Building a solid hiring strategy for a fluctuating hourly workforce

Introduction

Of all the challenges of operating a business—and let’s be honest, even the joyful parts are challenging—maintaining a team of hourly workers is among the greatest.

This makes sense: every hourly worker is a human being with a unique set of experiences, needs, demands on their time, passions, interests, and strengths. Yet, hiring programs cannot be so personalized. Particularly in the hourly workforce space, with constant high turnover, we need more workers, and we need them now.

So, we end up in a steady pattern of filling vacant roles.

If it feels like your business spends more time hiring than it does serving customers, you are not alone. The monthly turnover rate for QSRs jumped from 135% in 2019 to 144% in 2021 to 150% in 2024. That means for every 10 people on staff, more than 15 people leave the team each month.

And it’s harder than ever to fill those jobs: There are 70% more job openings in 2021 than before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and 10% fewer people are looking to fill those jobs. Plus, the entry-level workforce now has more options than ever before, with a nearly threefold increase in gig work and logistics jobs (such as warehouse and delivery work)

It’s a small wonder that our traditional hiring practices are struggling to find—let alone retain—quality hourly workers. Fewer workers for more jobs in more fields means that businesses are competing with each other to woo the attention, interest, and dedication of the available workforce. Any of us who have experienced a dip in hiring quality and quantity understand the pain points of working understaffed with constant turnover.

Those pain points hit the pocketbook, too. Employee churn costs money both in hiring/recruiting costs and in lost productivity. Wondering just how much? The National Restaurant Association estimates the cost at $2,000 per employee. The restaurant research firm TDn2K calculates it higher—$2,100 to $2,800.

Even using a lower-end number, that average turnover rate is costing you $28,000 each month for every 10 positions you have on staff. If you have more employees—which you undoubtedly do—you can do the math: It’s expensive.

And this isn’t even getting into the intangibles—how is the customer experience impacted by employee turnover, operating understaffed, and limited resources being spent on hiring? What about the company’s reputation with potential future workers?

These concerns are practically universal with any company in the hourly workforce space. Put them all together, and they illustrate why businesses with a fluctuating workforce are shifting their hiring practices: They must do so to remain competitive—even to survive.

A sound and sustainable hiring strategy keeps your locations fully staffed by hiring proactively and anticipating the churn. It engages your hourly workers and meets their needs, keeping them on board and reducing the need to hire in the first place. It also advances the presence of your brand, building a reputation within your community among both customers and potential team members.

This guide presents actionable insights and practices for developing a strong hiring program personalized to your brand and your current position. After all, hiring and retaining great hourly workers may be statistically tougher than ever—but all of us who enter this space relish a good challenge—especially when meeting it head-on sets us up for continued growth and success.

Evaluating and evolving your hiring strategy according to your needs

To build out and improve your hiring strategy, you need to understand thoroughly where you stand right now. You likely have a clear picture of your P&L, but what about your hiring strategy? Is it articulated in any formal, documented way? Or is it more reactionary, hiring as-needed for vacant or understaffed roles?

Whether you’ve formalized your hiring strategy or not, it’s actually a complex combination of many factors. We recommend assessing these aspects of your hiring experience, from top to bottom, as best you can:

It’s key to dig in deep enough to find the actual answers to these questions—not simply the answers you think or believe to be true. You might presume your new hires are coming predominantly from job postings when they are actually coming from employee referrals. Or maybe you’ll find that your churn rate is different than you anticipated—and perhaps, for better or for worse, it’s driven by particular factors in your operations.

You can also conduct more qualitative research into these questions. Talk to your team members— hourly workers and supervisors—and ask for their experiences, both in their own hiring process and in their time with the company. Their perspectives might shed insight into your hiring practices and tell the stories that numbers can’t about the human elements behind the numbers.

Get clear on where you want to go

Once you understand where your business stands, you can formulate where you want to go. What are your business goals? Often, people express these in terms of gross sales or net profit, but you might have other quantifiable goals—to double your franchise locations in five years, to be the top-selling QSR in your neighborhood, or to be able to donate a million dollars a year to local nonprofits.

Accounting for how your business is doing right now, where you want to go, and when you want to get there, you can develop a staffing plan to understand how many people you’ll need to help you attain those goals.

One piece of advice: The restaurant industry is not an end-goal game. Rather than setting one-time goals by themselves (such as “This location will make a million dollars”), set rolling goals that can help you meet and exceed those goals (such as “This location will net $50,000 a quarter”). To help you get there, you can even take more fixed goals, like doubling your number of franchises, and break them into improvement markers at your current locations.

This will set your business up for sustained success, and it will also help you staff to plan.

Adjust your strategy to get where you want to go

Once you have that clear sense of how to evolve your business, you’ll also have a sense of your gaps—and the future needs you’ll meet to fill them. How many people do you need, in what roles, to get where you want to go? And how do you need to build your hiring strategy to meet those needs on an ongoing, rolling basis?

Get flexible with a dynamic hiring plan

Of course, how often do things go according to plan? And when is the restaurant world ever a perfectly insulated environment where your ratios remain static and always effective?

