Restaurants Are Using an App to Staff Their Kitchens
Pared helps owners fill vacancies in restaurants—where hiring and retention is hard—on a temporary basis.
On a busy Friday night during the 2018 holiday season at the San Francisco restaurant Frances, chef and owner Melissa Perello faced a potential disaster. A dishwasher hadn’t shown up for work, and she was already down a person in the kitchen. “I got on the Pared app,” she recalls. “And 35 minutes later, a dishwasher walked in the door.”
Perello’s predicament is a long-standing problem for the industry, and it’s only getting worse. The number of full-service restaurants in major cities is increasing—in New York it rose to 9,809 in the third quarter of 2018, from 8,563 in the third quarter of 2016—but millennials are less inclined to commit to a full-time schedule. This makes dishwashers harder to hold on to. Staffing problems ultimately affect diners, who might be wondering why their roast chicken is taking so long to come out. According to statistics from the scheduling app 7shifts, the average tenure of a restaurant employee is one month and 26 days.