According to the National Restaurant Association (NRA), the restaurant industry is booming. NRA's 2007 Restaurant Industry Forecast predicts the nation's 935,000 restaurants should hit $537 billion in sales in 2007, a 5 percent increase compared to last year. The nation's 935,000 restaurant and foodservice outlets will employ 12.8 million individuals, adding two million new career and employment opportunities in the next decade. With Americans spending 47.9 percent of their food budget in restaurants, the industry is heading into 2007 as an economic powerhouse and an essential part of Americans' lifestyles.

Although this is great news for those looking for jobs in the food and beverage industry, it presents a challenge for employers who must find and retain the resources to keep their restaurants adequately staffed for what is estimated to be a very busy year.

How can you be confident you're selecting the right candidates for the jobs available? And that those choices are likely to be "keepers" rather than "short-termers?" Read on for tips and alternative methods for effectively staffing up for 2007 and making the best hiring decisions.

Sizing up the Service
Before making any major hiring decisions, take some time to adequately assess your business' needs and goals -both short- and long-term. This includes reviewing your business growth and strategy. Once this has been done, you can begin planning your personnel requirements for 2007. Communicate with your existing employees, your peers (other restaurant owners) and your customers to determine how well current staff meets job demands. To help facilitate the process, you need to ask some questions.

Company Specific
· Do you need to hire new employees? What is driving your need to hire new employees?
· What are your company's specific staffing requirements? Are they hourly or non-hourly? Where do you need to hire—service, food preparation?
· Are you short-staffed because the turnover rate is high, or is it because your business is rapidly expanding and the staff has yet to catch up?

Existing Staff
· How well does your staff meet job demands? Are you finding people with the right mix of talent?
· Are your existing staff members content in their jobs?
· What types of benefits are offered to employees?
· Is there room in the budget for higher wages/compensation?
· How is the current staff being evaluated? Does their performance need to be evaluated?

Customers
· Are they satisfied with the service?
· For repeat customers, why do they continue to come?
· Any suggestions for a better customer experience?

Keeping this feedback in mind will allow you to examine more closely the reasons for employee turnover, plan for growth, and in turn, get the right people on board.

High Turnover hurts Profits
The beginning of the year is a good time to re-evaluate human resources needs and to spend time planning for the duration of the year; a little preparation now could pay off greatly in the long run.

Remember, structure is related to function, and an adequately staffed team is more efficient than one or two employees taking on more than their share of the weight. Taking the time to hire carefully can offer huge paybacks in the form of money saved in reduced employee turnover costs.

Consider that the estimated cost of losing an employee is equivalent to the employee's salary multiplied by 1.5 (including costs of recruiting, relocating and retraining a replacement). These are expenses that can be avoided with the right planning and hiring techniques.

Modifying your recruitment process can help reduce these costs, making the objective not to simply fill the position, but to find the perfect "fit" for the job. Investing the time to learn more about job candidates before they've actually started the job allows you to make more informed hiring decisions.

The ‘Right' Hires
Investing in tools to find the most appropriate job candidates can help avoid costly employee turnover and bad customer service. Therefore, when assessing candidates for service positions, managers need to consider applicant's basic skills and abilities, experience and work attitudes vital to those positions.

Attitude is important, too. Research has shown that people who are effective in service jobs demonstrate key characteristics such as courteousness, cooperativeness and attentiveness; dependability; working well under pressure; and getting along with coworkers.

For years, foodservice managers have used traditional ways to assess talent, such as reviewing resumes, conducting one-to-one interviews and checking employment references. However, it has been shown that the interview is not the most effective means to assess talent. Today, more and more prospective employers are using pre-hire assessment tests to help determine the abilities of candidates.

Assessment tests provide "below-the-surface" views of job candidates' characteristics that are not readily revealed during other recruiting procedures.

Real Bottom Line
Retaining qualified employees not only increases the return on investment in training and development -it adds to the stability of a successful organization. Gathering as much information about the candidate as possible to support a hiring decision is worth the small amount of extra time and effort.

While these tests should not be relied upon as a sole source of information, assessment testing can play a crucial role in the decision-making process and supplement the hiring process in various ways, depending on the decision model.

Doug Walner is the president of PSI www.psionline.com He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it