No straightforward business forecast or staffing plan will go as anticipated. So, it’s critical to focus instead on being adaptable.

A simple way to do this is to be proactive instead of reactive. As one of our Workstream customers once said: “You need to start hiring today for the roles you’ll need filled three months from now.”

Let’s use those hypothetical five FTE workers per manager again. You want to maintain that ratio, but let’s say that historically, you need to rehire for three of those hourly positions each quarter. Rather than reacting to a vacant role by hiring, you can anticipate that hiring need by planning to hire one hourly worker a month on a rolling basis. Yes, sometimes this will result in having six workers to schedule for shifts—and playing the numbers, you’ll still sometimes be a worker down. However, the staffing will stay more reliable, keeping the customer experience smooth and preventing much of the lost business cost of an understaffed team.

The hiring growth to business benchmarks

If you’re taking a growth mindset to get where you want to go, you can also set benchmarks for hiring additional hourly workers and scaling out the organizational structure. The productivity ratio described above is not always predictive—meaning doubling your workforce may not automatically double your throughput. You need to hire more people when the growth is ready to happen, more than the other way around.

To do so, you can tie your hiring strategy to financial, commercial, or other benchmarks. For instance, you might hire another manager only after your store sees X% increase in sales or customer visits. Or, rather than setting a date to sign up for another franchise, you decide to do so only after your existing location maintains a certain sales figure for Y months.

Define your plan

Ultimately, evaluating and developing your growth strategy will require you to customize everything to your own circumstances. After all, there’s no magic ratio for maximizing staffing to profit. And you might have other aspects of the customer experience that determine your staffing needs—the speed of service, the number of locations, expanded hours, community outreach, and involvement.

But no matter your targets and your goals, building this hiring strategy requires more than simply hiring more hourly workers. You need to hire people in progressive steps, with dynamic flexibility, to take that growth incrementally in a meaningful, sustainable way.

The honest, thorough answers to these questions will help you clearly understand the tools and support you may need— and those you already have—as you build out your workforce. The rest of this guide will steer you to the best practices for creating a sustainable hiring program you can adapt to your own evolving, growing enterprise.

Attracting and sourcing applicants

There is no shortage of specialized ways to attract and source job applicants—but all of them fall into one of two camps: inbound recruiting and outbound hiring.

If you understand the differences between them—and why they both matter to a successful and sustainable hiring strategy—you can put the actual practices in a better context.

Now, honey is an apt image because all hourly workers take jobs to meet certain needs. An income is the obvious one, but candidates have other needs that your company might match: a particular benefits package, a strong community culture, or opportunities for career growth.

Inbound hiring strategies broadcast those aspects of your organization—the flavor of your honey, if you will— on an ongoing basis to build brand awareness. The idea is that potential hourly workers will like what they see over time, and the right ones will decide they want to work with you. These long-term strategies are based on the premise that you will always need to seek out new team members, which is particularly true in the QSR space.

Outbound hiring strategies are more immediate. If you need to fill a particular role, and you announce hiring for that role, or you recruit specific individuals suited to that position, you’re using active hiring practices. You’ll still use your company culture and benefits as incentives, but your goal is to get them to apply for that job—not to sell them on your company.

The simplest way to picture this is the classic sign-in-the-window. If it’s hanging all the time with a message about “Come work with us!” that’s more inbound. If it’s hanging on an as-needed basis and advertises “Hiring Line Cooks and Shift Managers,” it’s more outbound.

QSRs traditionally conduct more outbound hiring practices, particularly because of their standard turnover rate and entry-level positions. But relying on these as the primary driver for applications limits your flow of candidates. Incorporating both inbound and outbound marketing and recruitment practices will create a more sustainable rolling hiring strategy, which can be used in any of the following strategies.

Develop and promote your brand and culture

Your company culture is a critical part of sourcing the best-fit candidates. More than one-third of hourly workers find culture to be very important. Candidates like to know what they’re applying for—beyond a wage. If you stand apart from your competitors and appeal to your applicants, you will succeed in hiring.

But culture is one of those hard-to-define and even harder-to-explain concepts. So, how do you translate the on-the-job experience to a pool of potential employees? And how does it impact your hiring results?

Relaying the culture of your organization means telling the story of your company—not in the “we were founded 50 years ago” sense, but in the “here’s what it’s like to work with us” sense. So branding your culture relies on that old storytellers’ maxim: Show, don’t tell.

Here’s what that means in practice. You can tell applicants that your workplace is fun. Or, you can show them pictures of hourly workers having a good time—you can show them a video that walks through a typical day in the life, and you can show other employees describing what it’s like to work together.

To show off your brand’s culture, ask yourself (and your team!) questions like, “Why would a motivated person feel drawn to work for this business?” and “Why do our most dedicated hourly workers continue to work with us?” The answers to those questions can form the basis for how you show off your restaurant.

The culture you promote can go beyond the daily experiences of hourly workers—it can also dig into the shared ethos of the organization. What are your company's shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices? Candidates who jive with those core tenets of your business are more likely to apply for jobs—and to stick with them once they’re hired.

