Hiring a café or restaurant supervisor
A hundred and twenty applications for the first genuinely supervisory job most of them will have held — and hospitality CVs are the thinnest documents on this site.
Hospitality CVs are short by nature, and this role needs the part they leave out. A supervisor CV in this sector is usually five lines: venues, dates, and a list of duties that could describe anyone who has worked a floor. What the job actually turns on is not in there at all — whether this person can hold authority over people who were their colleagues last month, run a shift when it goes wrong, and have an awkward conversation with someone half their age without either avoiding it or blowing it up. The other complication is that the best candidate is often already in the building: this is the classic internal promotion, so an external hire is competing with someone whose actual behaviour under pressure you have watched for a year, and the CVs cannot compete with that on their own terms.
What the supervisor actually controls
Selene establishes the real authority in the role, because "supervisor" covers everything from keyholder to de facto manager.
Shifts, keys, and who they manage
The scope of a supervisory role in hospitality varies enormously and is rarely written down. Whether this person opens up, handles cash, writes the rota or manages anyone changes both the hire and, quite often, the pay.
One sentence changes the guide
It is a precise description of why internal promotions in hospitality fail. The person is promoted for being good on the floor, and then discovers that the hard part of the job is a conversation nobody has ever asked them to have. Screening for it up front is unusual, and it is a far better predictor than any amount of service experience.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The one who can tell a nineteen-year-old they’re late for the third time, and still have them turn up on Saturday.”
→ Handling a difficult conversation became a must-have; hospitality tenure dropped below shift leadership.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria for a five-person team. Note that formal management experience is absent entirely — requiring it on a role at this scale would remove every internal-promotion-shaped candidate in the pile, which is most of the good ones.
Two facts, and availability is the real one
Right to work and weekend availability are yes-or-no. In hospitality the availability question does more work than anywhere else on this site: a seven-day operation needs weekend cover from a supervisor specifically, and an applicant who can only do weekdays is not a weaker candidate — they are simply not a candidate, and both sides are better off knowing on day one.
Scored on the shift, not the CV length
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
On a discipline where applications are short and often written quickly, scoring a structured profile rather than the document itself stops presentation standing in for capability.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Pinning down what this supervisor actually controls, which the job title will not tell you
- Reading all 120 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist you can fairly compare against an internal candidate
- An interview brief built around the difficult-conversation question
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or sourcing sites
- The trial shift, which on hospitality is worth more than any interview
- The interview, with her brief in hand
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Nearby roles
Say what they hold the keys to
Keys, cash, rota, people — the scope decides the hire, and most job ads never state it.