A case study in modern-day staffing for the service industry, the John Barleycorn bar group recently opened its fourth location in Chicago utilizing Shiftgig.com to find a start-up collection of servers and bartenders nearly 100 deep. Here’s a look at how it all got done.
John Barleycorn Must Hire
For starters, allow me to apologize for the somewhat obscure musical reference in the title of this article. Unless you’re a diehard fan of early 1970s rock n’ roll, you may not be familiar with the classic Traffic album John Barleycorn Must Die. Then again, if you are a fan of such early 1970s sounds, it’s likely you still hire staff by flipping through piles of paper resumés, which, in some professions, is almost as antiquated as the vinyl record upon which Steve Winwood imprinted his powerful vocals. (Winwood was the lead singer of Traffic. Keep up with me, people.)
John Barleycorn, however, is actually referred to herein as a bar, in fact a collection of bars, residing in the great city of Chicago. With locations in Lincoln Park. Wrigleyville, and Schaumburg, the Barleycorn ownership group recently opened its fourth edition in the River North neighborhood, needing to start from square one to build a staff from scratch. With previous success hiring for the other locations using a particular online staffing company, they immediately returned to the site to seek out the next Barleycorn manager.
“There was an ad on Craigslist that said you had to apply through Shiftgig.com, and I’d never heard of it before,” explains TJ Callanta, manager at John Barleycorn River North. “So I went on, built a profile, and filled a few things out, but I submitted it too quickly; they had nothing but my name and contact information when I hit the send button too soon. But while I was filling out the rest of the profile page, I received a call from one of the general managers at Barleycorn who scheduled me to come in for an interview. This was, at most, five minutes after I’d sent my Shiftgig application in.”