Finally, the branding and the culture need to complement each other. Whether your workplace is friendly, formal, casual, or businesslike, everything from your social media to your job postings can reflect that tone.

This practice of promoting your brand and culture extends through all the other practices you incorporate into your overall hiring strategy.

Build a branded career page

A branded career page on your website is one of the first places to implement your culture. Think of this as the one-stop shop for anyone interested in working with your company.

Imagine someone telling you about this great clothing company. They think you’d look great in their clothes. Instead of running straight to the store, you’re likely to check out their online presence, where you’ll get a sense of the brand’s vibe and style. That’s exactly what a branded career page does for your hiring process—and for potential candidates.

After all, candidates are 1.8x more likely to apply for a job if the company is familiar to them. To accomplish this familiarity, your career page should:

Remember, too, that a career page is about more than just the content—it’s also about the feel of the content. Everything from your color scheme to your font choices, the accessibility of the layout, and the functionality of the page reflect your business’s values and attitude. Candidates will have an experience with this page that will shape their impression of your entire business, and it will be a major factor in deciding whether they want to work with you.

Use diverse job board platforms

Some strategies are tried-and-true because they work. There’s a reason businesses still put “now hiring” signs in the window, after all. And certain online boards, like Monster.com, are here to stay. But more avenues for hiring exist now than ever before.

You should use as many of these job boards as reasonably possible so that you’re not missing out on all the new applicants turning to these new and diverse channels. Not only are you losing out on some top candidates with your absence, but they are going to work for your competitors instead.

It’s also important to maximize your time and efforts. Posting job openings on multiple platforms can consume all of a hiring manager’s time, not to mention handling all the incoming applications and inquiries. You can reach a wider audience of potential candidates with exponentially less effort on your end by using platforms that automate this process.

Involve your current hourly workers

Your current hourly workers are your single greatest recruitment resource. Third-party endorsements, such as your employees’ positive comments, add depth to your business’s credibility. Their testimonials, photos, and videos on your career page will do more to advocate for your company than any marketing-speak you can dream up.

Starbucks’ careers page on Instagram (@starbucksjobs) is one great example of incorporating current hourly workers into a hiring strategy. Beyond their expert ways of broadcasting their culture through concise copy and wordplay, they have an abundance of employee portrayals on their feed. This inclusion offers prospective hires a glimpse into how their work lives could look if they only applied to one of the many Starbucks locations.

In the next couple of sections, we’ll look at ways to incorporate your hourly workers into a hiring strategy through referral programs and (like Starbucks) through social media engagement.

Incentivize referral programs

When current hourly workers recommend friends and family to work for you, that is more effective than any job posting. Think about it: Wouldn’t you be most likely to suggest a workplace to your best friends if you enjoy working there yourself?

You might be benefitting from organic referrals from your employees already. Great. But you can increase your reach simply by incentivizing team members to send more candidates your way. (For example, you might pay a referring employee $300 for each referral that is hired and stays on for 60 days.)

Your culture might shape how you build and implement these incentives. And they will be worthwhile investments—even beyond the costs of hiring. Because of that personalized recommendation from someone who experiences your company culture, referred candidates are more likely to fit right into it. Chances are that the referred candidates will only apply if they are attracted to your company culture in the first place. Plus, employees who suit the culture tend to have higher levels of satisfaction and are more likely to stick with the company longer.

This is also an opportunity for you to level up your current referral program. One possibility is to automate the program, making it easier for current team members to share job opportunities with their networks. Leveraging this kind of technology will enable your team to reach a larger audience of quality candidates more quickly and easily.

Learn the powers of different social media platforms

Social media platforms allow you to enact inbound and outbound hiring practices all at once. Your posts are a stellar way to engage customers and potential employees—who are most likely already customers. A truly engaging social media presence is itself a branding tool: look no further than Wendy’s willingness to roast anyone and everyone on Twitter, and you’ll understand the power of an active account.

However you implement social media, remember that people generally like lighthearted and interactive brands. Your presence will cultivate your audience’s expectations of what it’s like to work with you. And remember to strike a balance between posting consistently (whether that’s daily or weekly) without veering into spamming your audience or posting uninteresting, valueless content just for the sake of posting.

Here are some tips for applying hiring strategies to some of the more popular social media platforms:

Instagram

Instagram is known for its aesthetically pleasing feed and its image-driven posts. Accounts succeed with engaging visual content, more so than with text (although text incorporated into visuals can be an effective tool):

• Keep the creative content consistent with your branding—in visual style as well as in attitude and tone.
• Use striking colors and designs that will catch the eye in a feed full of outstanding imagery.
• Rely on simple infographics and punchy text to convey messages to your viewers.
• Opt for minimalism over excess.

Instagram also offers tools to boost the visibility of your content:

• Instagram Stories are temporary posts and are, therefore, excellent for on-demand and urgent hiring needs. It’s more acceptable to post more often to Stories than on your regular feed, which can come across as spamming your followers.
• IGTV allows you to post videos and animated graphics, with or without sound, affording you additional ways to engage viewers and develop your brand presence.

