The right (and wrong) way to source hourly employees through social media w/ Bruce Irving

Daniel Blaser (00:00):

Hello everyone. My name is Daniel and I'm with Workstream and it's my pleasure to be here today with Bruce Irving. Now Bruce has tons of experience in the restaurant industry going way back, he's done and seen about all there is to do and see in the restaurant industry. And the last couple of years he's taken that experience and now he helps restaurants with their branding, with their marketing and with their social media. And that's obviously what we're here to talk about today, is using social media to source new employees for your restaurant because social media can be really, really powerful for restaurants, but you kind of have to go about it the right way and be strategic with how you're using it. And that's obviously what Bruce is going to share all about today. So Bruce, it's so nice to have you here.

Bruce Irving (00:48):

Thank you, Daniel. Appreciate you having me on and I'm excited to talk about social media and help restaurants kind of get better at it. And we know that the work in finding employees is tricky right now, so I think there's some strategies that we're going to share today and go over that are going to help them.

Daniel Blaser (01:04):

Awesome. I kind of introed you, but I thought maybe you'd like to kind of add a little bit of your background in the restaurant industry and also what you've done recently. Like I said, kind of more in the restaurant marketing realm.

Bruce Irving (01:19):

So I grew up in the pizza industry is my niche where I started in the Boston area working for Pizzeria Regina, which is a famous local kind of chain now. When I was 15 years old, started making pizza there, worked for Independent, became a partner in that, independent, grew to a second location. So I come at my process of helping the restaurants from the aspect of being a restaurant owner, so I know what it's like to walk in their shoes. I know what it's like to work the day to day and how every day can have its ups and downs and you have your good times and your bad times. So what I try to do is teach what we used to do that made us successful in air quotes because success is different to everybody and help them understand how to use and leverage technology to find employees, get more customers, retain the customers that they have, build their brand, and just create a happy business that not only makes them money in a living, but they actually like to do.

Daniel Blaser (02:18):

I love that. That's so awesome. You touched on that. We all know hiring is really difficult right now. I'd just be curious based on the different restaurant owners that you speak with and you work with, what have you seen or what have you heard about the challenges of hiring right now?

Bruce Irving (02:37):

It's the hardest it's ever been. So I've been in the restaurant industry either as an owner, a consultant, or a podcaster for 25 years and it's probably the hardest it's ever been. It's always been difficult and it's always been challenging to find employees, but I really think the time we're in now is the most challenging that any restaurant owner has ever faced when it comes to building up the team and retaining employees. And I think it has a couple of reasons. Number one, the obviously Covid thing happened and it kind of threw a wrench in the whole restaurant industry start. It made people second guess whether they really want to be in the restaurant industry at all. And then the second thing is forever owners and operators have been seeing social media happen, but they've been really slow to adapt to getting on the bandwagon and creating content and getting their message out to the people and saying, Hey, this is what we do.

(03:37):

This is how we do it and this is why you should either buy from us or work with us. And in 2020 owners realize that, oh my God, now I've been doing this business for so long, people can't come to me. How do I get the message out about what I do and all the updates I got to get on social media, but it's going to take you a while. It's not something that you could do overnight. So it's really hard to find employees and if you don't have a social media presence or anything that they can go research you and look you up and see what you're all about, it's going to be even harder for you because the younger generation of folks, I have three daughters, they are internet natives, they grew up with the internet. I didn't grow up with the internet.

(04:18):

I remember a world now. I know the nerds out there are going to be like it's been around since the seventies, I understand that. But the way we use it today hasn't been around for 30, 40 years. But my kids use it and if they are looking for a job or to research a place, the first thing they do is go to Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat and ask their friends and research the place to see if they want to order from there or if it's a place that they're looking to get a job, they want to know about it before they get in there.

Daniel Blaser (04:47):

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So when you're kind of taking that lens, like that social media, internet, first generation and now you're trying to apply hiring to that generation, what have you seen? Have you seen restaurants that have kind of tried to evolve that strategy accordingly or not? Has that been a challenge?

