Seasoned is the only social community exclusively for service industry workers. The app allows hospitality workers to connect and share insights and experiences. It’s also a job listing resource that connects restaurants looking for staff members with potential employees looking for work. Traditional hiring websites aren’t well suited for hourly jobs and careers in the hospitality industry. Seasoned solves that. When it comes to hiring, the hospitality industry faces challenges from other hourly sectors, which often offer jobs that are less stressful than restaurant work. It’s essential for restaurants to focus on the benefits that they can provide to their employees in order to attract and retain quality workers. Centralized ownership, not franchise ownership, often does a better job of creating a successful HR and hiring model. Quotes “The pandemic had a historic impact. It slingshotted all of us past the laziness and apprehension and forced us to change and one big change is the labor market.” (Joseph) “If you look at the actual things that you gain from working in a restaurant, there’s an incredible number of attractive qualities that you gain from working in a restaurant. The skills that you build in a restaurant are going to help you wherever you go.” (Zach) “I was a busser for six months, and to this day whenever I have a bad day I think to myself, ‘At least I’m not bussing tables.’” (Joseph) “With younger workers, what you’re hiring for is attitude, reliability and coachability. You can teach anyone to do the job within the restaurant, but having those attributes [...] you can teach anyone to be great.” (Zach) “Instead of ‘You work for us,’ it’s ‘We work for you.’ That shift is really impactful (when hiring and retaining talent).” (Zach) Transcript 00:00.00 vigorbranding Everyone today I'm joined by my friend Zach Anderson he's brand partner at seasoned a system that we're going to dive into here in a bit but before we do Zach say hello give a little bit of backstory on yourself. 00:11.91 Zach Anderson Thanks Joseph hi next meet everyone. My name's Zach Anderson my like Joseph mentioned I'm a brand partner over it seasoned I've been in the restaurant space for about 15 years across a mix of both operations as well as on the vendor and supplier side working in. Various capacities across things like ad media to voice ai kiosk hardware and most recently I've been over here at season working on our mission to help bring the service industry together by offering a community-based product for restaurant workers to engage each other and find great jobs. 00:45.49 vigorbranding That's amazing. Yeah I'm really excited to pry in I'm I'm kind of holding myself back because we will get to it but I do want to talk about the the big l word right now which is the labor issues that we're challenged with in the industry. Um, from my point of view. It's kind of a long time coming. Um, anybody that thought we you know restaurants could continue to operate the the way that they had for as long as they have just really was blinding themselves in a lot of ways. So I'm going to use the pw word now I'm getting sick of saying it. But since the pandemic you know the pandemic had this historic impact I think it's slingshot at all of us. Ah. Past the laziness or apprehension and just forced us to change and 1 big change is the labor market not just the availability of people but the people willingness to work the work ethic and the passion for the industry that used to be there. Um. And and it's persisted so. It's not going away behaviors have successfully changed I would say so what do you think is leading this to be permanent. Um, and how do we start to chip away at rethinking the employee experience for restaurant brands. 01:58.33 Zach Anderson Certainly the the recovery from where we were at from staffing hasn't hit to where we were um, we're still probably somewhere between I thi