X (Formerly Twitter)

X is popular for finding jobs: 58% of job seekers use X in their search. It’s a particularly applicable tool for hiring in the 25-34-year-old demographic, which accounts for almost 30% of Twitter’s users.

X is predominantly known for its 280-character limit that drives concise and to-the-point posts, with liberal use of hashtags to filter tweets on particular topics. (This is where Wendy’s thrives; its infamous roasts are the epitome of pithy.)

Images, videos, and links can also help convey your message and draw attention to your tweets.

The reply and retweet features also enable you to build threads of information, such as all the perks of employment or a how-to on applying. They are also great ways to incorporate employee experiences into your feed. Chick-fil-A, for instance, retweets videos and photos of their employees at work and their accomplishments. This shows off the culture for prospective candidates and rewards hourly workers for their efforts.

Tiktok

This video platform has quickly become one of Gen Z’s most highly used apps. It’s known for sharing quick, humorous videos and spreading viral challenges—but TikTok has also recently launched a pilot program to connect job seekers and employers using the #TikTokResumes hashtag. Users can submit video resumes using the app, providing an alternative to traditional application procedures—particularly beneficial for younger workers, who may not have much experience but can show off their personality.

From the hiring perspective, such TikTok engagement strategies help you learn more about candidates before actually meeting in an interview. Using TikTok also increases your brand awareness and broadcasts your hiring campaigns to more people—a nice combination of inbound and outbound recruitment.

And it’s effective. Chipotle saw a 7% increase in the number of applicants after posting recruitment videos. Their content was entertaining, humorous, and engaging enough to reach a wider audience as part of their campaign to hire 10,000 new employees.

Facebook

The mother of all social media platforms, Facebook is perhaps less cutting-edge than the other popular apps. That said, it is multifunctional. You can set Instagram to automatically repost to your company’s Facebook page, and you can repurpose tweets and TikToks there as well.

It’s generally a good idea to have a Facebook page for your company—even for each location in a franchise, with location and contact information and site-specific hiring announcements. Facebook has also adopted certain tools similar to other platforms, such as Stories that mirror Instagram’s.

Diversify your team

Diversity is a nice thing to aim for—but that’s not why you should aim for it. Diversity in your workforce attained through a conscientious hiring practice, can make your team more versatile, more creative, and more relatable to customers.

Think about it: you have a diverse customer base. That’s likely true in terms of age, ethnic background, gender identity, and socioeconomic status. The more your team behind the counter reflects the customers in front of it, the more your employees will be able to relate to customer needs and desires. They’ll share similar experiences and backgrounds. And this is true for more than just hourly workers. If your hiring manager and your marketer reflect different aspects of your customer base, for example, they’ll be better able to develop an effective hiring campaign that speaks more directly to the community.

Forbes furthers this idea that diverse groups of people also tend to make better decisions. They point University of Michigan professor and social scientist Scott Page, who—in his book The Diversity Bonus— attributes this gain to cognitively diverse groups (which is affected by how people identify with different groups) thinking differently than more homogeneous teams.

Forbes also points to IMF managing director Christine Lagarde and what she calls a “larger horizon” when gender diversity creates this same bonus. She describes how banks with women in top leadership roles tend to sport stronger fiscal profiles and lower consumer risks— yet despite this benefit, women comprise a mere 2% of bank CEOs and 20% of their boards.

Or, we can think of it much more simply: the more diverse the perspectives on your team, the more potential you have on board for ideas, skills, and experiences that will improve your organization.

Recruit nontraditional workers

This is an offshoot of diversifying your team: Hiring nontraditional workers depends on who exactly the traditional workers are in your industry. But, in general, it means being open to offering jobs to people with experiences outside your industry—experiences that can prove valuable to your team, even if they come from atypical directions.

A pool of candidates that is often under-tapped consists of people with criminal backgrounds. Many communities offer programs to help one-time inmates reintegrate into the world and fill job positions in the labor market. The United States has 19 million people with felony convictions, and the biases around those convictions can make it very difficult to find meaningful employment—no matter how excellent they would be at it.

Furthermore, nearly 700,000 people are released from prison each year—and offering them a chance at employment opens this deep pool of candidates. It also helps improve diversity in your team because a disproportionate number of incarcerated people are people of color.

You can find nontraditional workers using other methods, as well. If your industry tends to employ teenagers, look at older adults. If it tends to employ college graduates, look for nongraduates with a track record of meaningful work.

Whatever ways you expand your recruitment reach, always recognize that non-traditional employees face non-traditional challenges. They may lack some of the experience or skills the job requires. These hourly workers may require a sound onboarding and training program, as well as coaching and support throughout their employment. In return, many of these employees will turn out to be your longest-tenured because you gave them a shot when no one else would.

Hire both internally and externally

The debate between hiring in-house hourly workers for other roles and hiring outside candidates is often framed as a build-or-buy conundrum. Do you build up from within or “buy” from outside the company? A comprehensive, sustainable hiring program requires you to think more about build-and-buy.

Internal hires have an understanding of what the hourly workers are doing and experiencing. They also understand your culture and see how you’ve invested in and believed in them. Promoting from within tends to be faster and less costly, as well.

