Are Restaurants Sabotaging Their Own Staffing?

Restaurant hiring has never been especially simple. Managers are balancing callouts, service rushes, food costs, guest issues, and all the other fires that come with running a dining room. Recruiting often gets pushed down the list—until a restaurant is suddenly short-staffed and needs someone, anyone, on the schedule.

That is where Karen Browne sees operators get themselves into trouble.

“Desperate hiring managers will do desperate things,” says Browne, CEO of Chicago’s One Off Hospitality, the powerhouse group behind Windy City staples like avec, The Publican, Big Star, and Publican Quality Bread. “When they’re understaffed, they’re hiring bodies. They’re not pre-screening for the successful attributes you need for the job.”

It is a familiar cycle in restaurants: A staffing need becomes urgent, standards slip, and the new hire is expected to figure things out in an environment that may already be stretched thin. Turnover follows, the team gets frustrated, and managers are right back where they started.

Browne’s answer is not particularly flashy. It is to slow down, get clear about what a role actually requires, and build a process that does not disappear the second service gets busy.

That perspective comes from an unusual intersection. At One Off, Browne helms a nine-time James Beard Award-winning collective responsible for some of Chicago’s most iconic dining destinations. But before stepping in as CEO in 2019, she built her career far outside dining rooms, leading massive human-capital organizations and helping major companies design hiring systems at scale. At One Off, she has applied some of that same thinking to a business where the people side can often feel more reactive than strategic.

Start with the person, not the open shift

The first mistake, Browne says, is hiring around immediate availability rather than the traits that make someone successful in a specific job.

A restaurant should know what it is looking for before it starts looking. That might mean warmth and confidence at the host stand, composure on a busy line, attention to detail behind the bar, or the ability to keep a team steady during a difficult shift. Whatever the role calls for, operators need a way to identify it before the interview turns into a simple question of whether the candidate can start Friday.

“You need to really take the pill and just slow down and design a system, and then work to the system,” Browne says.

That does not mean every hiring decision needs to become a drawn-out corporate exercise. In fact, Browne believes speed matters. The point is to be intentional before urgency takes over.

Get out from behind the inbox

For Browne, restaurant recruiting is still a decidedly human process. Job boards and applicant tracking systems have a role, but she does not believe an email chain is enough to win over strong candidates.

“This is hospitality,” she says. “If you’re sending emails, you’re not going to get the best candidates.”

Browne still goes into One Off’s candidate pipeline and calls applicants herself, particularly when a part of the business needs people. That hands-on approach is partly about filling roles, but it is also about setting a tone: Talent matters, and outreach should feel personal.

Restaurants spend plenty of time thinking about how to make guests feel welcomed and seen. Browne says candidates deserve a version of that same consideration. A quick phone conversation can reveal more than a resume ever will, while also giving a prospective employee a sense of the people and culture behind the job posting.

Give people a reason to choose you

That job posting matters, too. But not if it reads like every other one.

Too many restaurants reduce an opening to the basics: pay, hours, responsibilities, and perhaps a list of qualifications. Those things are important, but Browne says operators also need to be able to articulate an employment proposition. Why should someone work at this restaurant rather than the one down the street? What will they learn? Who will they work alongside? Where could the role lead?

The same principle can apply in restaurants. Candidates want to understand the work itself, but they also want to know what they are joining.

“What’s the employment proposition for this person?” Browne asks.

For a restaurant group like One Off, that might include the opportunity to learn from experienced chefs and operators or build skills across a portfolio of distinct concepts. For another operator, it might be a strong training program, a path to management, schedule flexibility, or simply a workplace where employees feel supported. The answer will vary. What matters, she says, is having one.

Don’t let good candidates drift away

Restaurants are busy by nature, which makes candidate lag one of the industry’s more predictable self-inflicted problems. A manager calls someone, gets pulled into the day, and returns to the candidate several days later. By then, the opportunity may be gone.

“You’ve got to move candidates through the funnel quickly,” Browne says. “They call someone, then they get busy, then they leave them, then they go back. Those people are gone.”

Browne says the candidate market has shifted lately, with more talent available today than operators have seen in recent years. But that does not mean the strongest candidates will wait around. They still have options, and silence sends its own message.

Her advice to operators is to use that moment well. If there are chronic underperformers on a team, she says, it may be time to upgrade the roster rather than simply preserving the status quo. That can be an uncomfortable conversation, but it also matters for retention. High performers tend not to stay in environments where they are consistently carrying the load for everyone else.

Recruiting does not end at the offer letter

A well-run hiring process can bring the right person through the door. It cannot, on its own, make them stay.

Browne’s broader philosophy is simple: “We want to treat our employees better than how we expect them to take care of our guests.”

That shows up in the day-to-day details after someone is hired. Were they trained properly? Did they receive their first schedule quickly? Do they understand where to go with questions? Are managers following through?

Browne says she regularly asks employees about their training and onboarding because those early gaps can undo even the best recruiting work. Someone may accept an offer, but if they are left waiting for information or thrown into a shift without support, they will likely move on quickly.

Restaurants cannot eliminate every staffing challenge. But Browne’s point is that operators have more control than they sometimes give themselves credit for. The best hiring systems are not built around a single job post, a signing bonus, or a last-minute scramble. They are built around clear expectations, real conversations, quick follow-through, and an employee experience worth choosing in the first place.