1Determine how many employees you need
Before building a team, consider the size first because there are several things to consider. Think about your café’s foot traffic, opening hours and volume. For a small shop serving 100–150 customers every day, for example, one or two baristas per shift might suffice, whereas busier spots may need three or four.
Planning staffing based on customer volume and shift needs helps maintain service quality and manage labour costs. Consider either drawing up or creating a digital workplace checklist to support everyone is aware of scheduling and how many employees are on shift at any one time.
2Create a talented pool of people
It would be nice if a talent pool was literally a swimming pool you could visit to fish out all the top talent, but in reality, it’s a tough task to cultivate a group of great employees and candidates, especially in the hospitality sector.
So, how can you build this talent pool for your coffee shop given the constraints in the sector?
First off, try to avoid recruiting anyone just because they’re willing to wash dishes and clear tables—start by understanding the profile of the people you want in your business. Work out what their qualities and personality traits are. Look out for friendly people with a can-do attitude who can build a rapport with your customers and focus less on previous experience.
The concept of enlightened hospitality suggests it’s actually ideal to hire people with the ‘right’ attitude and emotional skill set than to look out for relevant experience. Barista skills can be taught to someone with a great attitude, but it’s hard to teach someone to build a great attitude.
Don’t be afraid to try this out with the staff currently working at your café and figure out those who don’t fit your ideal profile. It might be hard at the beginning, but it will save you from banging your head against a wall and investing time in training someone who simply won’t work out.
What to look for when hiring a barista:
Look for these key traits:
- Personality & reliability: Friendly, consistent and punctual. The kind of people you’d naturally want to be friends with for all the right reasons.
- Speed & efficiency: Quick and reliable under pressure without compromising on quality or competency.
- Passion for specialty coffee: Shows genuine enthusiasm and commitment to the role. It obviously also helps if they know a lot about coffee.
- Communication & customer service: Clear, polite, empathetic. These are the customer service skills of people born to please other people.
- Attention to detail & multitasking: Keeps orders accurate, even when spinning dozens of plates.
- Salesmanship: Recommends add-ons and upsells naturally without it coming across as pushy.
- Barista qualifications & experience: Helpful, but not essential. Qualifications can be handy and are proof they know their onions, but attitude and experience trump them every time.
3Interview like a boss
Now that you have a clear picture of what your best-performing people look like, you’re ready to start the hunt for great staff. But before you embark on this daunting process, you should think beyond the standard ‘checking-off-boxes' interviewing approach.
One way you can do this is by refining your interviewing skills and learning to read body language. This will help you spot those subtle details that act as a red flag.
In the interview, you need to mentally position the candidate in the key areas of your café, like the kitchen or till. By keeping a close eye on how they behave and speak in front of you, you can get a sense of whether their personality would fit into your environment.
A final tip to save you lots of time and energy—be ruthless when interviewing. If you realise that the person sitting in front of you is a definite no, end the interview quickly. Always be polite and thank them for their time, but make sure you only invest time in those candidates with real potential.
Look for baristas with coffee shop experience:
Hiring experienced baristas can streamline the onboarding process with short training time and fast integration into the team. A barista with experience will generally be able to handle various situations and make few errors too, which is particularly important during busy periods. Their familiarity with coffee shop operations should help smooth shifts with good barista customer service and happy customers.
Observe candidates’ customer service skills:
In a café, where interactions are always face to face, customer service is very important. To ensure your baristas are firing on all cylinders, role-play scenarios (handling a complaint, preparing a complicated order, managing a lunchtime rush) and evaluate responses based on empathy, clarity, and problem-solving.
4Build an induction process for new staff
Big coffee chains have mastered the process of creating proper induction sessions and regular training for new staff. This is often overlooked by independent establishments.
Giving your new staff opportunities to grow with regular training can increase motivation and retention.
A good induction is less about coffee knowledge and more about ensuring your new staff understand the business. Get them proactively participating in this process and it will demonstrate what kind of motivation and energy you expect from them.
Creating your own coffee shop handbook is a great way to start. For instance, this handbook can include your story, values, main rules, health and safety training, attendance policy and even general coffee knowledge and history.
Give a copy to each staff member on their first day. And remember that for an induction to work, it must be interesting, fun, and include lots of hands-on training that tests them.