When recruiting for niche industries, your job postings must be tailored to reach the right candidates. Once you have defined what your ideal candidate should look like, you’ll need to carefully craft your job advertisement and ensure you’re posting your vacancies where these types of candidates are most active. This is no different when hiring fast food workers, and you may be faced with even more challenges than in other roles.
Information to consider before starting the hiring process:
- What does your ideal candidate profile look like
- Level of expertise desired and what your non-negotiables are
- Where are these candidates more likely to search for jobs
- Which application processes (whether online or other methods) are best
- Requirements for the role and how screening processes will take place
- Which job boards are best suited for the type of role you’re recruiting for
If this seems overwhelming, Ninja Gig can help to simplify this process and offers guidance around crafting the best job advertisement and application questions to make the process as seamless as possible.
How to Hire Fast Food Workers with Ninja Gig
Here are the steps (including some expert advice) that we’d recommend following:
1. Create your job on Ninja Gig’s portal:
- The good news is that this only takes a few minutes, and you can save this job listing for future roles so you’ll be able to come back to this and reuse key information, edit, and re-post.
- Be sure to include key information by following the easy step-by-step process to ensure you don’t leave anything out.
- Pay careful attention to the “Job Posting Success Factors,” which outlines the job advertising guidelines and standards. Abiding by best practices will ensure that your listing appears online on various job boards successfully.
2. Adding your core job information:
Key Tip:
- The number 1 rule to remember at this point is to keep it short and simple! That goes for job titles, role details, benefits, and qualifications.
- Remember: Most candidates will be applying using a mobile phone. In the fast food industry, this is around 70%! So, optimize for a mobile-first experience. If you have multiple lengthy text sections, this can lead to a poor user experience and fewer successful applications. Outline only the core details. You can expand on information in the interview if you need to.
Key duties and role outline:
Include a very short summary of what to expect in a typical day. For many people, a job in the fast food industry is their first ever, and they may not know what these types of roles entail. For example, highlight if they would be required to interact with customers, or rather, work in the kitchen, performing cooking or cleaning up duties. Also, state upfront if it is only a part-time, weekend, shift, or full-time position.
Tip:
Make this information easy to read, use bullet points and formatting tools that Ninja Gig provides.
Requirements & Certifications:
Again, although you want to keep this information as simple as possible, fast food work has some nuances when it comes to stating the requirements or qualifications for the role.
Important to remember!
Avoid any requirements that include age, race, gender, or anything else that may seem discriminatory in any way. Remember to word this carefully! See our examples below.
Experience:
Most fast food jobs don’t necessarily require experience, but if you do, state clearly what is a “must have”, such as “Requires at least 6 months of closely related serving experience,” which could be broad enough to allow a good amount of skilled individuals to apply.
Requirements:
There may be legal or health requirements for specific roles that are important to highlight upfront, such as:
- Legal requirements (may be required to serve alcoholic beverages). Remember to word this carefully to avoid discrimination. An example may be, “Must meet the state minimum age for serving alcoholic beverages.
- Physical competencies such as being able to stand for long periods of time, move, and carry large and heavy equipment, which is often expected in the fast food industry. You’ll need to outline this so that potential applicants who may not be able to perform physical tasks are aware before applying
- Ability to work weekends, shift work, and flexible times around vacation periods, including evenings.
- Not all candidates may be able to read, write, use basic math skills, or perform functions such as speaking to and interacting with customers effectively. Ensure you include this information if this is required.
- Interpersonal skills may be even more critical than having advanced qualifications, and in most cases, fast workers don’t often require qualifications at all. Technical skills, such as working with POS software, can be taught, but you do want to be sure that potential candidates can communicate effectively and work well under pressure.
Again, use bullet points and clear formatting when adding these must-haves. 
Benefits & Pay:
Now that you’ve outlined what you’re looking for, remember to include the benefits that help you attract great applicants!
Benefits:
State if there are benefits such as 401K, dental, or medical benefits. Most fast food industries provide meal discounts and feasible work schedules, which can be a great value add for entry-level applicants or even part-time students.
Many fast food businesses also offer referral bonuses, which can save you time and effort when recruiting for multiple roles.
