Then, every day on every shift in every restaurant, a computer randomly generates the names of two to four employees to be recertified in one of their jobs-pop quizzes, if you will. New employees get 120 hours of training before they are allowed to work on their own, and must be certified in each of the specific jobs they do. Once Pal’s selects its candidates, it immerses them in massive amounts of training and retraining, certification and recertification. Second, even great people need constant opportunities for improvement. Among the agree/disagree statements: “For the most part, I am happy with myself.” “I think it is best to trust people you have just met.” “Raising your voice may be one way to get someone to accept your point of view.” Pal’s understands that character counts for as much as credentials, that who you are is as important as what you know. It has developed and fine-tuned a screening system to evaluate candidates from this notoriously hard-to-manage demographic-a 60-point psychometric survey, based on the attitudes and attributes of Pal’s star performers, that does an uncanny job of predicting who is most likely to succeed. Pal’s 26 locations employ roughly 1,020 workers, 90 percent of whom are part-time, 40 percent of whom are between the ages of 16 and 18. So what can the rest of us learn from Pal’s? First, the best companies hire for attitude and train for skill. “But eventually you realize how much work went into that performance, all the training, all the skill-building, all the hours. “If you watch professional athletes, everything they do looks so smooth and fluid,” says CEO Thomas Crosby. Ultimately, what’s truly intriguing about Pal’s, what allows this small company to cast such a large shadow, is the level of intelligence and intensity with which it approaches the human side of its business-how it hires, trains, and links its identity in the marketplace to its approach in the workplace. Indeed, back in 2001, Pal’s became the first restaurant company of any kind to win the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award-an award that’s gone, over the years, to the likes of Cadillac, FedEx, and Ritz-Carlton. That’s ten times better the average fast-food joint, a level of excellence that creates unprecedented levels of customer loyalty, as well as loud acclaim from management experts. Yet Pal’s makes a mistake only once in every 3,600 orders. You can imagine the opportunities for error as cars filled with bickering families or frazzled salespeople zip through in under 20 seconds. That’s four times faster than the second-fastest quick-serve restaurant in the country.īut Pal’s is not just absurdly fast. All this happens at a lightning pace-an average of 18 seconds at the drive-up window, an average of 12 seconds at the handout window to receive the order. Instead, customers pull up to a window, place their orders face-to-face with an employee, pull around to the other side of the facility, take their bag and drive off. Pal’s does not offer sit-down service inside its restaurants. The most obvious difference is its fanatical devotion to speed and accuracy. It sells burgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, fries, shakes-standard fast-food fare, although the taste and quality have a well-deserved reputation for excellence.ĭig deeper, though, and you see that nothing about Pal’s is standard for its business, or any business. It has 26 locations in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia, all within an 80-mile radius of its home base in Kingsport, Tennessee. Like, say, an amazing fast-food chain called Pal’s Sudden Service.Īt first blush, there’s nothing all that amazing about Pal’s. But in a world where most companies don’t operate on the frontiers of digital transformation, and most employees aren’t tech geeks or app developers, our appetite for unconventional talent strategies should probably extend to more conventional parts of the economy. We want to know Google’s secret to hiring the best people or Mark Zuckerberg’s one tip for hiring employees. Many of us who are hungry for the latest dispatches from the war for talent look to to Silicon Valley.
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