Again, per Moneyish:

“The hiring party is really a play on the old school job fair that used to take place at colleges or at the restaurants where people come in and give their resume,” Bjorn Erland, vice president of human resources at Taco Bell, told Moneyish. “The key was making it interactive and casual, but also if they wanted to interview and get hired, that was available as well.”

Advertisement
Advertisement

Shake Shack, it seems, is also wont to throw the odd hiring shindig. (Does the whole shack shimmy? Sorry. Moving on.) Natalie Diehm, Shake Shack’s director of talent acquisition, told Moneyish that the point of the events is to make it “easier and faster for candidates to get to know us, and get hired... They don’t need anything — they can just show up.” Shake Shack’s events, which receive a big social media push by the company and are usually conducted at a local restaurant or brewery, involve the unloading of free T-shirts, koozies, sunglasses, and (naturally) burgers; some recent parties in California have resulted in the hiring of around 40 percent of those who attended.

It’s unsurprising that chains would be turning to some cool-mom hiring tactics. As reported last month, restaurants are facing a looming Generation Z (people born between 1997 and 2012) employee shortage, both due to changes in population as compared to job growth and to a reluctance to stick with the industry after such workers are first hired. A survey conducted by the National Restaurant Association Education Foundation and the Center For Generational Kinetics published last month revealed that 82 percent of employed Gen Z survey-takers said their first job was in a restaurant, but about three-quarters did not remain in the industry.