But external hires have benefits too; namely, you can draw from a much larger pool of applicants. These candidates might have more experience in the particular role you’re filling, especially if it’s a supervisory or skilled position. However, they will need to learn the culture as they go.

“Cultural fit is the most important factor when you are considering hiring somebody externally,” explained Roger Ahlfeld, vice president of human resources for Tedeschi Food Shops in Rockland, Massachusetts. “When you promote people internally, one of the biggest advantages is that they already know how to work in the environment.”

In the QSR space, many hourly workers are external hires simply because these are fairly entry-level positions. You might hire within to fill other hourly positions, though—say if a cook has an interest in moving to a front-of-house role.

Supervisory positions or skilled roles, such as GMs, hiring managers, or marketers, can happen either way. Although there is no simple solution to knowing whether external or internal hiring is the right course of action, SHRM offers some general guidance to consider:

Engaging applicants with speed and ease

In traditional hiring practices, the human element is the limiting factor: How many applications can one prospective hourly worker complete? And how many applicants can one hiring manager review, sort, contact, schedule for interviews, and make decisions on?

Let’s face it: Hourly workers are in demand, and QSRs are competing against each other for them. Hiring hourly workers is all about speed. And you need to engage them first.

Each pause in the application process improves the chance that a quality candidate will get an interview or an offer from your competitor, removing them from your pool. And the employer with the more engaging process is more likely to win the competition for the applicant’s attention.

Being the first to offer applicants a position doesn’t guarantee they’ll take it—but it certainly increases the chance they’ll accept. You’re a sure thing at that point, and your speed shows your interest in them.

Plus, a faster, more efficient, and more engaging hiring process lands you the better candidates—and it streamlines the process for your managers, maximizing their time and effort, minimizing the applicants who ghost them, and freeing them up to focus more on the restaurant’s countless other needs.

Paper applications, back-and-forth phone calls—these are relics. You can use better ways to engage applicants and find the best ones for your team.

Make the process seamless for applicants

Ghosting isn’t just for dating anymore—it’s becoming common practice for job seekers to go cold and quit communicating with potential employers (and even with their new jobs). According to Indeed, 28% of applicants ghosted a workplace in 2020. While employers can’t counter every possible reason for ghosting, they certainly can make the application process as seamless as possible.

Seamless—and really quite quick and easy. After all, it’s a lot harder to ghost a hiring manager who’s communicating with you than one who’s leaving you hanging.

And the secret weapon for engaging prospective applicants is already in your pocket.

Text message communication is your best friend

Text messaging is perhaps the single most powerful tool for improving the applicant experience. It’s more than convenient: It’s the preference for the largely millennial and Gen Z workforce. Three-quarters of millennials choose text messages over phone calls, and prospective hourly workers who receive text messages rate their experience 50% higher than candidates who don’t.

Sure, texting can feel casual to many of us who didn’t necessarily grow up with it. But it’s the best way to communicate with most of today’s hourly workers. It is convenient for both you and them—and in today’s world, it’s also a sign of respect for the applicant’s time and schedule. A phone call demands an immediate response: answer or ignore. A text message allows an applicant to read and respond when they can focus on it.

Texting is also your best bet to be noticed: Text messages have a 90% open rate, largely read within the first three minutes. Plus, texts see 18x the response rate of emails. So even if your hiring system relies on email communication, it can behoove you to follow up on email correspondence with a text message nudge to check their inbox.

And best of all? You can lean on texting for every stage of the hiring process.

Simplify—and speed up—the application process

Most QSRs have moved some or all of their job applications online. Good. But as simple as it is to type in your home page, navigate the menu to the hiring section, and identify the location you’re applying for ... that’s asking a lot, relatively speaking, of your prospective applicants. Put another way: It’s not how they’re already using their phones.

Make the process as quick as possible for them. Use text-to-apply features in your job postings (which you can use to send a direct link to the application or even to initiate a quick application-by-text). Alternatively, you can use QR codes the same way—just scan and boom! They’re applying to work at your restaurant.

Similarly, keep the job application as brief as possible. If candidates have to go digging for information, a percentage won’t come back—but you can once again use texts to remind them to continue their unfinished applications.

Get creative with finding the right fit

The problem with a quick application—from the hiring manager’s perspective, anyway—is the lack of information. So use text messaging (and all its app-based cousins) to engage your applicants while getting to know them better.

Many such ideas in this vein use video, a la Snapchat. Brands such as A&W ask people to send in short video resumes or to film responses to certain application and pre-interview questions. These allow job seekers to show off their personalities in ways that might be more natural or comfortable than written answers— and certainly more insightful than answering yes/no questions.

Similarly, you can engage with applicants by sending them videos or interactive media about your workplace, your benefits, your culture. The possibilities here are endless—but each of these ideas helps to screen prospective candidates before even getting to the interview stage. If an applicant is likely to ghost, they’re less likely to send you a video response to your questions. And if an applicant shines on screen more than on a written resume? Now you know.

Plus, you can do all of this directly in a text message thread—or use texts to send direct links to where the information needs to go and to acknowledge that you’ve received what they’ve sent.

