Tips for Hiring for Your Bakery Business

<This is a contributed post> If you make great bakes and bring in lots of hungry customers looking for something delicious to eat, the time will come when you may need to hire outside employees to help your bakery business run as smoothly as possible. If that is the case, here are some tips that will help you get the hiring side of the business right…

Advertise at colleges and culinary schools

It can be hard to find the right people with the skills you need to help you in your bakery, but a good way of recruiting candidates who know their macarons from their Madelines is to advertise your vacancy at colleges and culinary schools that train bakers, chefs and other catering staff. This is an easy way to get access to people who have or are in the process of acquiring the knowledge you need.

Consider looking overseas

We Brits are good at baking, but some would argue that the French, for example, are better, so if you want to rally boost your bakery, you may want to consider using online recruitment tools to hire professional bakers from abroad, especially if you specialize in patisserie, for example. Good immigration solicitors can help you with all the legalities, and having a chef who is specially trained in the cuisine you are cooking can be a huge selling point.

Meet candidates

Meeting candidates as early on in the process as possible is a great way to ensure you pick the right people. Not only can you question them on various baking techniques to ensure that they know their stuff, but you can assess their personality and work ethic to see if they would be a good cultural fit for your bakery business or not. This is more important than you might think because the wrong employee with the wrong kind of personality for the place can bring everyone down and make the working atmosphere miserable, Early meetings help to prevent this from becoming an issue.

Have them do a shift

If you identify a candidate who you think would be good for your bakery business, it could be useful to pay them to come in and do a shift or two before you hire them. Why do this? So that you can see how they work and what they are capable of doing. You’ll also be able to see if they can handle the hustle and bustle of a busy bakery or whether they’ll crumble under the pressure, which is surprisingly common.

Be honest

Being honest with candidates about the early starts, the hard work that is involved in mass-producing cakes, pies, bread, or whatever it is you sell, and the long shifts that may be required of them will help to sort the wheat from the chaff and ensure that anyone you hire is ready to work, know what to expect, and wants to be there. There is no point in skirting around the tongue aspect of working in a bakery because by doing so, you will just be setting your new employee up to fail.

Good luck.

Title image courtesy Photo by Madison Inouye from Pexels