Skift Take
For the Dead Rabbit's owners, this investment was worth every penny.
Hiring at The Dead Rabbit, a world-renowned bar located in lower Manhattan, is an exhaustive process.
There’s the questionnaire on the application (“Tell us a story about the best place you’ve ever worked. What was your best day there? How did you know when it was time to go?”), an intensive interview to gauge ambition, curiosity, and emotional intelligence, a trial run with the team, and then — maybe — a job offer.
“We don’t just hire,” Jessica Friedman, the Dead Rabbit’s director of operations, said. “We have to hire the right person.” She was in charge of vetting over 700 resumes for about 20 new positions that opened up when The Dead Rabbit completed its lower bar expansion in March. (Friedman made sure that she contacted everyone who applied.)
The hiring process has to be rigorous because once the papers have been signed, new staffers are enrolled in an intensive training and career development program that The Dead Rabbit has been building out as a proprietary online learning management system for the past two years.
“It’s expensive to bring someone on and train them and then realize it doesn’t work out,” Friedman said.
The system is the kind of in-depth workforce management platform that would be an innovative move for a company with 50 locations and thousands of employees. At an operation like The Dead Rabbit, a small company with two locations and 100 staff members, it’s extremely rare.
“Transitioning from paper manuals or powerpoint presentations is a c
