Competing for the best culinary candidates might sound like an impossibility. In today’s tight labor market, it can feel like a win just to fill a role—any role. But rushing to hire the wrong candidate comes at a cost.
With the right approach, you can attract talented culinary professionals who are looking for a long-term position. These career-oriented team members are more likely to stick around, contribute their unique strengths, and grow up the ranks of your organization. For restaurant operators, that ultimately translates to spending less on turnover and constant hiring.
Before diving into the where and how of attracting top talent, it’s important to understand why it’s worth putting in the effort.
The restaurant industry is notorious for its turnover rates, with more than 20% of accommodation and food service workers already separating from their place of employment between January and April, 2025, based on monthly estimates of separation rates in the accommodation and food services by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A more thoughtful hiring strategy could drastically improve your retention and workplace culture, both of which benefit the bottom line.
Hiring strong candidates can have a number of benefits on business operations, labor costs, and workplace culture. Here’s a look at a few key benefits:
Highly skilled, motivated staff can mean fewer mistakes, better teamwork, and a faster, smoother service experience for customers.
With high turnover comes expenses, including recruitment, onboarding, and retraining costs. Plus, with 90% of restaurant operators identifying understaffing as a moderate to significant challenge for their business, the time between one employee leaving and another getting started could mean reduced hours of operation–a direct hit to revenue.
Top-tier culinary professionals are much more likely to stay, reducing the costly cycle of churn and retraining. According to a Gallup survey, companies with highly-engaged employees experience up to 21% less turnover. Plus, the more enthusiastic employees you have, the more likely they are to impact your wider workplace culture and motivate others to stick with it, too.
Creating a pipeline for career-minded culinarians to come in at the lower ranks of the brigade and move up the hierarchy from within has a lot of benefits, including boosting morale and saving money.
When you transplant an executive chef from one restaurant to another, they may have trouble leading an all-new team or getting oriented with the restaurant’s style. When someone starts at an entry-level position and works their way up at one business, they come to know the culture, people, and food along the way.
Here are some of the top qualities to look for in talent:
Regardless of whether you’re hiring for a line cook or executive chef, everyone working back of house should know knife skills, food safety, and sanitation—or be willing to learn with the help of on-demand training.
A culinary education can demonstrate that the candidate is serious about building a long-term career in the industry.
However, candidates who already have formal training may expect higher wages—something that can be challenging for businesses experiencing tighter-than-average budgets. In these cases, it may be more cost-effective to hire promising applicants without professional training and invest in their education while they work.
Beyond cooking skills, hire professionals who know about the ins and outs of operations, finances, inventory management, and leadership. These are the candidates who can bring a lot to the table in terms of helping you spot potential issues, tighten up margins, and move up the kitchen brigade.
Test their knowledge: Ask about their menu pricing strategy or about a time they improved operating efficiency.
→ Read this next: 2025 Employee Recruitment & Training Statistics
Hiring in hospitality remains competitive in 2025, but there are plenty of ways to uncover strong candidates who are eager to learn, grow, and contribute to your team. These are some of the top strategies to help you find and hire top culinary talent:
Local Events: Attend food festivals, culinary competitions, cooking demonstrations, and other community events that attract food lovers and aspiring chefs. These spaces offer a great opportunity to meet candidates in person, see their passion firsthand, and build relationships before they ever apply.
Professional Associations: Organizations like the American Culinary Federation host regular conferences, local chapter meetups, and national competitions. Getting involved in these associations can help you stay connected to the industry and build relationships with skilled, career-minded culinarians.
EConnect: Escoffier Global’s complimentary job board, EConnect, can help connect hospitality employers with students, graduates, and job seekers who are invested in professional development. It’s a targeted tool that helps you reach candidates who already value learning and growth.
EConnect also features an automated resume builder that formats education and experience into a clean, professional document. This can make it easier for job seekers to communicate their qualifications, and for you to find the right fit.