Schedule interviews

In our own stress to find quality candidates, we sometimes forget that the process is stressful for them, too. Choosing to schedule interviews by text instead of calling can allow candidates to put themselves in the right headspace.

And—we can’t stress this enough—if you’re conducting the interview itself by phone or video, schedule it ahead of time by text rather than simply calling to talk spontaneously. They can refresh their memory about the role since they’ve likely applied for multiple jobs. They’ll then be able to perform at their best during the interview.

As a bonus, because you’ve already opened the door to texting, they’ll feel able to contact you instantly if the need arises before or after the interview. Say they’re having technical difficulties, or a doctor’s appointment ran long, or your hiring manager doesn’t show. They can text you to check in rather than leaving anyone hanging.

Follow best practices for engaging by text

Just because text messaging is simple and relatively informal, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s casual and easy. Texting comes with its own best practices, just like any tool, and here are our recommendations:

Automate to save time and maximize effort

All this seamless application stuff sounds great for applicants. But what about for GMs and hiring managers? Isn’t asking them to spend their days texting candidates just one more responsibility on their plate?

It would be if it weren’t so straightforward to automate. The more you can incorporate a system that automates the application and interview process, the more you can maximize your hiring team’s efforts.

Take a look at NRD Capital, a prominent middle market private equity firm that counts Fuzzy’s Taco Shop and Frisch’s among its holdings. Using a text-automated hiring platform, these QSRs engage applicants as soon as they apply—and they get candidates in for interviews in less than two hours—all without requiring a moment of the GM’s focus.

“We were losing on hiring because we didn’t respond to applicants fast enough,” Frisch’s COO, Darrin White, says. “Automating communication between us and the applicants increases our chances 10 to 1.”

With the right automated system in place, managers won’t need to expend their efforts on non-skilled tasks that otherwise take up a ton of time—like screening applications and scheduling interviews. Of course, you can personalize your own automation system to reduce friction in the hiring process, but here are some common strategies that work:

Smart screening

That initial process of sifting through applications consumes a lot of time, particularly if the applicant flow is as high as most QSRs need it to be. If the application process is electronic and standardized (either by text, via the restaurant’s app, or on the website), you can set hiring parameters to screen applicants for basic requirements. That way, no one spends even a moment eliminating the non-qualified applications.

More advanced hiring technologies can also help you assess the quality of applications before progressing them to the interview stage. We talked about some of these in the sections above—examples include asking applicants to upload a short video introducing themselves.

Thus, smart screening takes two basic forms: information gathering to see if candidates meet your basic requirements and personalized responses to engage applicants and to self-filter the ones who are less serious.

Automated interview scheduling

Another drain on hiring managers is the effort of making back-and-forth calls and texts just to schedule a single interview. Imagine if every applicant who passes the smart screening didn’t have to wait for a follow-up to schedule an interview—but instead had the option to self-schedule immediately after applying.

An automated hiring platform can provide permission-based calendar access to promising candidates so they can schedule an interview with you or your hiring managers during the times you’ve marked as available. The applicants get an immediate confirmation text, and the hiring manager receives a notification that an interview is scheduled.

This is how QSRs like Fuzzy’s and Frisch’s schedule applicants in less than two hours. It’s as close to instantaneous as it gets—and it’s how you can get applicants in the door (or on the phone) for interviews without a single moment of logistics work on the manager’s end.

Text confirmations

Even with the fast-as-it-gets process, managers still risk no-shows for interviews. An automated system can utilize text confirmations to minimize ghosting and keep managers from sitting around waiting.

With text confirmations, applicants automatically receive a text message from the hiring manager shortly before their interview, asking them to reply to confirm. If they don’t reply, managers know not to wait for them and can instead refocus their energy on the many other needs demanding their attention. And if a candidate needs to reschedule, that option can also be part of the text message.

This works—Jamba, for example, recently reduced its ghosting rate by 90% by using automation and two-way texting technologies.

This technology can also be employed at other points in the hiring process—text notifications can remind candidates to finish uncompleted applications, nudge them to review onboarding materials, or ask them to confirm they’ll be there for their first shift. And in that interim, between scheduling and conducting an interview, you can get applicants excited about their future careers with you by sharing digestible information about long-term growth opportunities, employee benefits, and other information about working with your organization.

Preserve the personal touch

“Automated,” of course, doesn’t have to mean “impersonal.” Applicants are still human beings, after all, and so are your hiring managers—and an automated system is simply a way to more efficiently get two people talking.

So, it’s essential to provide your hiring managers with extra training as needed to develop their interpersonal skills. They need to be able to communicate and interact professionally in the hiring process, whether they’re crafting automated text messages, responding individually to applicants, or simply sitting down for the interview.

After all, the best candidates will make their decisions largely based on their impression of the team and the company. That first impression needs to engage them and make them feel respected and valued.

