When he opened Lockhart’s BBQ near Detroit more than five years ago, owner Drew Ciora used window signage and limited advertising to announce he was hiring. “The labor market wasn’t as tight as it is now,” he says. “Now you have to be creative. They’re not walking in off the street.”
So Ciora and others are widening their nets, hooking new talent by hosting job fairs. Ciora’s was as informal as it gets; when staffing his second location last fall, he set up tables in the under-construction restaurant and held interviews on-site, offering strong candidates jobs in as few as five minutes.
On the other end of the job fair spectrum, Starbucks, Taco Bell and more than a dozen other companies banded together last year in an employer-led coalition. The goal: Engage and hire at least 100,000 youth ages 16 to 24 via opportunity fairs.
Neil Borkan, president of NJB Operations, a franchisee with 40 Taco Bells in the Chicagoland area, attended the first opportunity fair in that city last August (another has since been held in Phoenix with a third scheduled for Los Angeles this year). Typically, Taco Bell uses an outside service that guarantees 100 interviews to plan, promote and host its fairs, says Borkan. “But this was an opportunity to talk to 5,000 candidates, many of them prescreened by the city,” he says. More than 800 job offers were extended to attendees, 40 of them from Taco Bell.
Whether hiring for one store or on a larger scale, there are ways to bolster an operator’s job fair experience. Borkan and Ciora share what’s worked for them.