General Job Boards: Platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed may not be industry-specific, but they offer access to a broad range of candidates. These sites make it easy to post listings, set filters, and connect with job seekers across various skill levels and locations.
Students at Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts are required to complete an externship before graduation. This gives you a chance to observe how future culinary professionals perform in a real-world kitchen environment. It’s a low-risk way to assess skills, professionalism, and culture fit before offering a permanent position.
Referral programs can help reduce recruitment costs and often lead to faster hires with better retention. They also help you tap into networks of trusted employees and reach candidates who may not be actively job hunting.
However, referral programs can carry certain risks. They may contribute to a less diverse candidate pool or inadvertently encourage favoritism. To get the most out of your referral efforts, be intentional about equity, transparency, and evaluation criteria.
✓ Identify Current Gaps: Pinpoint what is missing in your kitchen, such as efficiency, technical precision, or leadership, so you know what to look for.
✓ Make a Long-Term Plan: Don’t just hire to solve your immediate problems. Invest in upskilling a team who can grow into roles with greater responsibilities.
✓ Modernize the Hiring Experience: You miss out on a lot of talent when your application process is clunky and disregards candidates’ valuable time. Streamline applications, interviews, and onboarding processes, making the hiring process as mobile-friendly and convenient as possible.
✓ Look Beyond Active Job Seekers: Externships and internships give you a chance to vet fresh talent before extending full-time job offers.
✓ Become Part of the Community: Attend job fairs, culinary school events, and national and local culinary meetups. Even if you don’t directly meet your next hire, new connections can lead you to them.
✓ Post Positions Thoughtfully: Use industry-specific job boards like EConnect to reach culinary professionals who are committed to a career in the industry.
If you do the math, you might be surprised to discover just how much undertraining might be costing your business. From high error rates to low retention, undertraining could be making a six figure dent in your revenue.
More and more successful restaurant operators are offering upskilling opportunities to 1.) attract talented staff who are interested in advancing themselves in the field, 2.) improve workplace culture and productivity, and 3.) reduce turnover.
And investing in educational opportunities is not just valuable for employers: 87% believe that employers should be investing in their continued education.
Auguste Escoffier Global Solutions offers a suite of tools designed to bridge the gap between hospitality employers and the skilled talent they need. With tools that can help make hiring and training easier and more effective, these tools are built to support long-term health in the hospitality industry. Here’s a closer look at what’s available:
The best candidates expect a high-quality, modern hiring experience. In 2025, that looks like mobile-friendly applications, clear job descriptions, and momentum that carries through from submitting their application to scheduling an interview. With the vast majority of Gen Z applicants now applying for jobs on their mobile devices, failing to modernize your application systems could be a real oversight that’s driving away younger talent.
Some of the most popular technologies operators are adopting include QR code applications and ATS to preview applications and automate interview scheduling. In some cases, modernizing hiring processes with automated technologies has reduced time-to-hire by as much as 93%.
In a tight labor market, where companies are competing to hire top candidates quickly, improving your hiring efficiency could make a meaningful difference in your efforts to find and hire candidates.
→ Read this next: 2025 Hospitality Hiring Trends: What Employers Need to Know
Your differentiators only work if you know how to communicate them.
The National Restaurant Association provides sample job descriptions for a range of career paths. While they’re a great starting point, you’ll want to flesh them out and differentiate it from the long list of job descriptions that candidates will be looking at.
These tips that can help you write clear, compelling, and informative job postings that attract the right talent:
Attracting and retaining exceptional culinary talent doesn’t happen by accident. Thoughtful hiring practices and ongoing educational opportunities support career-oriented workplaces that motivate and inspire long-term employees.
By reflecting on what culinary candidates are looking for, embracing tools that make it easier for them to get started, and offering career-growing tools like Escoffier Global’s Work & Learn and ESource, you can build a more capable and dedicated workforce. Get in touch with our team for more information on partnering with Escoffier Global and attracting the best employees for your business.
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