Restaurant Interviews

publication date: Jun 11, 2007

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author/source: Ron Gorodesky

Asking revealing questions during interviews will reduce the risk of making a bad hire. Besides the traditional questions such as prior jobs and achievements, you must get an idea from the candidate what they value about their current job and what they would be looking for in a position with your restaurant. You might want to ask some "stress" questions to observe how a candidate would react under pressure.

Here are samples of questions to set you in the right direction:

1. What value could you bring to the restaurant? This could indicate a person's confidence level and find out about his/her creativity.

2. What was your greatest accomplishment at your last job? The answer to this question will tell you what is important to the candidate in terms of his/her goals.

3. Why are you leaving your current position? If you can determine why the candidate changed jobs in the past, you'll get a good idea of what motivates the him/her - more money, more responsibility or greater job security.

4. Give me three adjectives that describe yourself - This will give a feel for the candidate's personality.

5. If you remained with your current employer, what would your next promotion be? This information could be used to formulate your offer. Also, you can tailor a job description to match a candidate's goals and sell this position to your prospective candidate.

6. On what issue do you disagree with your current boss most often? This questions gives you an indication of how the candidate handles authority.

7. What was your most satisfying evaluation and why? What about your most disappointing review? This will give you an idea of the candidates honesty and the type of skills he or she values.

8. How would your supervisor rate your ability to cope with last-minute changes? This will tell you how the candidate deals with stress and if he/she is a team player. Often in small business such as restaurants people wear many hats and you want a new hire to want to and be able to do that.

Ron Gorodesky is principal of Restaurant Advisory Services. RAS provides full-service consulting services to the restaurant and hospitality industries focusing on every aspect of the life cycle of restaurants and other hospitality organizations, from pre-opening and conceptual planning, to day-to-day operations, to design and brokerage.