Bruce Irving (05:11):

They're trying to figure it out. I think a lot of restaurants right now are trying to figure out how to use social media to look for employees. They know that that's where they're hanging out, that's where these people are spending time. They want to go on these platforms. The thing that they're doing that's not really helping them is they're doing what they used to do back in the day with Craigslist and newspaper ads and signage in the windows and they're implementing those same strategies to social media and that doesn't work. You can't just post something to Instagram that says, now hiring. Now you can do that but it's not really going to work. You're going to just post something on there because you're stuck and you're looking for some help and you're going to go to Canva and you're going to create a sign that says now hiring and you're going to put a post on Instagram that says, we're looking for this, this, and this. And yeah, you did it. You did advertise that you were hiring and you did use social media to advertise that you were hiring, but did you do it in a way that's going to make somebody stop the scroll or want to work for you? I don't think so. I think you need to think about it a little bit different.

Daniel Blaser (06:11):

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense and I think we're definitely going to talk a little bit more about that, how you can take checking the box. Sure, you technically did it and actually make that impactful. We will talk a little bit more about that before we jump into the specifics of how to remedy that approach. I am sure most people listening or watching this, like you said, maybe they've heard about the power of social media. Maybe in 2020 they're like, oh, we really have to do something here to stay alive. But social media can also be overwhelming. It's always changing. There's always different channels that people are talking about and it's like, well, do we start over here? Do we start over there? What would you recommend? Just in broad strokes, like a restaurant owner or a general manager is watching this and they're like, yeah, we've been meaning to do this. This is the time we're going to do this, but now where do you recommend that they start? Which platforms should they focus on and how can you kind of make an impact on social media without having it become this giant time suck? Because I think that that's what people are worried about too, right?

Bruce Irving (07:17):

Yeah, for sure. They don't have time. You're a restaurant owner, especially now when you don't have help, you don't have time to take that extra hour or two a day to curate content or figure out what works and then create content and post it to the internet and use the specific hashtags. It's tough, especially now. So what I think you need to do is take a slow approach. You don't need to rush into anything first of all because social media is not something that's going to help you tomorrow. It's going to be a long game. It's about building up the brand and being consistent over time. So don't rush into it thinking you're behind the eight ball and you got to do a thousand posts. What you need to do is think about your customer. The customer you're trying to reach or the employee you're trying to reach is on one, maybe two platforms.

(07:58):

Very few people are consistent followers of seven different platforms like marketers are. And businesses can be on seven different platforms, but as the user generally you have one or two favorite social media platforms that are your go-to platforms. You're a TikTok user, you're an Instagrammer, you watch YouTube, you're a snapchatter, you're on Facebook in groups like you go to one or two specific places that you feel comfortable. So what you need to do as an owner and say, all right, who am I trying to reach? And of those people who I'm trying to reach, where are they hanging out? And if it's Instagram, okay, most of my people that I want to reach are on Instagram, then what you need to do is say, okay, what kind of content strategy can I come up with to communicate with them or share what we're doing and then post it to Instagram.

(08:48):

So I always tell 'em to start with one, think about who you're trying to reach, figure out what platform they're on, and then just stick with one platform and come up with a content strategy and do that for six months and forget everything else. Just focus on one because in six months, if you're consistent with it, you will have a strategy in place that you're following. And in the beginning it's going to take a while to figure out and implement that strategy, but as time goes on, you're going to take that hour a day that's taking you to create one post, and in six months it's going to come to 10 minutes because you've been doing it for a long time. And anything that anybody does, the longer you do it, the better you get at it and the more natural it comes to you. And then at that point you can say, okay, what was the second channel that they were on? I'm going to go tackle that one now because my first channel is humming along. I know exactly what to create. I don't have content blocks in my brain about the kind of content I need to create and I have a system in place that has been flowing for a while and I can see if it's working or not.

Daniel Blaser (09:47):

Yeah, I think that's great advice. You kind of mentioned the importance of consistency. I definitely agree with that. If you decide, okay, let's give social media a shot and you hit it really hard for a month and then you taper off, you're not going to see any benefit there. But let's say you are committed, you're going to be consistent. Should restaurants be trying to post every day? What do you generally recommend? As far as how often to share something new?

