Hiring Staff Across Multiple Locations: A Guide for Restaurant Operators

Hiring staff across multiple locations is harder for three reasons. You’re recruiting in different local job markets, following different state and local labor laws, and keeping standards consistent without being on-site every day. The fix is one repeatable hiring process with room for local flexibility.

The hiring picture has improved lately, though. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2026 hiring report, only 22% of operators said their restaurants lacked enough staff to meet customer demand in 2025. That’s down from 32% in 2024.

Still, easier hiring doesn’t mean easy hiring. The National Restaurant Association’s 2026 report also found 62% of operators still call recruiting and retaining staff a significant challenge. When you run two to five locations, that challenge repeats itself in every market you’re in.

Why hiring staff across multiple locations is harder than running one

With one restaurant, you can walk the floor and fix problems as you see them. With several, you can’t be everywhere. Hiring decisions happen in rooms you’re not in, so the process itself has to carry your standards.

That’s the real shift for a growing group. Your job moves from making every call to building a process that makes good calls without you.

The stakes rise as you grow, too. A weak hire at one restaurant is a bad shift. The same weak hire repeated across five restaurants becomes a pattern in your reviews, your labor cost, and your turnover.

Getting the process right early saves you from fixing five versions of the same problem later.

The four challenges that multiply with every location

Every new location adds the same set of problems. Here are the four that trip up most operators:

• Inconsistent hiring practices: Managers interview, score, and hire their own way, so quality swings from store to store.
• Different local talent pools: A wage or role that fills fast in one market sits empty in another.
• Varying labor laws: Minimum wage, breaks, and overtime rules change by state and sometimes by city.
• Culture drift: Without shared onboarding, each store builds its own version of your standards.

Turnover makes all four harder. When people leave that often, consistency is tough to hold.

Trusting that standards hold in every store is exactly what a multi-unit owner and director need. Master these four challenges, and hiring staff across multiple locations becomes a system you can rely on.

Build one hiring process you can repeat at every location

Consistency starts with a written process. A repeatable process is the backbone of hiring staff across multiple locations. When every location hires the same way, you get comparable results and a team you can trust to run without you.

The pace alone justifies a system. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the accommodation and food services subsector had about 986,000 job openings in August 2025. Its monthly hiring rate was 5.2%.

You can’t manage that volume with scattered inboxes and text threads. This is where restaurant hiring software helps, giving every location one candidate pipeline to source, track, and move applicants from application to first shift.

Choose your hiring model: centralized, local, or hybrid

The first decision is who owns hiring. There are three common models, and the right one shapes how fast and how consistent your process is.

Hiring model	Who runs postings, interviews, and offers	Pros	Cons
Centralized	A central recruiter or the owner handles everything	Consistent standards and branding	Slower; misses local market knowledge
Local	Each location’s manager owns hiring	Fast; strong local fit	Uneven quality and drifting practices
Hybrid	Headquarters sets templates and standards; local managers interview and recommend	Consistency plus local speed	Needs clear roles and shared tools

For most groups of two to five locations, the hybrid model wins. You set the job templates, interview questions, and hiring bar once. Your local managers then interview candidates and recommend hires, because they know their market and their floor best.

The hybrid model also scales with you. When you open store six or seven, the templates and standards already exist. A new manager plugs into a proven process, so you grow without watering down what made the first restaurant work.

Standardize job posts, then tailor them locally

Write one job description template per role and use it everywhere. A shared template keeps your bar fair, speeds up posting, and makes every location feel like the same brand to applicants.

Then tailor the details that are genuinely local. Adjust the pay range, note the commute or parking, and list any required licenses for that state or city.

Keep titles short and searchable. “Line cook” and “server” get found; clever internal titles don’t.

Recruit for each local market

A repeatable process still needs candidates to feed it. And what works in one neighborhood may fall flat a few miles away, so your sourcing has to flex by market.

In smaller or tighter markets, go local and personal. In larger markets, add scale. Here’s how to split your effort:

• Local job boards and community outreach: Post on regional boards and connect with nearby schools, gyms, and community groups for smaller markets.
• National platforms: Use the big job sites when you need volume fast or you’re opening in a competitive metro area.
• Employee referrals: Ask your current team first; referred hires tend to fit the culture and stay longer.

Keep your employer brand steady across every market so candidates recognize you. Use the same tone, the same logo, and the same promises in every posting. A cook who sees your ad in two cities should feel like they’d be joining one team.

Finding the right people is still the hard part. Reward the referrals that stick, not just the ones that show up, and your best people will point you to more like them.

Don’t drain your first location to staff your second

When you open store two, it’s tempting to fill it with your best people from store one. Resist the urge to take all of them.

Sam Aguilar, brand president of Oak & Stone, has seen this firsthand. In the jump from one to two units, he notes that operators naturally pull heavily from the first location’s existing talent pool. Taking all your best employees to open store two will cause your first store’s operational consistency to suffer.

Related watch: Inside Oak & Stone’s multi-unit expansion

So move deliberately. Promote a few strong performers, backfill their old roles on purpose, and hire ahead of the opening. That way, no single location gets hollowed out.

Onboard new hires the same way at every location

Getting the hire right is only half the job. How you onboard them decides whether they stay, and in restaurants that window is short.

The stakes are real. A previous 7shifts study found the average restaurant employee tenure is just 110 days.

That churn is expensive. Turnover costs the hospitality industry more than $1,000 per FOH employee and nearly $1,500 per BOH employee, according to 7shifts data.

