to work out for your business. So Shiftgig is a nice filter to be able to find out who is going to fit the personality requirements of your venue, as well the experience level.” The Shiftgig hiring platform, currently posting service job information for the Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. markets, is headquartered in Chicago, and still enjoys a strong and growing presence in its hometown. “Barleycorn is actually next door to where I live, and I went there one night wearing a Shiftgig t-shirt and the bartender said, ‘Hey, I found my job here on Shiftgig!’” says Pieta. “I told her I’d love to talk to the manager to see how the experience was, and he comes out and he says, ‘I was hired from Shiftgig too!’” At John Barleycorn River North, Callanta has assembled a 25-member security team, 28 servers, 30 bartenders, and a handful of hostesses, and that’s just the front-ofhouse staff. Of the nearly 100 employees he has hired since coming on board, he estimates that half have been sourced from Shiftgig, the same site from which he was plucked. To boot, the bar has seen almost no turnover of its initial hires since opening the doors several months ago, a testament to the quality of the candidates found on Shiftgig, one top of the sheer quantity.
“I don’t know how we would’ve done this without Shiftgig, when you’re talking about looking for more than 100 new employees,” says Callanta. “To staff a place as large as ours with any semblance of organization is pretty difficult. Shiftgig helped a lot because we can go through the site on a Monday, have people in for interviews on Tuesday, and go through second interviews on Wednesday. It really worked out well, rather than having all these paper resumés flying around everywhere while we try to get the bar open. “To be honest, I feel like it’s such a new, trending thing, I’m starting to here more and more about it now. The Shiftgig name is really getting out there, and I can tell that more people are trying to get acquainted with it. Let’s face it—Chicago is an old-school city. It’s hard for us to let go of old things. We love the Bears and the Cubs for a reason. We hold onto that old-school notion. But I feel like Shiftgig kind of breaks that mold a little bit. It allows the newer, younger bar managers that are evolving and changing with the industry to keep those old-school grassroots, where you still want to do that second or third round interview, but it helps you be more organized getting there. So the buzz is out there.”
“I don’t know how we would’ve done this without Shiftgig, when you’re talking about looking for more than 100 new employees.”
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February 2013 Bar Business Magazine
41