Article

Column: Handling the changing economy

How independent operators can survive and thrive during economic slumps.

May 10, 2009 by George Green — Vice President, Bread & Company

You will be amazed at both the quality and number of ideas you will receive. More importantly, when your teams get involved, they gain a common sense of purpose that makes the "them" they are fighting someone other than management or you. Handled properly, I have seen across-the-board pay cuts unite a team and decrease turnover instead of destroying morale. Whatever you do, make sure that you are honest and forthright with your crew. They will not forgive being misled or having things held back.

• Invest in affordable online advertising: Employee recruitment and selection can be greatly improved using very inexpensive technology. In my opinion, other than food quality, nothing is more important than our people. In the last few years, I noticed traditional newspaper classified ads no longer work for us. Like many of you, I was intrigued by online ads but I didn't have the budget to try out the dozens of providers, or even knew if they would work. So, I went to Google adwords and bought words like restaurant, manager and job for our town. With this service (or those sold by other search engines), I was able to set the amount of money I wanted to spend each month on online ads. We found that we got as many or more responses to our online applications through Google than most online job boards.
• Accept applications online: Prior to our experiments in online recruiting, we decided to convert to online-only job applications. We found a great and very cost effective service called Sysdine ( JobApp is good, also) that provided online job applications and screening tools that gave our managers more applicants to chose from, and simple tools to help them better choose new hires. The impact was amazing and virtually immediate. We had hundreds more applications than we ever had previously and were able to be much more selective in hiring. The simple ratings tools our vendor provided helped our many first time leaders quickly hire wisely. As a result, turnover plummeted and has stayed down. According to The People Report, each instance of turnover costs more than $2,000 so this ads up to serious money very quickly.