The 80% Hire

The most expensive mistake in hospitality isn't the food cost or the rent. It's keeping the wrong person in the wrong role for too long.

UK hospitality staffing turnover runs at roughly 75% a year, three times the national average across every other sector. Replace one member of staff and, once you count recruitment, induction, and the productivity you lose while they get up to speed, you're down somewhere between £1,000 and £1,500. Multiply that by every hire you get wrong in a year and you'll see a hefty sum.

Here's the part almost every owner gets backwards. They interview to answer "can this person do the job?" That's the wrong question. The right one is "does this person share my values?"

You can teach almost anyone the mechanics of a role: how to take an order, work the till, clear a table, pour a pint. What you cannot teach is whether someone wants to be reliable. Whether they care about getting it right. Whether they take pride in a clean table, a full glass, a customer who feels looked after.

Those are values. They arrive on day one, already built in. No amount of training adds them later, however good your trainer is.

Everyone is reliable. Just not to you

Here's something worth thinking on. All people are 100% reliable. They're reliable to their own values.

Someone who genuinely values reliability is reliably reliable. They turn up, on time, every time. On the rare day something goes wrong, they feel genuinely bad about it, apologise without being asked, and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Someone who doesn't value reliability is reliably unreliable. They don't understand why being a few minutes late is a problem. They get defensive when you raise it. And they'll do it again.

Training cannot fix that gap. You can pour knowledge into someone for six months, and if they don't share your values, you'll get the work done their way, not yours.

Write your values down before you advertise

Sit down and ask yourself two questions: what do you actually reward in people, and what genuinely frustrates you when it's missing? Write the answers into every job description, every interview, and every hiring decision you make from here on.

A useful starting list, borrowed from operators who've already done this work:

Six words. Each one describes a specific way someone behaves, not a personality type you're hoping to spot on a gut feeling.

The interview question that actually works

Here's where most owners fall down even when they know values matter. They ask "are you reliable?" and get a confident yes from everyone because nobody walks into an interview and says no.

Ask for a real example instead of a hypothetical. "Tell me about a time something went wrong and you were going to be late. What did you do?"

A candidate who genuinely values reliability gives you a specific story. They called ahead. They felt bad about it. They made sure it didn't happen again. A candidate who doesn't share that value gives you something vague, redirects to a general statement, or tells you a story where they were the victim of circumstances beyond their control.

Listen for the detail and the self-awareness. That's the tell, and it works for every value on your list, not just reliability. Swap the story you ask for to match whichever value you're testing.

Get this right and you're roughly 80% of the way to solving your staffing problem before you've taught anyone a single task. The skills come later, and they come easily, because you've already hired someone who wants to learn them.