Hiring a chef
Seventy applicants, a kitchen that is already short-staffed, and a set of job titles that mean completely different things depending on where someone earned them.
A sous chef in a 40-cover bistro and a sous chef in a 200-cover hotel are not the same hire. Kitchen job titles do not transfer. The same words describe a person running two sections alone on a Saturday night and a person who is fifth in a brigade of twelve, and the CV rarely gives you the covers number, the section, or whether they were ever left in charge. Underneath that sits a harder problem: this is a shortage role, so you are hiring while already short-staffed, which pushes everyone toward whoever can start soonest — and speed is a genuinely reasonable thing to weight, right up to the point where it becomes the only thing. The classic false positive on this role is a run of impressive venue names with three months at each.
Covers, section, and who is left in charge
Selene asks the numbers that make kitchen experience comparable, since the titles on the CVs will not.
Service volume, menu, and the brigade around them
Three facts make kitchen CVs comparable: covers per service, the size of the team, and whether this person runs service when the head chef is off. Managers know all three instantly and job ads almost never contain them.
One sentence changes the guide
The last part is a real judgment call and worth stating. Short tenures are endemic in kitchens and often say more about the kitchens than the chef, so a guide that penalises them mechanically will discard good people. Asking about it in the interview and scoring what happened during those months is fairer and more informative than treating the dates as the evidence.
Exceptional, not just good —
“Someone who’s run a section on a bad night when two people didn’t turn up, and service still went out.”
→ Composure short-staffed became a must-have; venue prestige and tenure length stopped being scored directly.
What the guide ends up measuring
Seven criteria, and none of them is a job title. Covers, section and what happened on a bad night are the comparable facts; “sous chef” is not, which is why it appears nowhere in the guide despite being in the advert.
Two facts, and one of them is about the rota
Right to work and availability for the shift pattern are yes-or-no. The second is more decisive in hospitality than almost anywhere: split shifts, late finishes and weekend service rule people out for reasons that have nothing to do with their cooking, and finding that out at trial-shift stage wastes a day of a kitchen that is already short.
Scored on covers, not on venue names
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.
Venue names never reach the scoring, so a CV built on where someone cooked ranks on what they cooked through instead.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Getting covers, brigade size and cover-for-the-head-chef on the record, since titles will not tell you
- Reading all 70 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist that is not simply ordered by who can start soonest
- An interview brief that asks about the short stays rather than assuming the worst
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or sourcing sites
- The trial shift, which is the real assessment and always will be on this role
- The interview, with her brief in hand
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Nearby roles
The first supervisory step, where the skill is authority over people you were serving beside last week.
Where the CV barely matters and the rota decides almost everything.
Where one advert covers a day job and a night job with almost nothing in common.
Give her a covers number
One number makes seventy incomparable CVs comparable — describe your service and see it happen.