How to Hire Event Staff: 5 Tips to Find Your Best Catering and Event Team
Want to know how to hire event staff? You have a unique challenge if you are responsible for finding catering and events professionals for your hotel, restaurant, or venue. To have successful events, it is crucial that you not only have the staff but also have the right employees in place. Due to the ever-changing business demands for event planners and caterers, you need workers you can rely on and are resilient to the natural ups and downs of the booking schedule.
While it’s no easy feat in today’s job market, it’s not impossible! Here are the top steps to take to attract top talent to your hospitality business to stay ahead of every event and catering gig:
1. Evaluate Your Staffing Needs
Determining what you need is the first step to hiring event staff and catering talent. Review past and booked events and catering parties in your event management platform. Knowing the size of the events and catering jobs you have booked or anticipate will help determine how many people you need. Look at the last year or two to pinpoint the exact months when you anticipate more bookings and fluctuations in demand.
Next, review your current team and their roles in your events, such as kitchen staff, servers, bartenders, and managers. Put together your existing staff and their skills and availability to see where there may be gaps. You never want to overwork or underwork anyone, which is a recipe for high turnover. Consider your employees and business needs thoughtfully to determine how many people you’ll need to onboard.
2. Pay Attention to Your Hiring Process
Once you know your actual seasonality for events and catering, begin the hiring process a month or two before your busy season. Finding team members who fit within the company culture can take time.
Put together your job post, collect and review applications, schedule and facilitate applicant interviews, and onboard and train any new hires—all before you’re swamped with event and catering bookings.
Even if you’re not hiring now, you can do yourself a favor and start organizing your staffing process. Create general job descriptions, interview questions, and follow-up email templates to hit the ground running when hiring.
3. Be Transparent in Your Job Descriptions
Catering and event staffing requirements can fluctuate a lot—and it’s in your best interest to be honest and transparent about that in your job description. The goal is to find someone who fits in with your culture and business needs, which means they should also be on board with the unpredictability of events.
If you have a busy season coming up and only need someone for a few months, make the job post “seasonal” or “temporary.” If you’re looking to hire someone full-time initially but will need to alternate being part-time at various times of the year—make that clear.
Workers appreciate honesty, and by setting expectations upfront, you’re more likely to find someone that is happy to work with you.
4. Create an On-Call Catering and Events Team
Sometimes, the best solution for event and catering staffing is to have your core full-time employees, who you can keep busy even in the slow season, and then fill in with an on-call team as things pick up.
On-call catering and event workers can be W2 or 1099 freelancers, but they don’t work regularly. Call them when you need them to fill in and make some extra cash if they’re available.
You can build this team through your network – including friends of current employees, former employees, or asking family members for recommendations.
On-demand staffing services like Poached Shifts allow you to hire 1099 freelance workers. This allows you to build a roster of solid workers for your future shifts.
5. Optimize Team Communication
Nothing is worse than spending time in the event staff hiring process, finding your people, and then experiencing turnover right when you need help. The best way to keep employee satisfaction up is to optimize your communication with and amongst them.
Weekly or monthly meetings to review staff availability and the event and catering schedule is a great way to keep communication open and ensure everyone is on the same page for what’s needed in the coming weeks. It’s also a great time to voice any company-wide messages.
Event Management Software can also improve your employee satisfaction. Tripleseat offers an easy, streamlined way to alert your team of event details and last-minute changes.
Who you have on your team is the key ingredient to a successful event and catering business. Taking time to develop how you hire event staff is essential to onboarding the right staff for your catering and events team so you can continue facilitating memorable experiences and increasing customer loyalty. Interested in learning more about how Poached Jobs can help you find quality candidates for your hospitality roles? Post a job today.
Tripleseat is pleased to bring you this valuable information from Poached Jobs, an innovative, feature-rich employment platform focused solely on the hospitality sector. Poached Jobs is the nation’s leading hospitality jobs marketplace.
About the Author
Ashely McNally is the Digital Marketing Manager at Poached Jobs, where she heads up content strategy and builds brand and product awareness.