To that end, we recommend that hiring managers add appropriate personal touches in their communications so that applicants don’t feel like just another number. Even just using the applicant’s name at the start of correspondence can help, as can making specific positive comments on the experiences and information they share in their application. Connecting with potential team members in a personalized yet professional way increases the sense of mutual empathy between applicants and hiring managers, leading to a great applicant experience and bolstering your company’s reputation—regardless of whether you end up working together.

Retaining and engaging hourly workers

The greatest hiring program in the world won’t solve the workforce turnover problem on its own. The other side of a solid hiring strategy is keeping the hourly workers you already have—particularly the best ones.

However, the best ones are in the highest demand, so in a nutshell, the best way to keep them with you is to keep them engaged and connected with your company. And not just with lip service, but with actual, actionable practices that demonstrate your commitment to them and appreciation for them. In other words, how can you connect with them and connect them to the good work they’re doing beyond cutting them a paycheck?

The truth is that pay alone doesn’t cut it. The restaurant industry as a whole is seeing its highest quit rate in 20 years, although pay has generally increased. Employees need to feel satisfied, valued, and enriched in addition to being paid.

More hourly workers are looking at other ways to reduce hiring costs and improve employee retention, even so far as converting hourly workers to career leaders. This sounds easy enough—but the how is the kicker.

So, let’s presume that a competitive wage is a baseline. How else can a business differentiate itself for the sake of attracting—and retaining—its top performers?

Recognize and acknowledge hourly workers

We all appreciate when someone acknowledges the hard work we do. Yet we can all forget to recognize a job well done, especially when we’re facing economic, hiring, and other pressures—which, let’s face it, all of us in QSR leadership are. So, it’s helpful to ingrain a gracious working culture from the top down. This starts with owners and owner-operators flowing down to managers, supervisors, and other team members.

The small things, like verbal acknowledgments, matter. These moments show your team that you recognize the positive impact they have on the business. Yet you can also go beyond the praise and acknowledgment part of recognizing employees by institutionalizing it.

One strategy is to designate one or more of a team’s managers as recognition leaders. These leaders can make it a daily part of their work to acknowledge good work, whether through spoken acknowledgment of team members’ contributions or other, more tangible recognition programs.

That’s an important distinction: Tangible rewards signal gratitude in ways beyond words. It’s the epitome of “put your money where your mouth is.” To prevent a sense of favoritism, these rewards can be tied to performance benchmarks. For instance, an employee who clocks in on time for X shifts in a row could be rewarded with a gift card to a store they like.

You will greatly increase your ability to retain your top talent for longer by making employee recognition a priority, backing it with accountability, and pairing it with goals- or performance-based rewards programs.

Pro tip: Making such rewards personal—like getting a gift card to a store they like rather than the most convenient big-box store up the road—goes even further toward making employees feel valued and appreciated.

Lead with empathy

Of course, a gift card every day won’t be enough to overcome a poor manager/employee relationship. With so few distinctions between hourly wage jobs, one of the top reasons employees leave a job is because of their boss—which is why you should place importance on how managers and supervisors treat team members.

Leaders are the first touchpoint for keeping good employees and reducing turnover, which is why how they treat employees is key. (That need has gotten even greater, too—85% of HR leaders agree that demonstrating empathy is even more important post-COVID than it was before.)

All too often, empathy is a hollow buzzword in business circles—or else code for connecting with customers and their dollars. But when hourly workers are treated genuinely, empathy can build personal rapport between management and other team members, which will ultimately reduce turnover. After all, people want to work where they feel valued.

Support hourly workers

Of course, hourly workers take jobs because they need an income. But every job offers money. You can differentiate your organization and retain your employees by providing meaningful support that reaches beyond a competitive hourly wage.

Supporting your team is in many ways like supporting your friends or family members. This kind of support matters, and you can’t apply a blanket approach to every situation. Many companies now create personalizable support benefits so that employees can tap into what they need and want when they need and want it.

Personalizing employee support also helps them feel seen. The awareness of providing support and its availability strengthens your team’s connection to the company. And personalization goes both ways—you can personalize your support to jive with both your means and your culture, in addition to what speaks to your hourly workers.

This section offers many ideas and suggestions for support options, broken down into broad categories. But it’s in no way comprehensive. You can be creative in bolstering your workforce, so long as the support is genuine and it genuinely acknowledges your employees’ needs.

Provide comprehensive benefits

Most hourly workers don’t receive benefits from their employers. Yet the idea of comprehensive benefits is not new or innovative. It’s well-established that workers will choose and stick with jobs that provide healthcare benefits, particularly compared to similar jobs that don’t. It’s a basic strategy for attracting and retaining quality workers—one that is only lightly used with an hourly workforce.

But hourly workers also make decisions based on how well that coverage suits them: more than half of adults report that their satisfaction with health benefits is a key factor in keeping their current role—and that was before a global pandemic that conceivably could increase that number.

And comprehensive benefit possibilities extend beyond healthcare coverage to retirement, emergency support funds, and even education reimbursement. Starbucks experiences a 65% turnover rate—essentially half that of the QSR average—and a big factor is its comprehensive benefits package, through which every eligible U.S. employee, regardless of full- or part-time status, receives complete tuition coverage for a bachelor’s degree through Arizona State University’s online program. And Ben & Jerry’s offers the Core Academy, a series of free online courses.

