general onboarding (26%). As teams scramble to enact new virtual interviewing software and video onboarding due to the social distancing required, there are new headaches arising for already busy managers.
Luckily, the technological hurdle doesn’t seem like much of a problem as nearly 94% of respondents said that they could easily adopt video interviewing technology. This trend seems to be helping hiring managers process through more applicants in a shorter amount of time, which makes sense since it reduces commute time for the prospective employees (so they aren’t late or a no-show) and interviews are easier to set up back to back.
These hiring managers are also leveraging much of the automation that a hiring platform like Workstream provides to handle these new pandemic-related problems. As virtual onboarding has become the new normal, we are seeing higher usage from these QSR managers using Workstream to manage virtual documents and get their new hires virtually training.
More Applications Per Open Position
Over a third of the survey respondents said they were seeing a surge in the number of applications per open position, while 58% said that they are seeing the same amount. It seems job-seekers know that QSRs are continuing to hire during this down economy, and they are overall applying more during this time.
Yet, as mentioned earlier, these businesses are having a hard time sourcing good hourly workers. This means that it is getting more difficult weeding through the poor candidates to find the ones actually qualified for these positions. More resumes mean more bad resumes, so it’s no surprise these hiring managers are taking advantage of Workstream’s automated filtering methodology to find just the right candidates to interview.
You can view our entire report that has more information here.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, we at Workstream will continue to collect this hiring data to see where the industry is trending next.