Bruce Irving (10:17):

It depends on where you're starting from. And if you're starting from zero, then I do think you need to post every single day because you're going to have nobody listening to you in the beginning. If you're starting from zero and you post once a week, it's going to take you 10 years to build an audience. But if you post every single day, you're going to get there a heck of a lot faster than if you just post once a week. So it really depends on where you're starting from. Once you do build up a following, if you go to my social media following on smart pizza marketing on Instagram, I don't post every single day. I did in the beginning to get it up to where it is today because I knew I needed to get in front of as many people as possible. But then once you have a system in place, then you can kind of throttle it back and say, okay, I'm going to post four or five days a week or two to four days a week, and that's going to be my posting schedule. And your audience over time will realize that that's your cadence and they'll be okay with that. But if you don't post a lot, and I know a lot of people don't want to hear it because they don't have a lot of time, if you don't post a lot in the beginning, it's going to feel like you're just talking into a black hole and no one's going to show up, and then you're going to think it doesn't work and then you're going to give up on it.

Daniel Blaser (11:20):

Yeah, okay. So I imagine maybe some restaurant owners, the general managers, they're watching this and they're like, okay, I want to do this. And then they hear you say, if you're starting from scratch, you probably have to post something every day. And then their stomach drops a little bit and they're like, oh, that sounds like, how do I begin to even approach that? And I know that one thing that you're a proponent of is leaning on your team in a restaurant to kind of help you do a lot of this stuff. I'd love to kind of hear your thoughts and your suggestions of how, yeah, you do need to be consistent, but it doesn't all need to fall on the general manager. They can use their team.

Bruce Irving (12:01):

I think there's two aspects of creating content. There's creating the content, which means having somebody actually take a photo or take a video and edit it and put it together. And then there's leveraging technology to set that up to go out at specific times. So if you leverage your people, your team and technology and put those together and you have a good plan in place, you don't need to spend an hour a day doing or worrying about what you're going to post today. You could say, alright, on Sunday nights I'm going to go through the list of Google folders that I have that my team was taking videos and pictures all week and uploading them to Google Drive. I'm going to go through those. And then I called, I kind of wrote a quick thing here. Where was my camera? I dunno if you could see that.

(12:51):

It's content. I call it the content matrix. So on one column you have topics that you talk about. It could be your hours, your location, your recipes, your team, and then on the top you have different types of posts. It could be a video, it could be a photo, it could be a checklist, it could be a recipe guide. And you say to yourself, all right, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I'm going to post one thing, go through that and click one of the things on the left and match it up with one of the things on the top, and that's what the content is going to be about. And then you go into your folder and say, okay, which video or photo kind of relates to that? And I'm going to write a copy on the caption. And then you do that for an hour on Sunday and you schedule out all of your stuff to go out throughout the course of the week and you're only doing it for an hour on Sunday versus an hour a day just thinking about what you're going to post.

(13:40):

We have a client who also uses his team members to come in an hour early and they love it because, so this is how it works. Say someone's working four to 10, he says, you know what? I can't have you come in or I don't need you to come in at three, but I know that maybe you like to take, I see that you have an Instagram account and you like to take photos and you like to create videos and you have a TikTok account, why don't you come in at three o'clock instead of four, but instead of doing your job, why don't you just take photos and videos for me for that hour? So you get to do something different and I know you like to do it. I can see your social profiles and you're into that. And then I get something out of it because instead of having to hire a photographer or a videographer to pay them a ton of money, I'm just giving you your hourly rate that you work for me anyway, and you're creating something for me to use later on. And it's a win-win because he gets content or she gets content and the employee gets to do something different in the business so it doesn't feel like Groundhog Day every day and they're doing something they actually want to do.

Daniel Blaser (14:39):

I think that's really cool. And what a great way, like you said, to kind of build some enthusiasm among your employees and let them break from that routine. Now, I can imagine that maybe some restaurant owners are a little bit concerned where it's like, well, yes, I want to lean on my team, but that could be a liability or there could be some risk there. Have you heard that concern before? And how do you recommend that people overcome that or get to a place where they're not as worried about a team member going rogue or anything like that?

