Hiring a Chef: What CVs Won’t Tell You

TL;DR: Hiring a chef on CV alone is a mistake. After 30 years, the tell is how someone handles a kitchen they’ve never worked in before. The paperwork gets them in the door. Everything else decides whether they stay.

The CV tells you almost nothing useful. I’ve hired cooks with sparkling CVs who couldn’t hold a knife properly, and I’ve hired one lad who turned up with a handwritten note and a box of tomatoes he’d grown himself. He was brilliant. Still is.

Hiring a chef is one of the most consequential decisions you make as a kitchen leader, and yet most people approach it the way they’d sort a filing cabinet. They scan the list of restaurants, check the dates line up, and decide on that basis. I’ve been doing this for over thirty years, and I can tell you that the paperwork is the least interesting part of the process.

What Hiring a Chef Actually Involves

People treat chef recruitment tips as though they’re choosing a new piece of kitchen equipment. You check the specs, compare the models, read a few reviews. But a chef isn’t a combi oven. A chef has moods, habits, instincts, and bad days. What you’re really asking when you hire someone is: can I trust this person when it all goes sideways on a Friday night in August?

That question doesn’t get answered by a CV. It gets answered in a trial shift, in a conversation, in the way someone handles a kitchen they’ve never worked in before. The paperwork gets you in the door. Everything else is what matters.

What to Look for in a Chef Before They’ve Touched a Pan

The first thing I notice is how someone walks into a kitchen. This sounds absurd, and maybe it is, but bear with me. Do they look around and take it in, or do they put their bag down and immediately check their phone? Are they looking at the equipment, the produce, the layout? Someone who’s curious about a new kitchen before they’ve even started is already telling you something useful.

I also pay attention to how they talk about previous kitchens. If every single job ended because of someone else’s failings, that’s worth noting. Not because people don’t work for difficult bosses (they absolutely do, I’ve been one myself on a bad day), but because a pattern of blame is a pattern of blame. You want someone who can reflect, not just vent.

Ask them what they cooked last for themselves, at home, on a Tuesday night. The answer tells you more than any chef interview question about stocks or sauces. If they say they don’t really cook at home, I’m not saying walk them out immediately, but I am saying pay attention. The cooks who care most tend to cook all the time, not because they have to, but because they can’t quite stop.

The Trial Shift: What You’re Actually Watching For

Give them a task with a gap in the instructions. Not a trap, just an honest gap. Tell them you’ve got some courgettes that need using and see what they do. Do they ask questions? Do they taste as they go? Do they season properly, or do they add salt at the end out of habit? A cook who seasons from the beginning and adjusts throughout has been trained to think about flavour, not just procedure.

Watch how they handle pressure that isn’t theirs. On a trial shift, things will go wrong that have nothing to do with them. A delivery comes in late, someone else burns a sauce, the printer goes down. How they respond to chaos they didn’t create is genuinely one of the most useful things you can observe. Calm in other people’s storms is a rare quality in a kitchen and worth more than a stage at a famous restaurant.

Also watch how they clean as they go. I know that sounds like a small thing, but it isn’t. A cook who cleans their board between tasks, wipes the pass without being asked, and doesn’t leave a disaster area wherever they stand is showing you a set of values that you’d otherwise spend months trying to install.

Kitchen Leadership Qualities: Who Actually Runs the Room

If you’re hiring at senior level, leadership matters enormously. And yet most kitchens promote the best cook rather than the best leader, which is how you end up with brilliant technicians who make everyone around them miserable. I’ve done this myself. Promoted someone because their sauces were extraordinary and spent six months dealing with the fallout.

What I look for in kitchen leadership qualities now is someone who can explain what they’re doing while they’re doing it. Not teach formally, just explain. A chef who can work at speed and still tell a commis why they’re doing something a particular way is multiplying their own skills across the team every single shift. That’s genuinely valuable.

Ask them to describe a time they disagreed with a head chef and what they did about it. The answer you want is not ‘I just did what I was told’ and it’s not ‘I told them they were wrong’. You want something in between: someone who raised the issue, made their case, and then accepted the decision gracefully. That’s the whole job, really, in miniature.

Chef Interview Questions Most People Don’t Think to Ask

Most chef interview questions stay safe. Where have you worked, what’s your speciality, can you do pastry. These are fine as far as they go. Here are a few I’ve found more revealing:

• What’s the worst dish you’ve ever made, and what went wrong?
• What do you think is the most overrated technique in professional kitchens right now?
• Tell me about a time service fell apart and what you did.
• What would you change about the way you’ve been trained?

The first question filters out people who can’t admit failure. The second shows you whether they think for themselves or just parrot whatever’s fashionable. The third is about composure under real pressure. The fourth tells you whether they have enough self-awareness to grow. None of these questions appear on any standard job application, which is exactly why they work.

On Building a Culinary Team Rather Than Just Filling a Role

Culinary team hiring isn’t just about individual talent. It’s about fit. I’ve had kitchens where every single cook was technically capable and the whole thing still felt like pulling teeth because the personalities ground against each other. I’ve had kitchens where the skill level was mixed but the spirit was something else entirely, and the food was better for it.

Think about what your kitchen actually needs, not what looks good on a rota sheet. If your team is strong on execution but weak on creativity, hire a touch of chaos. If you’ve got creative energy that goes nowhere, hire someone methodical. A kitchen is not a collection of identical skill sets stacked on top of each other. It’s a set of people who, on a good night, make each other sharper.

One thing that rarely fails: ask your existing team what kind of person they’d like to work alongside. Not who, not a name, but what qualities. You’ll learn something about your kitchen culture, and you’ll make the people who already work for you feel like their opinion matters. Which it does.

A Few Things That Would Put Me Off, Quickly

Someone who can’t name a single producer or supplier they care about. Someone who talks only about the food they’ve cooked and never about the food they’ve eaten. Someone who refers to their previous team as ‘just commis’ with that particular tone. And someone who has never, apparently, made a mistake worth mentioning. We’ve all overcooked something, dropped something, mistimed something. If you can’t tell me about it with at least a small amount of humour, I’m not sure I trust your account of anything else.

The CV tells you where someone has been. The trial shift, the conversation, the way they handle a quiet moment when they think no one’s watching, that’s where you find out who they actually are. Hire accordingly.