Restaurant Hiring and Retention: 2026 Mid-Year Report
After 16+ years of running Mis en Place, I’ve had thousands of opportunities to observe that restaurant hiring and retention challenges are often more complicated than they appear.
Over time, I’ve learned that what I believed yesterday may not be the full story today.
That lesson has shaped how I approach recruiting, leadership, operations, and the hospitality industry as a whole.
Drawing from those experiences, the observations below reflect recurring patterns, real-world conversations, and lessons learned while working with restaurant operators, managers, and hospitality professionals across the country.
Rather than claiming to have all the answers, I try to stay curious enough to keep learning.
Restaurant Hiring and Retention Observations
Spring 2026
This mid-year report examines recurring patterns in restaurant hiring and retention based on conversations with operators, managers, and hospitality professionals nationwide.
Restaurants invest significant time, money, and effort in hiring through job boards, recruiting firms, referral programs, wage increases, social media recruiting, and hiring events.
Operators understand that attracting employees has become increasingly competitive. As a result, many restaurants continue investing heavily in hiring initiatives.
Industry research continues to identify recruiting and retention as major operational concerns for restaurant operators. Recent reports from the National Restaurant Association continue to highlight staffing as one of the industry’s most persistent challenges.
However, what often receives less attention is what happens after the employee joins the team.
Mis en Place has reviewed more than 100,000 hospitality applicants and maintained a database of approximately 70,000 candidates. While every restaurant is different, certain patterns recur across conversations about hiring, onboarding experiences, training programs, leadership interactions, and retention challenges.
One of the clearest patterns we continue to observe is this:
Restaurants often invest heavily in hiring and underinvest in the systems that support retention.
As a result, many operators find themselves caught in a familiar cycle where positions are filled, employees arrive, problems emerge, and the hiring process begins again.
To understand why this pattern persists, it’s helpful to examine where restaurants focus most of their time and resources.
Restaurant Hiring Receives Most of the Attention
It’s understandable. After all, hiring is visible, and hospitality has historically been a high-turnover industry.
An open position affects service, scheduling, labor costs, management workload, and guest experience. Operators feel that pressure immediately.
In response, most restaurants focus on attracting more candidates.
Common approaches include rewriting job descriptions, increasing pay, purchasing job board visibility, offering referral bonuses, and expanding sourcing efforts.
While those actions can help, hiring alone rarely solves retention problems. Many of the issues discussed in Restaurant Staffing Challenges persist long after a restaurant fills the position.
Hiring brings people into the organization. Systems determine whether they stay.
At that point, the conversation shifts from hiring to retention.
Restaurant Retention Begins on Day One
In many cases, retention challenges begin long before an employee decides to leave.
In fact, many early signals appear within the first few shifts.
During those shifts, employees evaluate onboarding, the workplace environment, the clarity of expectations, the organization of training, manager communication, the consistency of standards, and overall team stability.
Consequently, employees often decide whether they can succeed in the role before management realizes there is a concern.
A structured Restaurant Employee Onboarding Process can significantly influence how those early experiences unfold.
However, onboarding is only the beginning.
Daily Work Experiences Influence Retention
Retention is often discussed as a long-term outcome.
Instead, employees experience it as a daily reality shaped by training, communication, scheduling, leadership consistency, accountability, team dynamics, service standards, and workplace stability.
Few employees describe their experience using the term “retention.”
More commonly, conversations center on support, communication, and clear expectations.
Leadership follow-through and consistent standards also shape how employees evaluate the workplace.
Many of the same themes appear in our article on Restaurant Service Standards, where consistency often determines whether expectations become habits.
As a result, daily experiences frequently influence long-term employment decisions.
Dependence on Individual Heroics Isn’t Sustainable
A common misconception in hospitality is that retention depends primarily on hiring the right people.
The right people matter, but systems matter more.
That same principle appears throughout our discussion of a Structured Hiring Process for Restaurants.
As a result, restaurants with effective onboarding, structured training, consistent leadership, and clear standards create environments where employees are more likely to succeed.
Eliminating turnover entirely is not the goal.
Instead, restaurants should focus on reducing preventable turnover.
Strong operations rely on systems that create consistency.
Without those systems, the costs become difficult to ignore.
The Cost of an Imbalanced Approach
When hiring receives most of the investment and retention receives less attention, the consequences compound over time.
Over time, the operational impact becomes visible through increased interviewing, repeated training cycles, declining team stability, lost institutional knowledge, higher labor costs, and a less predictable guest experience.
Here’s a common example:
You own and operate a restaurant. You need to hire a new FOH Manager. You’re wearing way too many hats. We know they all look good on you, but not all at once.
At this point, hiring feels like a revolving door. One inadequate new hire follows another. They don’t follow the rules, show up late for shifts, can’t seem to hear what you say, and occasionally disappear during service.
So what do you do?
You post another ad for a FOH Manager, and the cycle continues.
Take a step back.
Spend 5, 10, or even 15 minutes looking for a common thread. I know you don’t have time. However, the time spent on this exercise is far less than the time spent interviewing, onboarding, training, and replacing another employee.
Do you see the common thread?
Who trained those new hires?
Did they follow an onboarding process, or were they expected to wing it? I hope you own a chicken restaurant. That line would land a little better.
More often than not, the answers are already sitting right in front of you.
Consequently, every preventable resignation requires the restaurant to invest in the same position again and again.
Recruiting expenses represent only part of the cost.
In many cases, the operational impact is much larger.
Research from Toast continues to show that staffing, turnover, and labor management remain closely connected to restaurant performance, profitability, and guest experience.
The question, then, is how restaurants can respond.
Rebalancing the Structure
This is not an argument for investing less in hiring.
However, hiring remains essential.
The opportunity is to create better balance.
Many restaurants would benefit from investing the same level of attention in the systems discussed in Restaurant Employee Onboarding and Strong Restaurant Leadership.
For that reason, onboarding, training systems, leadership development, communication, accountability, service standards, team support, and retention planning deserve the same level of attention as recruiting.
Therefore, attracting employees is important, but helping employees succeed after they arrive is equally important.
Before making changes, consider these three questions. Together, they often reveal how much structure exists behind the hiring process:
- Is one person assigned to monitor and train new hires, or is it based on who’s working that shift?
- Is information communicated daily per shift, and is there follow-up reinforcement?
- Do your employees ask questions?
If you’d like to learn more about our approach to restaurant hiring and retention, visit our Restaurant Recruiting Services.
Ultimately, the discussion returns to a simple observation.
Final Observation
Over the years, one observation consistently stands out.
Most hiring problems are not caused by a lack of effort.
Certainly, restaurants work hard to attract employees.
Yet hiring, onboarding, training, leadership, and retention often fail to operate as a single connected system.
Operators who consistently retain strong employees usually understand this.
Research from the James Beard Foundation has similarly highlighted the importance of leadership, workplace culture, employee development, and operational sustainability in supporting long-term restaurant success.
Throughout this report, the patterns continue to point in the same direction.
In other words, retention is the cumulative result of what employees experience every day.
Rather than viewing hiring as the finish line, successful operators recognize it as the beginning.
Long-term stability rarely comes from a single initiative. Instead, it comes from systems that support employees from the first shift forward.
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