Hiring waiting staff
Three hundred applications, most of them three lines long, for a job where the honest answer to two thirds of them is a question about Friday nights rather than a judgment about the person.
There is almost nothing on the page to screen. Front of house applications are the thinnest documents in this entire list: a couple of previous venues, sometimes nothing at all, from students and first-jobbers whose relevant qualities have never appeared in writing anywhere. Any attempt to rank them on experience mostly ranks them by age. What genuinely decides the hire is availability against a rota built around Friday and Saturday nights, and after that a quality that no CV has ever recorded — whether someone reads a table, notices the empty glass, and moves at service pace without being told. Hospitality has traditionally solved this with a trial shift, which works and does not scale to three hundred people.
The rota, and one thing worth asking beyond it
Selene sets up the availability questions first and then finds the single scored criterion that is worth asking a three-line applicant for.
Service times, sections, and how many you need
Restaurant hiring is about covering specific services, not about headcount. Establishing which services are short changes the advert, the questions and who is worth interviewing.
One sentence changes the guide
It also gives a three-line application something to actually contain. The single most useful change on a role like this is asking one good question on the application form, because it converts a pile of CVs with nothing in them into a pile of short answers that can genuinely be compared.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The ones who read a table. They can tell who is celebrating and who is in a hurry, without asking.”
→ Reading a table became the one scored must-have; hospitality experience dropped to the lowest weight.
What the guide ends up measuring
Five criteria, and only two of them are scored. That restraint is the point: on applications this thin, a six-criterion guide would be inventing distinctions the documents cannot support.
Availability by service, and the question that makes the pile sortable
Right to work and age are simple facts, and availability is asked by service rather than in general — “are you flexible?” produces a yes from three hundred people and sorts none of them. The additional question, the one about noticing what a customer needed, is not eligibility at all: it is there because it gives a three-line application something worth scoring, which nothing else on this role does.
Scored on one answer, because that is what there is
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 the thinnest applications in this list, what she scores is the short answer to the question the application form asked — which is why asking a good one matters more here than anywhere else.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Turning your short services into availability questions, and adding one question worth scoring
- Reading everyone whose availability fits against the same guide, blind
- A ranked shortlist per service rather than one undifferentiated list
- Drafting the declines, so three hundred people hear back rather than nothing
Yours
- Advertising the roles — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or sourcing sites
- The trial shift, which on front of house is still the real assessment
- Right-to-work and age verification before anyone starts; she records what candidates state, she doesn’t verify it
- 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 job title travels badly and the covers number tells you everything.
Where one advert covers a day job and a night job with almost nothing in common.
Name the services you are short on
Friday nights, Sunday lunch, weekday cover — the rota is the hire on this role.