There’s no free lunch—that’s a universal law. If you want something, you’re going to pay for it. For top restaurant chain, Demos’ Restaurant, the price they paid for making customer service their number one priority was a reputation as a tough place to work. And that, of course, creates a pretty big challenge if you’re the person at Demos’ who is responsible for recruiting, as was the case for Amy Dement, Human Resources Director, who would eventually find creative solutions to meet that challenge.
The Top 3 Percent
Demos’ Restaurant was founded in 1989 in Tennessee by Jim and Doris Demos, who were in their late fifties and early sixties at the time. They originally planned to keep things simple and have only one location. But because of their top-notch service and great food, the restaurant became a huge success and before long they were opening up a new location. When their son, Peter, and daughter, Felicia, joined the family business, expansion continued. Today there are four locations in Tennessee, each of them rated in the top 3 percent for their location on Trip Advisor. Demos’ has also launched another restaurant this year called Peter D’s, also a highly rated eatery.
Mandate: Grow, Recruit, Stay at the Top!
Amy Dement, who started going to Demos’ as a teenager when it first opened, and loved the restaurant, joined three years ago to become a one-person HR team. While she handles all the usual HR functions, like health care, her priority, and mandate, was to recruit staff to the growing chain while ensuring each restaurant was a leader for its area. That’s not an easy task, for any restaurant chain, let alone an organization that potential candidates think isn’t an easy place to work.
Amy and Demos’ approach to solving the problem would follow three steps.
Step One: Understanding Your Uniqueness
Amy first had to understand where that reputation came from, and the answer to that lay in the fact that Demos’ isn’t your typical restaurant. Generally, restaurants strive to excel in three basic areas—food quality, service, and volume. Most restaurants can only manage to do well in one or two of these areas, but Demos’ actually wins in all three, which is why customers rate them so highly. In terms of volume, their busiest location will see ten to twelve thousand customers each week. How do you make sure every one of those thousands of customers receives the same exceptional experience? If you’re Demos’, you rewrite the rules for how to run and manage a restaurant.
Doing It the Demos’ Way
For example, most restaurants will have managers that specialize in one area, such as the bar or cash stand, but each of the 10 to 15 managers that work at a Demos restaurant is expected to become certified in four or five areas of responsibility. This ensures that there is always somebody to provide expert customer service in all areas. But it means constant training and learning. No downtime. In fact, all staff are on the run from the moment they get in to the moment they leave. For restaurant workers who might be used to downtime, this can be a shock.
Unusual Policies
On top of the pace, the ethic of putting the customer first has meant some unusual policies. For example, if a staff member can’t make their shift, it’s up to them to cover it off. If they don’t, they could find themselves not working at Demos’. That’s not done as punishment; it’s done to protect the customer experience, which can’t be maintained when a restaurant is short staffed. So, it’s easy to see that an organization willing to go this far for the customer could get the reputation Demos’ has.
Step Two: Embrace the Reputation
The next step lay in deciding how to handle the reputation. Some organizations would probably try to fight it, but not Amy and Demos’. They embrace it. “We’re not for the faint of heart,” Amy says. But, as Amy adds, for the right kind of employee, Demos’ is a great place to work. Amy herself is one of those people. She loves it there, and that’s because she has high standards herself. She also has a strong work ethic and likes that Demos’ rewards hard work. In fact, for ambitious people who are willing to learn and grow, Demos’ provides great career opportunities through its management track, which is why so many employees have been with the organization for ten or twenty years—not typical for an industry where turnover is usually 50 percent a year.
Step Three: Identify the Recipe for the Ideal Demos’ Employee
The third step was to identify who would be a fit at Demos’. As we’ve just seen, it takes a particular type of person to thrive at Demos’. And, as Amy has experienced, finding them isn’t easy, because the skills and experience that many applicants gain from working in other restaurants doesn’t usually prepare them for working at Demos’. In fact, the more senior the role, the less likely a candidate will be a fit. That’s because most people with five or maybe fifteen years experience will take issue with Demos’ way of doing something. As Amy reports, they’ll say, “When I was at such and such, we did it this way,” or “I’ve never seen it done this way before.” It’s too much of a culture shift for them. Because of this, the bulk of Demos’ successful hiring has happened with entry level to mid-level type management candidates, who have less experience, but are able to embrace the Demos’ way.
When It’s All About Personality
Because prior experience and skills isn’t what makes a great Demos’ employee, personality became the key factor in hiring decisions. For help in this area, Amy went looking for a method to identify an applicant’s personality, which is what took her to ClearFit, a system which asks all applicants to complete a 12-minute survey that measures them on 20 personality traits and scores them against the success profiles for the role they are applying for.
Cooking up the Recipe
By using ClearFit, Amy could see which applicants would be strong fits for various roles, such as a restaurant manager. But because Amy knew that the profile of a successful restaurant manager at Demos’ wasn’t going to be the same as a standard restaurant manager, she decided to create a success profile unique to Demos’, which she did by asking her top managers to take the personality survey and using their answers to establish the benchmarks for the critical traits.
What the Recipe Revealed
What Amy and Demos’ found was both quite astonishing and confirming. For most restaurant managers, being driven to succeed and having the ability to recover from setbacks aren’t critical traits. But they are exactly the traits that a Demos’ manager possesses, along with a high preference to work in an environment that provides a lot of structure. For Demos’, this profile makes perfect sense. If you aren’t driven, and if you can’t bounce back from a setback, and if you fight against structure, you aren’t going to be able to reliably deliver the great experience that Demos’ customers expect. You’re also not going to enjoy working there. But if that’s you, Demos’ is the world you want to be in.
By being able to instantly identify—even before looking at resumes—who has what it takes to excel at Demos’, Amy has managed to recruit the right kind of employees that continue to keep Demos’ at the top, in all its locations. If you’d like to experience what that feels like from the customer’s point of view, be sure to make a reservation at a Demos’ restaurant next time you’re traveling to or through Tennessee.
