The People That You Hire
Your coffee shop will be known by the people that you hire to be part of your team. These baristas represent your brand, and your customers will associate your brand with your team members. While you spent your time and money preparing and opening a coffee shop, your team members will influence the reviews that your customers will leave your coffee shop on Google, Yelp or social media platforms. This is why it is so important to hire and train team members who will represent your brand well.
While there are many articles available on how to interview and hire great people, I’d like to focus on the process of finding and scheduling great team members. Being a barista is a highly coveted job among young people, so you will likely have numerous candidates from which to choose if you can get the word out that your coffee shop is hiring.
The easiest way to find great team members is to ask your current team members for recommendations. The second easiest way is to recruit from within your customer base. We use joinhomebase.com as our team scheduling tool, but it also has a job posting function that allows you to post your opening on social media and other job posting sites. We have used this tool to create a QR code that we include on a “Now Hiring” type of poster that we placed by our entry doors. This has allowed our customers to text a picture of it to their friends who often will click through and fill out the online application. This has created a database of potential team members for our manager to consider when it is time to hire a new team member.
During the interview process, you will be looking for those who will fit well on your team. This potential team member is also often looking for a coffee shop environment that will work well for them. To create that mutually beneficial environment, we choose to treat our team members like we would want to be treated by creating a work schedule that is dependable. Instead of creating a work schedule that changes every week, we determined that, as much as possible, we would create a consistent base schedule for a 2-4 month period of time.
While the base schedule remains constant, the team members may choose to trade with others for differing reasons. We found that by creating a predictable schedule for each team member, our team members not only trusted our management more, but it also allowed our team members to build stronger relationships with our customers, which has helped to increase our sales.
