You Hired Holiday Temp Staff. Here's How to Get Them Menu-Ready in 3 Days
Hey Team!
If you're hiring holiday temps right now, here's the honest answer: three focused days is enough to get them functional on the floor. Not perfect. Functional. That's the goal.
Thanksgiving week is two weeks out for most of us, and if your temp staff starts Monday, you don't have six weeks of onboarding runway. You have the time between now and their first real shift. So let's talk about how to use it.
Day one is about the menu, and the menu only. Not your full menu. Not your seasonal specials sheet, not your modifier grid, not your allergen binder. The 20 items that account for most of what you actually sell. At Black Barrel Tavern, I can tell you exactly which items those are because I've watched the ticket printer for years. At your place, you probably already know them too. Your apps, your two or three most popular burgers or sandwiches, your top shareable, your best-selling dessert, your highest-volume drinks. Write them down. That's your day-one list.
For each of those 20 items, your new staff needs two things: what's in it, and how to talk about it. Not a memorized script. Just a sentence or two that sounds like a real person describing food they've actually tasted. "The queso comes out super hot, it's got two kinds of melted cheese and roasted jalapeños, we serve it with house chips" is way more useful than reading the menu description back to the guest word for word. Walk your temps through each item out loud. Better yet, have them taste a few. The items they try on day one they'll describe confidently on Thursday.
Keep day one to two or three hours. You're not trying to build expertise. You're building a foundation they can stand on.
Day two is allergens and modifiers. This is not optional, and it's not just about liability. Guests with serious allergies are going to be at your tables over the holiday. Your temp staff needs to know which of your top items contain the big ones: tree nuts, peanuts, gluten, dairy, shellfish. They don't need to memorize your entire 14-page menu's allergen chart. They need to know your most ordered items, which allergens show up in them, and what to do when a guest flags something. The answer to that last one is almost always: go ask the kitchen, don't guess.
Modifiers are the other half of day two. What can actually be changed on your menu and what can't. Can the sandwich be made gluten-free? Does going dairy-free on that dish actually work or does it just leave you with something that doesn't taste right? What substitutions does your kitchen want to know about at the time of order versus what they can handle during prep? Your temps are going to get these questions at the table. They need an honest answer ready, not a deer-in-headlights look.
Two hours on day two. Maybe less if your menu is tight. The goal is confidence, not perfection.
Day three is where it comes together. First thing in the morning, give them a short quiz. Not a written exam, not a printed test. Put it on their phones. At ShiftTrained, the platform I built, we generate these straight from the menu so your staff can quiz themselves anytime, anywhere. But whatever method you use, the quiz should be short, 10 to 15 questions, focused on exactly what you covered in days one and two. Top dishes, key ingredients, allergen flags, common modifiers. If someone stumbles on something, that's information you needed before Thursday, not after.
After the quiz, the rest of day three is a shadowed shift. Pair every new temp with someone who's been on your floor long enough to know the rhythms. Not to babysit them, but to give them a reference point they can turn to when something comes up. The veteran answers the question, the temp files the answer away, and they both move through the shift together. By the end of that shift, your new staff has a real feel for pace, for the physical layout of the floor, for how your kitchen communicates, for all the things that don't show up in a quiz but matter enormously when a table of six orders all at once.
A few things that tend to go wrong with holiday temp onboarding and are worth avoiding. Don't try to cover everything in day one. I've watched operators dump a full operations manual on someone their first day and wonder why they're still confused by the end of week two. Focus is what makes short timelines work. Also don't skip the quiz because you feel like there's no time. The quiz is how you find out who actually retained what you taught. Skipping it means you'll discover the gaps during service instead of before it, and that's a worse problem.
The other thing I'd say: talk to your kitchen about this. Your cooks and your prep staff are going to be the ones fielding questions about modifications and allergens when tickets start flying. If they know you've spent two days covering this stuff with your new hires, they'll have more patience when a temp comes back to ask a question. Most kitchens will cut a new hire way more slack when they know the front of house actually put in the work.
Three days sounds short. It is short. But focused three days beats a vague two weeks every single time. Your temps don't need to know everything. They need to know the right things, and they need to know them well enough to walk onto a busy floor with some confidence behind them.
Get them there before Thursday. You'll feel the difference.
Have a great day! — Terry Psaltakis
Your AI Restaurant Guy
For more on putting this into practice, see how ShiftTrained approaches restaurant staff training.
