Recruiting and retaining staff surged back to the top of operators’ challenge list in 2026, jumping from 18% of operators naming it their #1 concern at the start of the year to 33% by mid-year, according to Restaurant365’s 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry Mid-Year Report. That’s a 15-point swing in six months, and it’s happening at the exact moment staff investment has fallen to a three-year low, with just 16% of operators naming staff enhancements a top priority for the back half of the year.
That gap — a fast-growing problem paired with falling investment — is exactly where turnover stops being an HR metric and starts eating into margin.
The data also shows what’s actually moving the needle. Better training and development has overtaken pay increases as operators’ leading retention strategy. That’s a meaningful shift: it means retention is starting to be treated as something operators can actively manage, not just something they hope for.
But most restaurants are trying to solve this with tools that were never built to work together. A job post lives in one system. Onboarding paperwork lives in another. Training happens on a clipboard, a binder, or a bloated learning management system nobody logs into. And retention is treated like an outcome instead of something you can actually build, one connected decision at a time. Every disconnected handoff is a place where a cost that could be managed quietly turns into one that isn’t.
Building and retaining a restaurant team is the practice of managing the full employee journey — attracting candidates, hiring them, getting them onboarded, training them to do the job well, and giving them a reason to stick around — as one connected process instead of four separate ones.
For most operators, that journey breaks down in the handoffs. A candidate applies through a job board that has no connection to the employee record. Onboarding paperwork gets handled on paper or through a generic HR tool that wasn’t built for restaurants. Training happens inconsistently, if it happens at all, because the manager training a new hire this week is also running the floor. And retention efforts — recognition, growth opportunities, career paths — rarely exist as a deliberate program because nobody has the bandwidth to build one on top of everything else.
The fix isn’t a better hiring tool or a better training app in isolation. It’s connecting the four so that a hiring decision flows into onboarding, onboarding sets a new hire up to be trained quickly and consistently, and training gives that employee a visible path to grow — which is the single biggest lever operators have over whether that person is still on the schedule in six months.
Turn your hiring and training process into a retention strategy, not just an administrative task. Get a free demo.
Recruiting and retaining staff was named the single biggest challenge by 32.9% of operators in the first half of 2026 — narrowly ahead of food costs at 29.7% — and together the two accounted for nearly two-thirds of every “biggest challenge” response in Restaurant365’s own research. When operators were asked how labor pressure was actually showing up in their business, 64% said they were operating below full capacity, 17% had limited their operating hours, and 12% had shrunk their menu as a direct result. Every one of those responses reflects a gap in the team that a restaurant is working around instead of solving.
With net margins typically landing between 5% and 15% per that same research, the cost of turnover isn’t abstract. It’s the vacant shift that goes unfilled for weeks. It’s the manager who spends Tuesday morning re-training someone who quit two weeks after being hired. It’s the new employee who never got proper food-safety or service training and either creates a compliance risk or gets pushed onto the floor before they’re ready — and quits soon after because nobody set them up to succeed.
None of that is inevitable. It’s the compounding effect of treating retention as an afterthought instead of a number operators actively manage — and closing that gap is one of the most direct ways to protect margin without touching the menu or the guest experience.
For multi-unit operators, the problem multiplies with every location. A hiring and training process that barely works at three locations, run on paper checklists and manager memory, breaks down completely at fifteen or twenty. Brand consistency, compliance documentation, and training quality all become harder to guarantee the moment growth outpaces the systems meant to support it. At that scale, an unmanaged turnover cost isn’t just a line item — it’s a ceiling on how fast an operator can grow.
Every day a shift stays open is a day the rest of the team absorbs the gap — and with recruiting and retaining staff now the single biggest challenge named by operators in Restaurant365’s own 2026 research, speed and quality both matter more than ever. Slow, manual hiring processes lose good candidates before they ever get an offer, and disconnected applicant tracking makes it nearly impossible to know which job boards, postings, or messaging are actually delivering qualified applicants.
That open shift isn’t just a scheduling problem, either — it’s a real dollar figure, showing up as overtime, lost sales, or a manager pulled off higher-value work to cover the gap.
R365 Hire streamlines job posting across multiple boards from a single dashboard, automates candidate screening and interview scheduling, and gives managers real-time visibility into every applicant instead of a folder of resumes. Because hiring connects directly to onboarding and payroll in the same platform, an accepted offer doesn’t require a second round of manual data entry — the new hire’s information is already there, ready for the next stage.
The gap between “hired” and “actually ready to work” is where a lot of restaurants lose new employees before they’ve had a real chance. Paper-based onboarding — I-9s, W-4s, direct deposit forms, policy acknowledgments — is slow, error-prone, and often the new hire’s first real impression of how organized (or disorganized) the business actually is. A new hire who quits in week two doesn’t just leave a schedule gap; they take the full cost of recruiting and onboarding them with them.