Bruce Irving (15:20):

Yeah, I have heard that before many times, not just once. Many, many, many, many times, and I always tell them this, you're not necessarily having the employees post in real time about what they're doing, although it is a possibility if you trust them. And then I go back to you're having your employees handle your money and your customers and your customer's credit card information and you trust them with that, but you're not going to trust them to post a photo to Instagram or give them your Instagram login. I think that if you have employees that you won't trust to post a photo to your Instagram account, it's probably not an employee. You should be trusting to talk to a customer or handle a customer's credit card information that could potentially do way more damage than a bad photo going to Instagram or wherever.

Daniel Blaser (16:09):

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. So we talked about this idea, going back to using social media for hiring, we talked about, okay, we have a job opening posted to Instagram, and you alluded to the fact that that's, yeah, you did it, but it's probably not going to make any sort of impact. Could you just throw out some examples of here are some posts that are going to be more encouraging and actually more productive as far as sourcing new employees. Here's maybe what they would look like instead of just the help wanted flyer,

Bruce Irving (16:48):

Right? For sure. So I think if you do a business, you always should be hiring. First of all, there's never a point in your business where you shouldn't be recruiting employees. It should never be. And that's a problem we get into as business owners is we always have these peaks and valleys. We have enough employees so we stop hiring or interviewing, and then what happens? A couple people leave, it goes into the valley, you got to start the whole process over again. You get 10 applications and it goes back to the peak. You should always be hiring because you always want to take on people who are going to help your business regardless if you need them or not. If you have somebody come into your team, that is amazing. Even if you don't need them at the moment, you should find a spot for them because who knows if you're ever going to need them in the future.

(17:28):

A company that does this really good and they're having a hard time too, is everybody knows the Walt Disney Company, right? Of everybody here's Disney and forever people have, they've never had an employee problem. I talked to Lee Cockrell who was the vice president of operations for the Walt Disney company, and they used to do an interview process where they would interview a thousand, 1500 people. That would be their hiring process. And even them in today's environment are having a hard time finding employees. So we're recording this the beginning of June, 2022. If you go to Disney's Instagram account, and this is the first time they've really done this, you can see a post that they did where they're really desperately trying to hire lifeguards. They're having a real shortage of staff for lifeguards. And they did a post on Instagram where it was reliving what a day in the life of a Disney postcard.

(18:21):

A Disney lifeguard is like, it showed you how their day starts, what they need to do throughout the course of the day, the perks of being a Disney lifeguard, and it's an Instagram post, it's like a 62nd video, but watching that video, you get to see exactly what to expect if you do become a Disney lifeguard. I think businesses should do that once a week. Once a week, a post on your social media should be a day in the life of whatever you want to show that week. It could be a day in the life of a delivery driver, it could be a day in the life of the owner, it could be a day in the life of the grill guy, whoever it is. It doesn't have to be a long video. It could just show how does the day start for them? What does the dinner rush look like?

(19:03):

What happens at the end of the night? What are some of the perks to being an employee of your business? And if you do that once a week, every week you're having content go out there on social media that helps people who watch that understand what the environment is like in your business. So that way when you do have an opening, people can go back and search you and say, okay, alright, they're hiring for that grill cook. I saw three videos of what the day in the life of a grill cook actually is. And that kind of looks like a cool place to work. And I don't think there's any businesses that actually do that because I think they think it's too much work. But if you go watch that Disney video, it's over the course of a day. So it's a lot of small videos put together, but the way TikTok and Instagram works in today's world, it's so easy to slice three videos together and put it, they make it really easy for you. So it's not as overwhelming as it seems.

Daniel Blaser (19:53):

I think that's an awesome example. And when you think about, sure, people can now see, okay, here's what this position looks like in a day. But there's also I think the kind of taking it to the next level, if you see a business that's willing to be that transparent, I think that's reassuring in itself, right? They're not trying to trick any employees into getting in the role and then all of a sudden it's not what they promised. Transparency I feel like can be reassuring. And in my mind that's one of the benefits of businesses using social media is you're not trying to hide anything. Right?

