Digital recruiters hard at work
The French decided to respond in an organized manner to the great crisis related to the gastro industry talent drainage. New applications have appeared to help recruit waiters, baristas, cooks, confectioners, sommeliers and all the necessary staff.
Prestachef.fr has prepared a ranking of the 4 best recruitment tools and industry talent banks. Among them was Badakan, which includes approximately 15,000 candidate profiles, verified by the authors' team. Another is Brigad, a digital HR tool that verifies the qualifications and experience of all registered candidates. The database is smaller and includes 4,000. freelancers willing to work in the gastronomy industry. The application works in most major French cities: Paris, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes, and Strasbourg, and is now launched in London.
In turn, "with Extracadabra restaurateurs receive a list of relevant profiles of future employees in under ten seconds," the app's authors claim. They emphasize that the solution reduces the recruiting time to under three minutes. Interestingly, candidates' skills are verified by artificial intelligence. Restaurateurs, hoteliers and managers rate its effectiveness very highly, as much as 92 percent. The drawback of the solution is the scope of its operation: so far, it includes only Paris, Nice and Lyon.
Another interesting idea implemented by the French media is Alloextra, a recruitment application for restaurants and catering companies in small towns. This is important because most of such solutions operate in major cities and agglomerations. So far, over a dozen thousand people and two thousand restaurants have signed up for it.
Digital maître d'hôtel supports customer relations
An app that has become increasingly popular since the pandemic in France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Switzerland is TheFork, owned by the Tripadvisor group. It allows you to find and book a table for any occasion, and within budget, in just three clicks. It relieves the guest from making booking phone calls, much less contacting anyone live. When the table is booked, TheFork confirms it with an email.
In October 2021, the app was used by over 80,000 restaurants, with over 20 million of customer reviews and 40,000 photos to help choose a place. TheFork has already become so popular that it organizes its own festival, offering 50% discounts at selected restaurants in France, Switzerland, and Belgium through mid-November. In addition, each guest collects points that can be spent in their favorite places.
Another example of the new quality of customer communication is the Eat App, which brings together more than 3000 restaurants in 50 countries. The idea behind it is: "Take care of your guest, we will automate the rest." With the Eat App, you can easily make table reservations and create a waiting list. Creates a database of customers, remembering their preferences, past purchases, frequency of visiting and characteristic behaviors, such as "always orders a double dessert" or "drinks only Chardonnay with sparkling water." As the developers of the application claim, restaurants using the Eat App increased their bills by 19%. Their cancellation rate dropped by 25% and the number of customers increased by 15%.
Another quite impressive proposal is OctoTable, free in the basic version, and available in English, French, Spanish and Italian. The application offers a booking system based on the hours proposed by the restaurateur, as well as a menu with beautiful photos, and a map of rooms and tables. Other features included a restaurant website building panel, a customer database, integration with social media, and payment management. The exotic version of OctoTable is OctoBeach, created to manage pubs and beach clubs.
