Lisa Johnson punches in an order at the new Hully & Mo Restaurant and Tap Room. Johnson, who is a full-time real estate agent, is working the second job to get by while home sales are slow.
Karen Robinson-Jacobs reports in the Dallas Morning News that with today’s economic meltdown, the restaurant life raft is rapidly filling with applicants from inside and outside the restaurant industry.
Lots of restaurant workers are lifers, but the industry has always attracted a transient group, too – people between jobs or looking to supplement their income.
Thousands of people flooded the Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers chain with applications when it began advertising late last year for 42 jobs in its new Plano office. Recruiters got more than 10,500 résumés, and about 45 percent were from people who didn’t have restaurant backgrounds, the company said.
“What we’re seeing is that recruiters are being deluged with résumés of overqualified people,” said Joni Thomas Doolin, chief executive and founder of People Report, a Dallas restaurant research and consulting firm.”They’re applying in droves. We’re starting to see them coming from retailing, grocery, banking,” she said.
Some would-be waiters will be disappointed to find that there’s more competition for jobs they used to think of as easy pickings.
“If you were counting on waiting tables to get through this, it may be harder than you think,” Doolin said.
Greg Cavanagh, managing partner at Capital Grille in Crescent Court in Dallas, says he’s seen more job seekers with scant restaurant experience.
“We tell them we require two to three years of fine-dining experience,” he said, adding that turnover in his shop is lower since the nation’s been shedding jobs.