The cross-industry benchmark runs higher. According to SHRM, the cost of replacing an employee can range from 50% to 200% of their annual salary.

Consistent onboarding is your best defense. Build a standardized-but-modular framework so the core stays the same everywhere and the local details layer on top:

• Core company modules: Your values, service standards, safety rules, and pay and scheduling tools stay identical at every location.
• Location-specific modules: Add the floor plan, local menu, point of sale (POS) quirks, and manager introductions for each store.
• A clear timeline: Map Day 1, the first week, and 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins so nobody falls through the cracks.

Digital paperwork keeps it all in sync. With employee onboarding software, you can send, collect, and store new-hire forms like the W-4 and I-9 the same way everywhere. No chasing paper across town.

Send in culture carriers when you open a new market

New teams learn your standards fastest from people who already live them. That’s the idea behind what Ellen Yin, founder of High Street Hospitality Group, calls “cultural inoculation.”

When she opens in a new market, Yin sends seasoned “culture carriers” from her established concepts to work on-site. The new team is then deeply integrated into the expected standards of hospitality, an approach she describes as “cross-pollination.”

You can borrow this play. When you open a location, staff the first few weeks with trusted veterans who model your standards, then let the local team take the reins.

Make your managers the engine of consistency

You can’t be in every store, so your managers carry your standards when you’re not there. Strong local managers are the single biggest lever for consistency across a growing group.

Hire and develop them on purpose. Skills can be taught; the ability to build a team is what you’re really screening for.

Then set clear guardrails. Give each general manager a labor target and set permissions so they can’t schedule above it, which keeps costs steady without constant reminders.

Keep managers in sync and auditable, too. A shared manager log book lets you read shift notes and issues from one place. You spot problems early, without visiting in person.

Managing work teams across sites also means managing your managers as a team. Get them together regularly, even on a quick video call, so they share what’s working and solve problems once instead of five times. When your managers trust each other, standards travel between stores on their own.

Connect communication and scheduling across locations

Scattered texts, group chats, and phone calls fall apart fast when you add stores. One message that reaches the wrong half of your team can cost you a shift.

Pull it into one place instead. A single team communication app lets you reach every location’s staff and managers in one channel, with a record of who saw what.

Scheduling needs the same treatment. When you centralize it, managers see availability across units, and staff can pick up open shifts at nearby locations to cover gaps. Our guide to restaurant chain scheduling walks through how to set that up.

This matters most for people who work across stores. Anyone splitting time between locations needs one clear schedule, not two that quietly overlap.

Stay compliant with labor laws in every location

Every location can add a new rulebook. Minimum wage, overtime, break rules, and predictive scheduling laws change by state and sometimes by city. What’s fine in one store can be a violation in another.

Multi-location setups create their own traps. Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, employees who work more than 40 hours across two or more locations owned by the same operator are generally entitled to overtime — the hours get combined, not counted separately per location. Miss that, and you owe back pay.

The cost of getting it wrong is steep. In fiscal year 2025, the U.S. Department of Labor recovered more than $259 million in back wages for nearly 177,000 employees across all industries.

Protect yourself with a simple habit. Map the wage, overtime, break, and scheduling rules for each location, and build them into your scheduling so alerts fire before a violation. Then keep clean documentation for every store.

Review the rules whenever you open in a new city or state. Local wage and scheduling laws change often, and a rule that didn’t apply last year might apply now. A quick check before each opening beats a back-pay bill after.

Track performance and retention across your locations

You can’t improve what you can’t compare. To keep quality even, measure the same things at every location and watch for the store that drifts.

Track a short, consistent scorecard per location:

• Labor cost: Track it as a percent of sales to catch over- or under-staffing.
• Scheduled hours: Compare them against actual hours to catch plans that slip.
• Overtime hours: Watch them to flag coverage gaps and compliance risk early.
• Retention rate: Follow it by store to see who keeps people and who churns.

Group-wide reporting turns this into minutes, not spreadsheets. With the operations overview dashboard, you compare every location side by side.

Comparing locations early is how you catch drift before it spreads. If one store’s labor cost climbs or its tenure drops, you can dig in that week instead of at quarter’s end. The store that’s doing well often holds the playbook the others need.

Retention comes back to growth. A visible path from crew to shift lead to manager is a cheap retention tool that works at every location.

Frequently asked questions

How do you hire staff for multiple locations?

Use a central hiring process and tracking tool for consistent standards, then let each local manager interview and recommend candidates who fit their market.

What are the biggest challenges of hiring across multiple locations?

The hardest parts are keeping quality consistent, recruiting from different local talent pools, following varying labor laws, and holding culture steady across sites.

How do you keep hiring and onboarding consistent across locations?

Build a standardized-but-modular process where core company elements stay identical everywhere and location-specific details layer on top of the same foundation.

How do you manage compliance with different labor laws across states or cities?

Map the wage, overtime, break, and scheduling rules for each location, build those rules into your scheduling, and keep clear documentation for every store.

How do you maintain company culture when hiring across multiple locations?

Share the same values and standards everywhere, send experienced culture carriers into new stores, and hire managers who can build morale and team culture.

Bring hiring, onboarding, and scheduling into one platform

Hiring staff across multiple locations gets easier when hiring, onboarding, scheduling, communication, and labor data live in one place built for restaurants. Instead of stitching together spreadsheets and disconnected tools, you get one repeatable process and a clear view of every store.

That’s what 7shifts, the HR platform for restaurants, is built to do. See how it fits your group. Start a free trial.