The ability to hire awesome employees means that you know who will fit into your coffee shop culture.

There are a lot of good reasons why your café can be remembered: the quality of coffee, a great location, stylish interior design, and its signature drink. But among all of those, proper customer service will be essential for your clients wanting to keep visiting your place.

In one hand, your café staff members must be ready for the job. And on the other hand, you should know what the qualities you will evaluate to hire them are. They have to learn how your business works and manage their tasks efficiently.

But how can you be sure of that when you first meet them?

The key to having the best café staff

Before you rely on your new staff members to make ends meet, you should establish what are the specific functions and contributions of each one of them, for the café to operate efficiently. This means that, during the interview, you need to define the job descriptions with reasonable expectations and attainable boundaries.

If you do not have those definitions already, you may want to write down a procedural manual for each personnel, so they know when their responsibilities start and when they end. Being said that, as a business owner, you must be aware of work ethic policies and that you are dealing with people: they have feelings, hopes, and dreams.

The latter is vital to understand how to hire great employees. The most professional café staff members are easy to find when you are present in any grievances, stay firm, and are available anytime they need you. That is why you have to look for potential, significant willingness to learn and excellent social skills. Yes, in a sense, their professionalism depends on your ability to guide them.

Show them that you care, and do not forget to teach them everything you know about coffee. These days, everyone wants to be a coffee connoisseur, and your staff must learn about the business to be one step ahead of their customers. Remember that a café is a good place for a nice talk. It is more than okay to train your employees to start a conversation about coffee origins, and the importance of fair-trade and specialty coffee, for instance.

That is how this industry rolls!

So far, these are the key aspects you should consider to hire a professional café staff:

Establish specific functions and contributions.

Write down a procedural manual for each personnel.

Define work ethic and customer services policies.

Be firm, present, and available.

Look for and develop potential and excellent social skills.

Assess their knowledge of coffee and their willingness to learn.

These are the job positions you can offer:

Manager: a manager makes sure everyone else is offering high-quality customer service. He (or she) will be your right hand because he/she will be the person to train the staff and deal with several financial responsibilities.

Barista: this is the position for which you should demand more professionalism. You can even make a competition to hire the best. The barista you hire must be a specialist in making sure that each cup of coffee is perfect.

Marketing and administration teams: choose people with great ideas and the ability to be organized. In the world of coffee, the right business decision can give you the chance to be the owner of everyone’s favorite coffee place.

Cashier and waiters: these two have to be your nicest and most tolerant staff members. Make sure that they know how to take customers' payments and petitions fast, and as well as having the skills to balance the books at the close of the business day.

Other positions: if your place starts growing, you might need a greeter who opens the door for customers and makes them feel welcome. You can also hire people with artistic skills to throw private shows.

The list can go on, but what it is important for you to consider at this point is to hire passionate people with great work ethics. At Coffland Corp, we enjoy when we come up with ideas to help you start your journey as an entrepreneur in this industry. Feel free to contact us to know about our service as Colombian coffee providers!