The top 6 benefits of hiring temp chefs + a success story

Staying on top of recruitment in hospitality can be a challenge. Particularly for regional businesses, mining sites or just any area where demand for great talent exceeds supply, when you need great people and they’re just not available, costs go up and customers start to notice.  

It’s for these reasons and more that many Australian venues are turning to contract chefs to solve short-term recruitment woes. But what could a contract chef offer your business, and do you need one? Let’s take a look at some of the common benefits, and then share a success story. 

 

Situations where it’s time to think about hiring a contract chef

If you find yourself in any of these situations, it might be time to speak with a specialist contract chef recruiter to fill key gaps in your kitchen roster. 

1. There’s a shortage of great culinary talent in your area. 
2. It takes too long to hire great chefs. 
3. You’re struggling to find chefs who want to stay for the long term. 
4. There’s little room in the budget for highly qualified, permanent people. 
5. Your kitchen struggles with fluctuating seasonal demand. 
6. You’d love to try something new with the menu, but don’t have the right skills in-house. 

In each of these cases, pulling in a talented, pre-vetted temp chef would allow you to fill a need very quickly, without the risk or cost of a long-term commitment. 

 

8 benefits of hiring temporary chefs

1. Cover sudden staffing shortages

You never know when someone will fall ill, suffer an injury or just resign without warning. In these cases, your kitchen can be left without enough people to cover demand. 

Contract chefs can be found very quickly, even overnight. As opposed to event staff who might only come in for a day or two, these chefs can be signed on for weeks at a time – allowing you to take pressure off your permanent team while you source a new hire, however long it takes. 

2. Stay flexible during seasonal changes

Sometimes even the best-prepared venues get swamped unexpectedly during peak seasons – that or customer figures drop dramatically in the off season. Flexibility is key to maintaining quality of service during these big swinging changes. 

Keeping contract chefs on speed dial will help you adapt to demand, whether it shoots up or down. You’ll keep a core group of permanent staff on the books to maintain basic operations, then add or subtract contract chefs as needed. 

3. Access specialised skills

So you want to try something new on the menu – perhaps a new ingredient has become available, or you see customers demanding a unique style as a new fad sweeps Australia. You’ll make a lot of happy faces if you can plug into these trends, but only if you have the skills in-house to experiment with the new menu items. 

This is where you might pull in a temporary chef who already has those skills to handle the changes for you. Your customers will get what they want (and fast too, because you don’t need to train anyone), and your business won’t need to fully commit to a new permanent hire. It’s a very cost-effective way to get a fresh perspective on your menu. 

4. Reduce burnout or job fatigue

For some venues, burnout and creative fatigue are very real problems. Regional areas in particular can struggle to find and keep great people. That’s not to mention the extent to which exhaustion impacts very busy venues, or the risk that your chefs will simply get bored and want to move on. 

Temporary chefs are a great solution here. They allow you to keep only a small permanent group, adding or subtracting extra talent as required (see point 2), and each new face comes in excited, fresh and ready to work. If they get fatigued, or tired of regional life, it’s OK – their contract will end soon, and you can swap them out for someone new. 

5. Fill tricky roles

Some roles are just tricky to fill, and there’s not much to be done about it. Whether you need specialised talent or you’re just in an area where good chefs are hard to come by, the recruitment process here can be protracted and arduous – not to mention costly. 

Here, you’d turn to temporary chefs either on a regular rotation, or to fill a short-term need while you find someone for the long term.  

6. No long-term commitment

You never know what the future will hold, and that makes staffing a hospitality venue tricky.  

Temporary chefs are a short-term commitment, not a long-term one. You’re pulling in highly qualified professionals to fill a need, and when that need is over, they go away to help someone else. This takes a lot of pressure off the hiring process and the budget, because it reduces your risk while still achieving key business goals.  

 

Case study: Solving hiring woes on a gorgeous eco island

The situation

Lady Elliot Island Eco Resort is a little piece of paradise out on the Great Barrier Reef, home to manta rays, white-sand beaches and a fabulous dining venue. For tourists, it’s heaven, but for the owners of Lady Elliot it was a challenge – very few chefs wanted to stay. 

While Lady Elliot has an awesome company culture, island life is a tricky sell. The only chefs they could get who were willing to live there didn’t have the right experience, so they turned to Squad Recruitment for help. 

The solution

We put together a custom roster of some of our top chefs, perfectly matching the skills and experience that Lady Elliot required. These chefs went on a rotation, swapping out every four to six weeks, so no one had to remain on the island for too long. 

This kept all the chefs in good spirits, as there was always a fresh set of hands ready to dive in and get to work knowing they could get back to ‘reality’ after their roster. And by having only a few chefs for each role on rotation, the venue could keep consistency with minimal handovers each time. This maintained the high level of guest experience that people had come to expect from this fabulous eco retreat, while solving their recruitment problems at the same time. 

 

Need a temporary solution for your business? Let’s talk

At Squad Recruitment, we’re experts at sourcing, vetting, testing and placing high-quality chefs into temporary roles. 

Whether you need ready-to-go talent to fill sudden holes in your roster, flexible staffing to match shifting demand, or you want to discuss an ongoing partnership, get in touch today and let’s talk about your business, or submit your vacancy here.