While Keiser is looking for applicants to be comfortable with the environment, he’s not hung up on kitchen skills just yet.
“We’re really looking for people that have leadership skills, communication skills, critical thinking skills, team-building skills,” he says.
In the mornings during Discovery Week, applicants further reveal those skill sets through the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test, personality tests and a GED equivalency test measuring math and verbal skills. While Keiser considers these results, he doesn’t put too much weight on them.
“We’ve had people that have scored off the charts that haven’t done real well working in the restaurants,” he says. “But it does give us an insight in terms of how that person is wired.”
To really understand what makes applicants tick, Keiser and other executives — including Craig Culver — interview them at the end of Discovery Week.
“Try to understand: What are their goals or objectives?” he says. “Most of them have some motivation to get into this. And if their motivations aren’t aligned with what we know it takes to be successful in this business, that’s probably a deal-breaker.”
Because the right motivation requires a lot of commitment, Keiser wants to make sure candidates are sincerely willing and able to make necessary sacrifices. Would their family support relocation? What if their July Fourth tradition at the lake couldn’t happen on July Fourth?
He also tries to read current employees’ interactions with applicants. Now that they’ve worked together a week, Keiser observes how well they mesh.
“You can tell sometimes by the body language of our team members, and you can see by the interaction of people, what they talk about,” he says. “The team member, if they’re leaving the shift, do they come over and say goodbye (to the applicant), or do they just leave because maybe they won’t see this person ever again? Are there hugs, or is it just pleasantries? There’s a lot of collective input from people that goes into this.”
To gather all that input, Keiser brings together everyone who interacted with the applicant on the following Monday. It’s crucial that opinions are kept quiet — especially from the top — until decision time.
“We don’t talk about the candidates during the week when they’re here,” Keiser says. “Myself or for Craig — if we met with somebody and said, ‘We really think they’re great,’ or, ‘Boy, I don’t think they’re very good,’ — because of our positions, we would taint somebody else’s insight.”
But come Monday, there’s no holding back. By engaging several team members around the decision, he gets a better-rounded view of applicants. Plus, by this point, he’s given applicants plenty opportunities to self-select themselves.
2. Train and develop your team
Discovery Week is just the appetizer for new franchisees. Once they’re on board, they dive into an intensive 16-week training course. The first 12 weeks are spent at the restaurants around Culver’s headquarters in Prairie du Sac — about two and a half of those in a classroom.
“Some of that would be dedicated to food safety, then everything from how to conduct training, how to use the training tools, how to conduct local marketing, to accounting practices, payroll, labor laws and presentation skills,” he says.
Franchisees spend the rest of the time mastering each workstation in the restaurant, not just learning what happens but also why.
“The product and techniques have to be followed,” Keiser says. “But part of the burden for us is to ensure that we have a policy or a procedure or a product or an ingredient that makes sense, that we can actually back it up and make a business case for it. When we do a good job with those decisions, we make it easier for the franchisee, that they aren’t thinking of doing it a different way.”
Throughout the program, trainers test franchisees and even reward the highest scores. Like school, they have to maintain passing grades to advance.
“If they aren’t cutting it in one area or another, then they have to go back and revisit it,” Keiser says. “A few times, we’ve actually had to extend the training a few days because they weren’t getting their arms around some aspect of the business. There’s a lot of testing, measuring and follow-up that goes into it.”
The ultimate test comes in the last four weeks, when new franchisees open two restaurants, facilitating a week of training and a week of opening for each.
“That’s where the dynamics really change, because when they’re working in our restaurants, the team members basically know their jobs,” Keiser says. “But now, they have to become the expert. Now, the people ask them questions. Now, they’ve got to help inexperienced team members overcome challenges of getting the job done.
“If they’ve never been through an opening before, they’re kind of standing there wide-eyed like, ‘What the heck’s going on here?’ The second time they do it, they really start to understand the challenges they’re going to face when they do the same process in their very own Culver’s restaurant.”
But it can’t be all work all the time. Most training programs at Culver’s include a cookout at Craig and Lea Culver’s home, or there’s a patio at the office that makes a perfect casual spot for serving beer and appetizers.
“You’ve got to look for some of these social times to get to know people on an individual basis and not make it all just about the business,” Keiser says.
NEXT: Staying present and engaged after training