Pay:
You should state hourly rates upfront. Some businesses include expected rates based on a specific number of hours per week. This will help outline what candidates can expect.
Here’s an example below:
- Full-time $18/hour (30 – 40 hours/week)-Weekends and holidays are included
- Part-time $16/hour (16 hrs/week)
3. Adding your application questions:
It may seem overwhelming to know where to start, but Ninja Gig has you covered!
Application or screening questions are critical for filtering out unsuitable candidates. Fast food vacancies tend to attract a very high number of applications. Although this is great, it does mean it’ll take substantial time to sift through hundreds of applications.
You’ll want to craft your application questions to help you carefully, but also keep the application process as easy and smooth as possible for the applicants.
- Ninja Gig has a list of predefined application questions that you can simply select/deselect with the click of a button.
- Fast food workers typically don’t have professional references or cover letters, and some may not even have a full resume. Include the questions that make sense for you job listing, but only select the necessary required default questions to ensure the process is as easy as possible to apply.
To make the best use of your custom application questions on Ninja Gig, they should tie back to your job role requirements. Remember to keep these between 3 – 5 questions and ensure you allow a quick yes/no or tick-box selection answer field to make it as easy as possible to fill out the application.
Remember to allow answers for all levels of experience. You will be able to filter out applicants that aren’t suitable, but you should not discriminate against any experience levels. This allows candidates to answer honestly.
Here’s an example based on our requirements in the job requirements above:
Note that once you have created a great set of application questions, you’ll be able to save these and import them for future roles.
This will save a lot of time when advertising for positions that have similar requirements.
4. Posting your job advertisement:
Now that all the hard work is done, you’ll be able to post your job listing online on your website (customized on Ninja Gig) and on relevant job boards.
Ensure you’ve selected “Yes, enable this job and show it online” so that candidates can apply.
- You’ll also be able to view this job to see how it looks to external applicants. This is important to check so that you can ensure the formatting is clear and easy to read.
- You can view your job on the website as well as “apply online” as a candidate would.
- Following this process is a great way to ensure all aspects of your job advertisement are correct and that the application questions are easy to follow.
- Applicants will be able to fill out all of the basic information you specified, as well as add a resume or additional attachments if you’ve made them required.
- Here’s an example of how the application questions created above will display for external applicants.
Once you’re satisfied with how your job advertisement looks, you can enable job posting to job boards by clicking the option below.
Depending on what job board integrations you have enabled (Ninja Gig has many to choose from), your advertisement will be syndicated to several job boards.
Note: This can take up to 24 hours to be added to (or removed from job boards. This is also why you’ll need to make sure all information is 100% correct before posting!
5. Other things to consider:
Ease of application and use of an ATS:
Remember to allow easy and quick applications for fast food workers.
Although many candidates may not have a full resume or any experience at all, this should not stop you from requesting basic information to create a shortlist of best-fit candidates.
Having a central database of applicants that is secure is critical in saving time and maintaining compliance when it comes to personal information.
Job advertisement reach:
Remember to post jobs to the most relevant job boards specific to this role.
Due to the nature of the industry, it may also be essential to post vacancies at physical locations. This may seem impossible digitally, but Ninja Gig has thought of this, too!
Ninja Gig creates a Job Flyer, Tiny URL, and QR code for your use:
The flyer is a great option to use and is branded with your company logo. You can simply print these out and post them in-store, online on community WhatsApp channels, Facebook groups, or outside of colleges or high schools, for example.
6. Managing your applications:
Once candidates have applied, they will receive an automated email confirming their application. Quick, precise, and effective communication is essential for high-churn roles to ensure that you don’t lose out on fast-moving roles.
Ninja Gig allows you to view and manage your shortlist within minutes! You can also add tags (see below) and send predefined personalized emails to candidates as you move them through each workflow status.
In summary, there is a lot to remember when hiring for fast food roles.
Try to reduce friction as much as possible and reduce your time-to-hire by using Ninja Gig smartly.
Managing applications is far easier using an ATS that helps you automate functions like communications and managing applicants through the workflow. Hopefully, this guide enables you to recruit fast food workers quickly and easily in the future!