Bruce Irving (20:36):

I agree with that a thousand percent. It's much different being able to visually see it and see how it's actually working than what the job description says, the post, because the job description generally says the best parts, and with the video you can show the best parts, but if you show what it's actually like, there is no surprises. There is no somebody coming in to apply for the job and you hire them and a week later they're thinking to their selves, this isn't anything of what I read or what the job description was, and now I'm leaving. So if you're more transparent in the beginning, your retention rate is going to be way higher because only people who want to do that job and see it in action will apply and your retention rate will be way higher.

Daniel Blaser (21:20):

Yeah, I definitely agree. So we've talked about creating content from the restaurant side of things. Obviously anyone that's ever hired knows that referrals are tremendously powerful, and I mean this would apply to me or you or anyone, but especially if you are 1920 and you see that a friend works somewhere and they give it a thumbs up, that's going to be a huge factor in like, well, maybe I want to work there too. Right? That's really, really important. How do you recommend that restaurants approach kind of this referral side of things using social media?

Bruce Irving (21:57):

I think first of all, every business owner should have a personal brand that they're building along with their business brand. Your business brand isn't your personal brand because you could sell the business and then all of your social status goes with that business if you've built it up over time. So you should be building up your personal brand along with your business brand, and the best thing to do is give shout outs to people who join your team or who are doing an amazing job on your social media or encourage them to brag about their job on social media and don't poo poo it. A lot of businesses poo poo employees using social media to talk about their job because they think it's going to be all negative. And if all of your social employees are posting negative comments on social media, that's more of an internal thing that you need to think about versus worrying about what they're going to be posting to social media.

(22:47):

So I think you should encourage them to talk about what their day is. You should make it where not only do you encourage them, but when they do do it, you shout them out because the more you do that and the more you encourage them in public, the more people are going to do it. And when they do it and then you share it, a whole bunch of people on the internet are going to see that and see that you're a supportive CEO or boss or whatever you call yourself, and it's going to say, Hey, listen, you, maybe you're a mom and you have teenage daughters or sons, and you say, you know what? I saw this owner of a business over there who I've been following because they share some business advice. They're always so supportive of sharing their employees accomplishments, whether it has to do with the job or not.

(23:27):

That's somebody I would want you to work for in today's environment. The parents have a lot more control of what their kids do than when I was younger. My mom and dad didn't care where I work. They just wanted me to get a job. There was no social media or any input. They're like, get a job. I don't care. You just got to go do something. Now, parents are a lot more concerned about who their kids work for, where they work, what they're going to be doing, and the more supportive the owner is, the more likely the parents will encourage them to work there. So I really think that everybody heard of user generated content, which is content produced by the customers, but not so many people talk about the content that the employees, employee generated content. I think that's a huge plus for a business if they can get people to do it.

Daniel Blaser (24:12):

Yeah, I think that's a great point, and we don't need to go deep into this, but I know that in general, you can think about it. A brand has 200 followers or whatever on Instagram, but how many followers do different employees have, right?

Bruce Irving (24:27):

Yeah.

Daniel Blaser (24:27):

And so whenever they're posting about the restaurant, you're kind of opening up to hundreds or thousands of different people than you could ever reach just through your own restaurant brand or your personal Instagram account or whatever. One thing that I just wanted to call out, obviously workstream is the one that is hosting this webinar, and we've heard some things that are kind of cool about kind of gamifying referrals where you challenge employees to share things out to their own social media or just word of mouth, and then you build in a mechanism to track. It could be as simple as, did someone refer to you this job and then they mention Brad or whatever. But one other cool thing about workstream is we have kind of these referral URLs, so you can theoretically generate several of them, hand them out to whichever employees want to participate, and then be like, okay, whoever can lead to the most number of applications gets a gift card or something. It can kind of be a little bit of a game. I don't know if you've ever heard of maybe not using workstream necessarily, but you've ever heard of any of your clients that have kind of gamified this process of how to get referrals from employees?

