Should I Hire for Attitude or Experience
TL;DR: Should I hire for attitude or experience in restaurant roles? Attitude, nearly every time. Experience shows what someone has done. Attitude shows what they will do. Only for senior roles does baseline competence outweigh character.
When it comes to the question of whether you should hire for attitude or experience in restaurant roles, the honest answer is: attitude, nearly every time. I’ve worked alongside people with pristine CVs who made a service feel like a hostage situation, and I’ve trained dishwashers with zero experience who became the most reliable chefs I ever had.
That’s not a romanticised version of events. That’s just what happens when you spend long enough behind a pass.
Should I Hire for Attitude or Experience in Restaurant Roles?
The debate comes up every time there’s a gap on the rota. You’ve got two candidates: one who has worked three years at a decent brasserie but gives you a slightly sullen handshake, and another who has barely touched a professional kitchen but lights up when you talk about the menu. Which one do you take a chance on?
Experience tells you what someone has done. Attitude tells you what they’re willing to do. In a restaurant, the second one matters more, because no two services are ever quite the same and you cannot train someone to care.
I’m not saying experience is worthless. Obviously, if you’re hiring a head chef or a sommelier with specific responsibilities, baseline competence is non-negotiable. But for the majority of front-of-house and kitchen roles, especially at junior or mid level, attitude is the quality that determines whether someone grows or stagnates.
What ‘Attitude’ Actually Means in a Restaurant Context
It’s worth being specific here, because attitude is one of those words that gets used vaguely in interview feedback. It doesn’t mean enthusiasm performed for thirty minutes in front of a hiring manager. Anyone can do that.
What you’re actually looking for is a combination of four things: a willingness to be told you’re wrong, the instinct to help without being asked, a threshold for pressure that doesn’t involve taking it out on colleagues, and genuine curiosity about the food or the craft. You’ll usually spot these in the first ten minutes of a proper conversation, if you ask the right questions.
Ask them what they got wrong in their last role. Ask them what they’d have done differently. The people who answer those questions honestly, without deflecting onto a former manager or making excuses, are almost always the ones worth investing in.
The Problem with Prioritising Experience Every Time
Hiring purely on experience creates a very particular kind of problem. It fills your team with people who’ve learned how to do things a certain way and have no interest in doing them differently. That’s fine if every restaurant runs identically. They don’t.
I once hired a senior sous chef on the strength of his background because I was under pressure to fill the role quickly. He knew his way around a kitchen. He was also the single most demoralising presence I’ve had to manage, publicly correcting junior staff in a way that made them afraid to try anything. Within three months, two good young cooks had quietly left. Experience came with a culture we never agreed to take on.
Bad habits acquired over years are significantly harder to shift than gaps in knowledge. You can teach someone how to break down a chicken. You cannot easily unteach someone the habit of making others feel small.
When Experience Should Win
There are roles where a certain level of technical knowledge is genuinely required before day one. A head pastry chef needs to understand how to work with sugar and temper chocolate. A bar manager needs to have handled stock and ordering before. A sommelier needs, at minimum, a foundation of wine knowledge that takes years to build.
In these cases, you’re not choosing between attitude and experience. You need both. The question is which you’d sacrifice if you had to, and even here, attitude is the last thing to compromise on. A technically brilliant head pastry chef who treats the team like furniture will cost you far more than their salary.
How to Hire for Attitude or Experience in Restaurant Roles Without Getting It Wrong
The mistake most operators make is trying to assess attitude through a standard interview. You’re sitting across a table, someone is performing their best version of themselves, and you’re asking questions they’ve prepared for. It tells you very little.
A trial shift, even a paid one of two or three hours, is worth ten interviews. Watch how they interact with the rest of the team when you’re not looking. Watch whether they ask questions or just wait to be told what to do. Watch how they respond when something goes wrong (something always goes wrong; you can more or less arrange that).
A few other things that actually help during the hiring process:
- Ask for a specific example of a difficult service and what they did about it, not what they ‘would’ do in a hypothetical situation.
- Pay attention to how they talk about former colleagues. Contempt for everyone they’ve ever worked with is a pattern, not bad luck.
- Notice whether they show any curiosity about your restaurant: the menu, the sourcing, the style of service. Indifference at interview rarely improves once they’re in post.
- If they’re younger and inexperienced, ask what they cook at home, or what they last ate that made them think. It tells you whether there’s any genuine interest underneath the application.
Training Experience In Is Achievable. Training Attitude In Is Not.
This is the thing I keep coming back to. Skills have a training pathway. There are courses, stages, mentors, repetition, and practice. A motivated person with limited experience and the right temperament will, given time and good teaching, become competent. Usually they become better than competent, because they’re driven by something internal rather than a line on a CV.
Attitude doesn’t have a training pathway. You can manage someone’s behaviour. You can set expectations and hold people to them. But you cannot install curiosity, or the instinct to take ownership, or the basic decency to support the people around you during a punishing Friday night service. Those things are either there or they’re not.
I’ve seen kitchens with technically impeccable brigades that were miserable to work in and produced food that was technically impeccable and utterly soulless. I’ve eaten in places where half the team were still learning, but the energy was good and the food was alive. The second kind is worth building.
A Note on the Interview Question Nobody Asks
At the end of an interview, ask the candidate what they want to learn. Not where they see themselves in five years (a question which produces only polished fiction), but what specific thing they’re trying to get better at right now.
The people who answer that question with something real, something they’ve actually been thinking about, are the ones who will use whatever you give them. The ones who deflect, or give you a non-answer about ‘wanting to grow’, are probably not going to surprise you in a good way.
The Bottom Line
- For most restaurant roles, hire for attitude first. Skills can be taught. The willingness to learn cannot.
- For senior or highly technical roles, you need both, but don’t sacrifice attitude to fill a gap quickly. That shortcut has a long tail.
- Trial shifts tell you more than interviews. Use them.
- Watch how people talk about former colleagues and how they respond when things go sideways. Both are more revealing than a CV.
- The question ‘what are you trying to get better at right now?’ separates the curious from the comfortable faster than almost anything else.
Do you actually want a team, or do you want a collection of individuals who happen to work the same shifts? That’s the real question underneath all of this, and your hiring decisions will answer it whether you mean them to or not.