New research reveals the cost of understaffing, the ROI of great onboarding, and why strong managers and smarter hiring drive restaurant success.
Joshua Secrest
Head of Paradox Marketing
Workday
The restaurant industry is always hiring. That's not just a sign in the window — it's a structural truth, and one of the most consequential facts in the American labor market. With 15.7 million people on the payroll in 2025, restaurants and foodservice businesses employ roughly 10% of the entire U.S. workforce. More than half of all American adults say their first job was in a restaurant. Nearly 67% say they've worked in the industry at some point in their lives.
Employment in the restaurant and foodservice industry is projected to reach 17.3 million by 2035. These aren't just jobs—they are entry points for teenagers, students, career changers, and people building new lives. Restaurants have functioned as the nation's de facto job training program for generations.
That context matters when reading the April 2026 Research Insight: Hiring & Staffing report from the National Restaurant Association (NRA). The data paints a clear picture: an industry so vital to the American workforce demands a more sophisticated approach to talent management.
Employment in the restaurant and foodservice industry is projected to reach 17.3 million by 2035.
The worst of the staffing crisis has passed. The share of restaurants reporting insufficient staff fell from 78% in 2021 to just 22% in 2025. The Great Resignation has given way to what Chipotle's Director of Talent Acquisition Shelly Grange called "the big, scary stay"—a market where workers are reluctant to switch jobs and operators can afford to be selective.
But 62% of restaurant operators still call recruiting and retention a significant challenge. And demographic headwinds are real: the Congressional Budget Office projects U.S. deaths will exceed births by 2030. A smaller population means fewer people looking for jobs. The operators who invest now in attracting, supporting, and keeping great people will be the ones who stay fully staffed when competition for talent heats up again.
Being short one employee can cost a restaurant hundreds of dollars per shift. Biaggi's Director of HR Robyn Jones estimated that a missing server reduces sales by roughly 7 to 8% per meal period—approximately $800 to $1,500 per service. Taco John's VP of HR Damian Hanft pegged the cost of one missing frontline worker at $3,000 to $5,000 over a three-month period.
Among operators with difficult-to-fill openings in 2025:
Customer experience damage is cumulative and hard to quantify. A guest who encounters slow service may not return—and in a business built on repeat visits, that erosion compounds over time. Overtime accelerates burnout, creating conditions for further turnover. Understaffing isn't a temporary inconvenience. It's a financial liability.
On average, it takes restaurants 16 days to fill an hourly position and 46 days to fill a manager or salaried role. During every one of those days, the restaurant operates understaffed. And frontline job seekers are applying to 10 to 15 positions per week, so slow response times mean more candidates lost.
But speed isn't just about capture rate. It's a quality lever. When a hiring process moves quickly enough—screening, qualifying, and scheduling interviews in hours rather than days—operators can be more selective, not less. Chipotle's AI-powered hiring assistant reduced the average application-to-start date from 12 days to just 4 days, nearly doubled applicant flow, and pushed application completion rates from roughly 50% to nearly 88%.
The divide between early technology adopters—specifically those leveraging automation—and the rest of the industry is stark. Southern Rock Restaurants (160 McAlister's Deli locations) reduced its hiring timeline from two weeks to as fast as 24 hours using automated screening and interview scheduling. The Saxton Group cut its process from over a week to about three days. JRI Hospitality (130 Freddy’s locations) shortened its cycle from two to three weeks down to under eight days.
Yet only 26% of restaurant operators report using any AI tools at all, and only 12% use AI for initial qualification screening and scheduling. The result: a two-tier labor market where a minority of operators capture top candidates in days, while the majority spend weeks—losing talent to faster competitors and absorbing the cost of prolonged understaffing.
One more data point worth acting on: 54% of restaurant job applications come in during evenings or weekends, per Workday data featured in the NRA report. Automated systems respond immediately. Manual processes don't.
Only 26% of restaurant operators report using any AI tools at all, and only 12% use AI for initial qualification screening and scheduling.
Every new hire represents a short-term cost before they represent value: recruiting expenses, background checks, uniforms, onboarding time, and early shifts devoted to training. The NRA report quantifies when that investment breaks even: hourly employees become "net positive" after an average of 31.8 days. Managers reach that threshold after 72.2 days—and often three to six months in practice.
Every employee who exits before that threshold is a net financial loss. This is the core problem with "quick quits"—employees who leave before generating real return on the investment made to bring them on. And quick quits are often predictable: they stem from hiring under pressure, misaligned shift schedules, unclear role expectations, or a poor culture fit identified too late.
Dave Burrington of Lehigh Valley Restaurant Brands noted that a manager who leaves before becoming net positive can double or triple the cost of the original hiring cycle—because the full process starts again. The fix starts upstream: hiring with greater precision around schedule alignment, behavioral fit, and honest role previews—before an offer is extended.
While turnover before the first 31.8 days is the most costly, the NRA report identifies the first 90 days as the highest-risk window for new employee turnover. Employees who make it beyond 90 days with strong engagement show substantially better long-term retention. The research is consistent on what drives survival through this window: structured onboarding, regular manager outreach, clear development pathways, mentoring relationships, and a genuine sense of belonging. One restaurant executive described providing new hires with a multiweek schedule on day one—a concrete signal of stability and investment. Golden Corral's Chief People Officer Shelley Wolford emphasized ensuring every new team member feels "seen and listened to, with a strong connection to their manager."
Getting employees through those first 90 days isn't just an HR priority—it's a financial one. Hourly staff average 18.8 months of tenure overall; managers average 34.5 months. Those numbers only hold because of employees who make it through the early window. The ones who don't pull the average down and the cost-per-hire up.
It’s becoming clear that operational success is increasingly defined by leadership rather than just logistics: 87% of restaurant operators say the most important attribute when hiring a new manager is the ability to build team culture and morale—ranking above cost control, sales performance, and compliance.
That priority reflects what operators know from experience: managers are the primary retention mechanism. Employees leave managers before they leave restaurants. A great general manager, as Grange described it, creates a location where organization and calmness are evident the moment you walk in—even when the GM isn't present. That culture is built through consistent coaching, genuine mentoring, and giving staff real ownership over their work.
The inverse is equally true. Poor managers accelerate turnover, erode morale, and create operational problems that no scheduling tool can fix. Given that managers take an average of 72.2 days to reach net positive, the financial case for investing heavily in identifying and retaining great leaders is inseparable from the cultural one.
Poor managers accelerate turnover, erode morale, and create operational problems that no scheduling tool can fix.
The data from this report points toward a connected set of priorities.
The restaurant industry has always known it's a people business. This research quantifies what it costs when people are in short supply—and what it's worth to build the systems that keep great people showing up, growing, and staying.
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