Tips on hiring a Professional Bartender

How best to hire a Professional Bartender

Bartenders play an important role in making or breaking your business. Getting a good bartender might be a bit hard but it is possible if you follow this guide throughout. A Bartenderr must be very friendly, must know all drinks available in the stock by heart, and must know how to keep an inventory of the business, and must be certified on alcohol safety issues.

Before you can get a very good bartender to employ to handle your business, you must check out his work experience, you must also check for someone who has the natural ability of a salesperson. These are all that will be discussed in this article.

Evaluate Experience and Work History

When you are employing a new bartender, you must check out his work experience. Never employ someone who recently graduated from a bartending school. Though, you might employ new graduate on somewhere else so he can learn and gather experience of a bartender before he can be employed, but not as a bartender. I won’t employ them straight into my business because they might not be used to such situation before. Consider a new school graduate who has bartended in a campus bar coming out after school and employing him straight to my business like a country club – no, it not a wise decision because the situation quite differs in the two environments.

Hire a bar backs

Employing a recent graduate as a bar back is really wonderful opportunity to learn more about bartending in the ‘real world’. A bartender in a very busy bar will not be able to take all the inventory of drink glassware smashed, clean the glassware, stock the shelves and order bar supplies. It eventually qualifies a bar back to become a very good bartender.

Get a Sommelier or Cicerone

A sommelier is an individual certified in the understandings and recognition of all types of wine. Sometimes, they make sure they taste each bottle of wine before serving it out to customers to be sure it matched the expected quality. It’s good especially if you run a tap room, wine bar, or drink paying menu.

Cicerone, on the other hand, is an expert in any beer related issues including flavours, styles, and quality are all he understands and can give you the best storage, handling and right drinking glassware for each beer.

Check His Safety Certification

Ask your prospective bartender if he is certified in ServSafe alcohol on the need to handle over drinking, underage drinking, easy detection of someone drunk, and how to handle alcohol induce violence etc. It is very important that he get certified on this because it can lead to heavy fines in your business, imprisonment, and increase insurance costs etc.

Train Your Bartender as a Salesperson

Your bartender must be an aggressive salesperson, not just a passive and indifferent individual who seat and expects ‘all’ customers to come to him. He should be proactive by making the first move. The bartender should be able to discern anyone who is yet to make a decision on what to drink by going to the person and suggests to them in a friendly way. He should be able to suggest drink from the more expensive ones to the least expensive ones. He also must be able to match up the individual personality with a drink they might like if they are yet to decide.