With the lifting of health restrictions, restaurants across Europe are slowly reopening their doors, much to the delight of customers. However, the return of customers to restaurants comes with a new problem: a shortage of restaurant workers. Due to a number of factors (changing aspirations, industry uncertainty, etc.), restaurateurs are struggling to hire the skilled staff needed to handle the mass return of customers, both dine-in and for takeout orders. In France alone, a study conducted by employer representatives in the sector indicated that restaurant owners feared a shortage of more than 100,000 employees when activity resumed. If you find yourself in this situation and hiring additional staff for the summer season is complicated , follow these few tips below to adapt to this new situation, optimize the recruitment of your staff and continue to offer quality service to returning customers. Manage your staff rotation smoothly Intuitive, scalable, reliable: Lightspeed is the all-in-one POS system that lets you manage your entire restaurant. Start a free trial Why is there a labor shortage in the restaurant sector after the crisis? Due to the COVID-19 crisis, at the start of 2020 and the first announcements of closures, a certain number of restaurateurs had to reduce their payroll to optimize their personnel costs .  Result: at the time of reopening, the catering sector lacks staff to ensure operational activity . Extended unemployment benefits, professional retraining, returning to studies, health insecurity, uncompetitive salaries: there are many reasons that explain this disenchantment with the profession. The good news for restaurateurs: there are still a number of qualified and motivated staff ready to return to work in the restaurant sector. Whether they are servers, cooks or dishwashers, their motivation has remained intact. However, to attract them back and retain them, fair pay, more flexible schedules and more substantial benefits will be necessary to align with the new expectations of these individuals. In the United States, for example, a number of independent or smaller restaurant chains have decided to go on the offensive to deal with this new situation of staff shortages: the McDonald’s group has decided to increase the hourly wage of its employees in its own restaurants , from 11 to 17 dollars per hour to meet its need to recruit 10,000 employees.