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/38014
the best baristas How café owners In search of recognize potential when they hire baristas and other employees. BY PETER SUROWSKI Finding your shop’s next great barista among the stack of résumés is more than luck of the draw. It’s a craft. A few key ideas can help any coffeehouse owner find good employees and shape them into great baristas. Specialty Coffee Retailer talked to coffeehouse owners and managers across the country about how they find good employees, how they train them and how they hang on to them. NORTHEAST said, but what sets the good apart from the bad is their personalities. To get a feel for their personalities, he asks open-ended questions; he gives them a situation and ask what they’d do about it. “If you ask them a yes-or-no question, like, Muddy Waters Coffeehouse Geneseo, N.Y. You can teach somebody to make coffee, but you can’t teach them to be friendly people, says Brian Sullivan, the owner of Muddy Waters Coffee. “Personality’s something they have to have,” he says. His two-year-old, 1,200-square-foot shop sits in the middle of the State University of New York Geneseo’s sprawling college complex, about a five-minute walk from classroom doors. The town is small – the population’s about 10,000 – but very hip, and the shop reflects that. Portraits of blues legend Muddy Waters, the shop’s namesake, hang on the earth-tone walls alongside paintings from artists at the nearby college. He has no shortage of applicants, Sullivan 34 | August 2011 • www.specialty-coffee.com ‘Can you do this?’ they’ll tell you what you want to hear,” he says. He hired a few very experienced baristas before, and they turned out to be his worst employees. The baristas who had great personalities turned out great, he says: “They turned up and hit the ground running.” MIDWEST they need a job. “We say, ‘Have you ever thought about working here?’” she says. “They’re usually the best, since they drink here every day.” The shop sits on the south side of Grand Island, a medium-sized suburban town of about 50,000. Most of its clients are employees of local businesses, residents of the surrounding neighborhood and the occasional burst of out-of-towners who come to the nearby fairgrounds for races or carnivals. It shares a suite with a pharmacy, though a wall stretching through most of the suite divides the two. The shop has a long table popular with big groups of friends and three smaller tables. It also has two sets of armchairs and five tables on the patio. Nearly all the shop’s employees are former customers. “They turn out to be great employees,” she says. This works well because the unemployment Scooter’s Coffeehouse Grand Island, Neb. The best employees are customers first, says Kristen Sandoval, the manager of Scooter’s Coffeehouse. When the shop needs a new barista, Sandoval asks her best customers whether rate is so high, she says: “There are so many people looking for jobs.” Not all customers will turn out to be great baristas though. During the interview process, she learned to look for one common red flag: people who had lots of jobs for short periods of time. These people tend to quit after a short time on the job. “Those kind of things should