Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/109835
"Hiring someone that has a personality that's going to mesh with the existing team goes a long way toward having good morale among the employees." —Emeran Langmaid us," and we're like, "You know what? That's just not our culture. Or we might be on the same page, but you're going to have a hard time trying to sell that to the culture of the store." So [we're] really trying to find a good fit for the culture. KALAL: Boy, it's hard to add anything extra, that's original, to this. I think Janice is solidly in first place. What I look for first is personality. I go through the door at about 6 foot 8, 250 [pounds], so when you come in the office, if you're intimidated by me, you're going to be even more intimidated by some of my clients. So I look for someone who can just blend in. What I do here is, I do things backwards. My staff is in charge. I'm their backup. If they have a problem, they know they can just come in the office, snap their finger and say, "Hey, can you do some dishes? Or hey, can you help out?" And I will drop whatever I'm doing. GROOT: We're going to change gears here...I'm going to ask, How long after hiring an employee is an employee typically ready for bar training? I know there are variables here. The variables can be how competent they are, maybe how busy the store is, full-time or part-time. But if you could just give a ballpark idea, and then maybe one or two supporting things that you do for training your new hires. Again, let's go back and start with Janice. TOWNSEND: This is kind of an interesting question for us. We are a smaller shop, and we only run three baristas in the morning and two in the afternoon and evening. So basically, if you're working, chances are you're going to have to at least know how to make drinks on the bar. So we've integrated that into our training program. We have a three-day training schedule. The first day we talk about company policy and all of that. The second day, we actually dive into drinks and bar training. That said, the first couple of shifts that they work after their three days of training, they're generally going to be put on register, and grabbing brewed coffee. We're not necessarily going to put them on the bar their first one or two weeks in. What we will do is, during down times, we'll go ahead and quiz them on the drinks, make sure they're making good drinks, and we know when they're ready to be on the bar fulltime. I would say it's actually two weeks to a month before we'll actually put a barista behind the bar. LANGMAID: Everyone pretty much starts on the register and at the bar back for at least four to six weeks. If they show competency and interest, then we have a two- to three-week espresso training program that deals with just pulling shots, understanding the mechanics behind the distribution, the grind, the tamp, cleaning the machine. So they just pull shot after shot. And then once they do that consistently, we shift to steaming milk to meet our standards. At the end of all of that, there's a physical and written test, and a lot of that is just the recipes. If you're a barista and you have six or seven drinks lined up and they all are different specialty drinks, with ratios of syrups, you don't have time to look in the recipe card box. So a lot of that is, the mechanics of making the espresso shot and steaming the milk has to be become just second nature. 17