What type of employee do you prefer?

I was talking to a fellow operator about hiring employees, and he prefers to hire someone who has no pizza experience that he can teach his way without having to break old habits. While others that I have talked to prefer to hire someone who has made pizza before so that they do not need to spend as much time training. Given the two options and all other things being equal, who would you hire?

When hiring I look for the ones without the headphones on. This means they are not listening to the message “breathe in, breathe out”
I can’t remember who has it on their website for hiring profile but it was hillarious but very apt. Some were similar to - if your mom still makes your bed apply to Dominos - if you have trouble counting without a calculator apply to PH
The owner of the site may want to chime in as I am in need of a good laugh
Dave

If you already have an experienced crew, definitely hire someone without any experience. If you need someone to help NOW, you might go with the pre-trained hire.

I’ve found that my favorite kitchen workers have been people that have experience in kitchens, but not working with pizza. That way I don’t have to spend so much time on kitchen basics and they are learning something new at the same time, so it doesn’t seem like the same-old-same-old for them.

Oh how I hate the phrase “Thats not how we did it at _____”. Your best bet, like indie pizza said, is to find someone with no pizza experience, but with some kitchen experience.

Also, if they are leaving one of your competitors to come to work for you, be a little weary. They may still have ties with your competition and pass on info such as sales, recipes, etc.

We’ve had luck hiring people with restaurant experience (not necessarily pizza) or at least some retail experience. If they stick, they quickly pick up the pizza making/kitchen tasks. We haven’t had luck with people that aren’t service oriented or into cleanliness.

Says the guy who keeps poaching my employees :lol:

So you finally figured out we’re in the same town… :wink: I just realized it the other day myself. If you’re referring to the guy that worked for both of us at the same time, i had nothing to do with him leaving you. He never said anything about how you were doing and i never asked. It was the people above me that caused him to leave you. And for the record, i havent been there since the end of april, so you dont have to worry bout me anymore… 8)

I didn’t realize you had left. D was a good employee and I didn’t have a problem at all with how he left, I wish I could have countered your stores offer, but I couldn’t.

I figured that if you were going to answer tech questions for us while we were setting up POS, then it was all friendly competition between our stores.