Yes, these efforts cost money. But so does a high turnover rate. It’s worth exploring various traditional benefit programs to see which ones will help your organization retain its best hourly workers for longer—preserving institutional knowledge, reducing onboarding and ramping up expenses—and drawing in the best candidates right from the start.

Prioritize hourly workers' needs

According to McDonald’s EVP and Chief Global Impact Officer, the top reason hourly workers leave their jobs is a lack of sufficient childcare. This is all the more significant because parents account for more than one-third of the food service workforce.

Employers can retain more than one-third of their hourly workers by providing better access to childcare: flexible scheduling, for example, or a childcare stipend.

Employees have all kinds of needs. And they are more likely to stick with a company that goes the extra mile to understand those needs and then shows its appreciation by providing resources to help them. Sure, it might feel good to get movie tickets in appreciation for a job well done—but what about impactful programs that make the job possible in the first place?

These possibilities are boundless. Imagine a scheduling program updated in real-time that the millennial/ Gen Z workforce can access on their phones. Consider what it would take for workers to feel safe at work— from infectious diseases to aggressive customers and everything in between. Pretend you’re paying rent in your first-ever apartment, and your manager uses an on-demand pay app instead of waiting two weeks to cut you a check.

Other ideas include looking at the tools hourly workers want to do their job better and how you can facilitate their professional development (say, from line cook to manager). Those things make a difference in the employee experience. They show you are invested in them and that you prioritize them—and they are more likely to invest in your company in return.

Respect and enable a healthy home/work balance

The phrase “time off” can carry certain connotations of a worker not working. But, of course, your hourly workers aren’t always working. They have lives and needs outside of the workplace, and today’s employees want to know you’ll have their back outside of work, too.

Let’s face it: Employees who can tend to their home and personal lives will be happier, more focused hourly workers, too. This is especially true in industries like QSRs with traditionally high turnover rates, which can lead to employees working understaffed shifts, covering other shifts, and generally experiencing burnout.

You can protect your employees by being intentionally mindful of how you schedule their shifts (and teaching your scheduling managers to do the same). You can even encourage them to take time off—for mental health, sure, but also just for fun.

Go on the offensive

If you have the above bases covered, you can go on the offensive and offer retention and engagement strategies that help your workers grow beyond meeting their needs.

Many companies have started to do this through perk stipends. These are often relatively low-cost programs that enable hourly workers to improve their quality of life without impacting their hourly wage. A key strategy is that these are often a choose-your-own-adventure from a suite of options, so employees can use the benefits that are most meaningful to them.

It’s fairly common practice for employers to categorize their perk stipends, like food, entertainment, or exercise, and then give hourly workers autonomy to decide how they access the resources. Some employers expand perk stipends to include psychology resources, nutrition programs, and other wellness-centered benefits. Others make the stipends available for basic resources like groceries, diapers, gas, and bus and Uber fares.

Other offensive-minded strategies can include giving hourly workers increased autonomy to make decisions on daily operations, granting them permission to reward a certain number of their best customers, or, really, whatever initiatives you think will meaningfully improve your employee engagement, enjoyment, and well-being.

Such offensive-minded tactics create exceptional experiences for your teams, and they actively build your culture and your reputation as thinking creatively and supporting your workers. This will improve retention and engagement and help entice new hourly workers to apply.

Develop employees

Many QSRs and other hourly employers resist investing in employee development programs. After all, for generations, these businesses have been built on an expectation of high turnover and fast training.

Now that we better understand the true cost of rehiring for a role, the industry is slowly realizing that employee development is an investment rather than an expense. Employee development programs can actually lead to a long-term positive effect on the bottom line by improving retention.

Most hourly workers have plans for their careers, and often, these wage jobs fill short-term needs or are stepping stones on their longer journey. So employee development isn’t something to hand out willy-nilly. Rather, it builds on the idea of empathy and connecting with team members: It’s critical for leaders to engage in conversations with employees about their career goals.

These managers need the ability and the resources to connect potential long-term employees with sound career development programs. These opportunities improve the employees’ careers—and they’ll show the hourly workers that the company really cares about their professional growth.

Businesses will reap dividends on these investments, as well, and not just because they will spend fewer resources on rehiring—they will also see improved performance and increased long-term institutional knowledge.

Professional development doesn’t have to mean sending hourly workers to college (though it can). And unlike some educational opportunities provided by forward-thinking QSRs, it doesn’t have to be open-ended. It’s alright and sensible for the training to relate to the employee’s role (both present and future) within the business.

Furthermore, attending to your hourly workers’ development creates a strong sense of loyalty. Even in highly skilled fields, like software development, employers fear that upskilling workers will just arm them to go get a better job somewhere else; and while this does happen in singular cases, that is simply not the overall result.

How to implement training and development

You can use, of course, many creative avenues to integrate development into an organization. Here are some high-level thoughts to get you started:

Even if you do not choose that route, onboarding can set the tone for expectations and train employees to integrate into a company’s culture through the use of anything from lighthearted videos to a truly unique employee handbook.