If you believe that one of your food truck employees is ready for a promotion, be sure you test employees and don’t jump right in. Performance in their current role doesn’t always predict performance in a future position.

How To Test Employees Before Promoting Them

When you have a capable person to promote in your food truck, there’s no such a thing an appropriate amount of tenure. Sure, it’s ideal when employees have two or three years under their belt to prove themselves. But in today’s high-demand global marketplace, talented people are hard to retain.

Gather more information by designing an assignment for the employee that mimics the tasks and challenges of the new job (service window, line cook, truck manager). Be transparent and tell them that you are using this experiment to test their ability. Make it short-term, outlining clear success criteria and an evaluation timeline. Be careful not to invisibly promote someone without recognizing their contributions. Permanently providing more responsibility without a change in title or pay can sap motivation.

Test Employees With These Simple Steps

  • Superior Results. Does the candidate consistently post superior results in the work they do? Superior results mean a person has expanded their job duties and brought insights to your food truck team. Basically, superior results mean a person has over delivered in their current position. This is the key indicator that they’re ready for more.
  • Employee Values. Does the employee consistently demonstrate the behaviors you want to see from your staff? Are they customer-focused? Does they share ideas? When it comes to promotions, the question about values is the same, does the candidate live and breathe them?

Promoting internal candidates is a fast way to attract good people to your food truck. Best of all, it keeps your top performers inside your business.

RELATED: Simple Staff Training Tips For Your Food Truck Employees

The Bottom Line

Promotion is more art than science. You can never be sure an employee will succeed in a different role. You can only know if they have passed these two simple tests. You may not get every promotion right, but you can be sure that if you have a tenure based promotion system you’re sure to push your best employees to your competitors that don’t.

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