Bruce Irving (25:46):

Oh, yeah. There's so many instances where business owners say, all right, if you refer a friend, we'll give you a $50 gift card if they last 60 days, but it's hard to track because you never know really who really said that person. It's just like, Hey, I referred like you said Brad, but there's no link to it or tracking system in place to really say, okay, Sarah gave us Brad. Brad's been here for three months. She gets the $50 gift card. But if you have a good employee, generally who you hang around with is who you're most likely to be like, and if you have a great employee, they're probably hanging around with some pretty cool other people, whether they know them in real life or on the internet, and your employees are the best advocates for your business because if you can get one of your employees to suggest a friend that they work there, that's a great endorsement than a Craigslist ad or an ad in the window that says, Hey, we're hiring and it's just a stranger walking off the street. I encourage business owners to, when you find a good employee, ask them, did you have any brothers or sisters? Did you have any friends that need jobs? What would it take for you to go out there and help us get and surround you with people you would want to work with? Not necessarily that we would want to work for us, but that you would want to work with.

Daniel Blaser (27:00):

I think you made such a great point that I want to call it out one more time, right? Is it's natural to find top performing employees proactively ask them, like you said, and I feel like that's probably good restaurant owners have done that for decades, but understanding the fact that now more than ever, people have a lot of friends that are online only friends or 90% of the time, all of their interaction is taking place online, and so kind of opening that up, it's not just about the face-to-face. Can you refer someone Now you kind of have to keep up with the times a little bit and understand that a lot of people have friendships that are exclusively online. It's different,

Bruce Irving (27:43):

And I think you have to be careful because people share great experiences online and they share really bad experiences online. There's never that mediocre experience that you're proud to share on social media, but if you do build up a good culture and you do have a good environment for people to work at, which I'm assuming everybody watching this does, people are going to go out there and if you ask your employees say, Hey, listen, you know what? I know you have a good social media following. Do you mind asking anybody if they want to work with you here? They're going to be like, yeah, you know what? Maybe, and I'll give you a hundred dollars if you find somebody, you're basically asking your employee to go help you find other employees in all it's costing you and is a referral fee if you hire somebody. There's no real hurt in that.

Daniel Blaser (28:21):

Yeah, I think that's great. Now, Bruce, I think we're about winding down on time. I hope that people are feeling encouraged that those that have watched this, they're feeling like maybe they can wrap their heads around the social media thing, especially for the purpose of hiring, because that's such an ongoing huge challenge. I think anything that they can give a leg up is important. I wanted to give you kind of the opportunity as we end this conversation to share maybe your ultimate takeaway or one final point with people watching.

Bruce Irving (28:58):

I think my final takeaway would be this, don't get overwhelmed because there are a lot of platforms out there, and it does seem overwhelming, and when you open up the Instagram app, everything's coming at you a hundred miles an hour. Don't be overwhelmed. All you really need to do is, and we have a whole PDF with 65 ideas, I'll give it to everybody for free if they want it. When they watch this, come up with a plan, pick a platform that you feel comfortable on, that you think your audience is there. Think of one content piece that you can create every single day and take it slow. There's no rules that you have to follow. There are suggestions. There's nobody out there who says, this is the exact plan you need to do. You need to do whatever plan you are going to consistently do over time, so you need to figure that out, and then don't get overwhelmed with it. There are businesses out there from people who are old people and young people who have done the strategy that I'm talking about, and if they do it for six or seven months consistently over time, they start to see results. And I guarantee you if you do that and you stick with it, just like building your business in the beginning, it takes time to really get profitable and really learn how to run it. You'll figure it out, I promise you that.

Daniel Blaser (30:05):

I love that. Wanted to give you a chance real quick to mention a website or where people can find you if they want to chat more or learn a little bit more about what you're doing.

Bruce Irving (30:17):

Yeah. Our main website is smart pizza marketing.com. We have a couple of different podcasts that we do and our blog posts and everything that we put is on that website, but if you want to say hello to me on Instagram, you can do that at Smart Pizza Marketing or LinkedIn or wherever you prefer to hang out. You can find all the links though on smart pizza marketing.com.

Daniel Blaser (30:34):

Cool. Well, thank you again for all your time and we'll talk to you again sometime soon.

Bruce Irving (30:41):

Thank you, Daniel. Very much appreciate you having me on the show. It was great.