Inconsistent training is one of the most common — and most preventable — reasons new hires struggle, guest experience varies location to location, and compliance certifications lapse without anyone noticing until there’s a problem. When training lives on paper checklists or in a clunky learning platform managers avoid using, none of that is actually happening the way leadership assumes it is.
In other words: Untracked training is a hidden cost, one that shows up later as a compliance fine, a bad review, or a re-hire nobody budgeted for.
Retention is what keeps a schedule from bleeding money. Every employee who stays is a shift that doesn’t need overtime to cover, a hire that doesn’t need to happen again at a premium rate, a role that doesn’t get filled by someone who isn’t trained yet.
Because hiring, onboarding, training, and scheduling all run on the same platform, that payoff isn’t abstract — a manager can watch labor cost as a percentage of sales hold steady in real time, because the schedule is full of people who are already trained and already staying, instead of gaps being patched at a premium.
Bricco Dining Group operates four casual dining restaurants in Ohio. When owner Dave Sharp acquired the group in 2019, the business had no standardized systems and was making decisions off the bank balance instead of an actual P&L. Only two people in the entire organization had access to performance data, which meant managers had no way to see their own numbers — and no way to be held accountable for them.
Sharp brought in Restaurant365 with one rule: decisions would be made on data, not assumptions. That meant giving every manager, not just ownership, real visibility into how their location was actually performing.
The impact showed up first in labor. By giving managers access to real-time labor and sales data — and training them to build schedules against a budget instead of guesswork — Bricco cut labor costs by at least 5%. “Managers are now scheduling to a budget, seeing the numbers, and evaluating their actuals at the end of the week,” Sharp said. “That level of visibility and accountability has been a game changer.” Bank reconciliation, which once took up to 40 hours a month, now takes 15 minutes. And with a connected view across all four locations, Sharp has what he calls a “central command” — visibility into schedules, tasks, and performance without waiting weeks to find out where a location fell short.
The bigger shift wasn’t just the cost savings. It was turning labor cost from a number ownership tracked from a distance into one every manager could see, own, and actively manage — the same connected-visibility principle that turns retention from a hope into a number operators can act on in real time.
Results:
See what a connected hiring, onboarding, training, and retention platform could look like for your team. Get a free demo.
Building and retaining a restaurant team means managing hiring, onboarding, training, and retention as one connected process rather than four separate ones, so new hires move quickly from applicant to confident, engaged employees — and have real reasons to stay.
According to Restaurant365’s 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry Mid-Year Report, recruiting and retaining staff jumped from 18% of operators naming it their #1 challenge at the start of the year to 33% by mid-year — even as staff investment fell to a three-year low of just 16%. The same research found turnover is actually trending in the right direction overall, with 39% of operators now reporting turnover under 10%, the best reading in three years, showing that the operators solving this problem are pulling ahead of those who aren’t.
A slow, paper-heavy onboarding process delays a new hire’s first shift and creates a poor first impression, while a fast, digital onboarding experience gets employees productive sooner and signals that the operation is organized and worth staying with.
Consistent, role-specific training helps new employees feel prepared and confident, reduces the frustration that drives early quits, and — when tied to growth paths and certifications — gives longer-tenured employees a visible reason to stay rather than look elsewhere.
When hiring, onboarding, and training run on the same platform, brand consistency, compliance documentation, and training quality can be maintained across every location without relying on manual processes that break down as the business scales.
Yes — and the data backs it up. In Restaurant365’s 2026 Mid-Year Report, better training and development overtook pay increases as operators’ top retention strategy for the first time in the survey’s history, and 37.31% of operators plan to invest even further in training over the second half of the year, more than any other retention strategy. Platforms that connect training to certifications, growth opportunities, and recognition — rather than treating training as a one-time compliance task — are what make that investment pay off.
Every point of turnover carries a real, calculable cost. When hiring, onboarding, training, and retention run as one connected system, operators can see that cost clearly enough to manage it, instead of absorbing it as a fixed cost of doing business. That’s the difference between a workforce that’s a background risk and one that’s a genuine operational advantage.
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Building and retaining a restaurant team starts with treating hiring, onboarding, training, and retention as one connected process instead of four disconnected ones. A fast, digital hiring and onboarding experience gets new employees off to a strong start. Consistent, trackable training gets them ready to perform and keeps compliance current. And a real retention strategy — growth opportunities, recognition, visible progress — gives them a reason to still be on the schedule six months from now.
Every vacant shift, every rushed re-hire, and every employee who leaves because they never got the training or recognition they needed is a cost that compounds quietly until it shows up in turnover, in guest experience, and in the labor line on your P&L.
Treated as a connected system instead of four separate tasks, that same cost becomes something operators can see coming, plan for, and reduce, turning workforce stability from a hidden risk into a real operational advantage.
Get a free demo and see what a connected approach to hiring, onboarding, training, and retention looks like for your restaurant. Get a free demo.
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