How to make everyone want to work at your restaurant brand

According to Pew Research Center, 63% of U.S. workers who voluntarily left a job in 2021 said a ‘lack of opportunities for advancement’ was one reason they left. The same percentage that cited low pay.

Along with advancement, people are also thinking about what happens to them while they work for you. What will they learn? Will anyone trust them with something harder? Will they be more capable, or have better options, after spending a few years there?

We understand this when someone chooses a university, for example. The degree matters, but so do the people they'll meet, the opportunities they'll get, and the person they expect to become. We understand it when someone accepts a demanding job because they believe the experience will open doors.

The argument I want to pose here is that restaurant brands should make that same promise, more deliberately.

An industry the majority of people grow up in

The National Restaurant Association reported 15.7 million U.S. restaurant and foodservice jobs in March 2026. Within the narrower limited-service restaurant category, which includes QSR and fast casual, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show about 4.6 million payroll jobs on average during 2025.

The association also reports that 51% of U.S. adults say their first regular job was in restaurants or foodservice, and, more critically, that nine in ten restaurant managers began in entry-level positions (90%!). Those are different populations, but together they show both how many people enter working life here (A MAJORITY!) and that progression through the industry already happens. I grew up watching that progression at our family business, ChurroMania. Most of the people who became important to the business developed alongside it over years.

What we want is for someone applying to a restaurant job to see development as a reason to choose that employer in the first place. It should be something we can describe and deliver, not something that depends entirely on whether they happen to work under an unusually good manager.

A person may not plan to stay in restaurants forever, but they can still choose the job because they expect it to make them better at whatever comes next.

A promise that survives the employee leaving

McKinsey et al. offer an example of supporting people through promotion and departure.

Its historical up-or-out model involved assessing whether consultants would advance over time, with those judged unlikely to progress encouraged to leave.

McKinsey describes its departure and alumni support as "a true continuation of the people promise we make when someone joins the firm." It maintains career opportunities, professional connections, and continued learning beyond employment. Although this process is not guaranteed placement in an incredible next job, that is usually the case.

The proposition is attractive: your time here should improve your options, including options outside the company. A restaurant doesn't need to carbon copy consulting's hours or promotion policy to take that proposition seriously.

It could mean helping someone become a capable shift leader, teaching them how to understand store economics, or giving them experience training another person. Those are the human soft skills that are even more valuable today. A manager willing to give a useful reference, introduce someone to another operator, or help them prepare for a larger role is what true human leadership looks like.

We'd rather employ someone who believes the work is taking them somewhere than someone who stays because they don't think they can leave. Leading by opportunity, not fear.

Advancement needs something attached to it

Raising Cane's shows that parts of this model have positive results in restaurants.

Its published career path runs from Crewmember through several management roles to Restaurant Leader and, for selected high performers, Restaurant Partner. Its careers page says people may be invited into the partner program after exceptional results and describes long-term incentives that share profits. This doesn’t mean equity for every employee (like startups, or more closely related, Publix, the largest employee owned company in the US) or a fixed percentage of restaurant sales. It is a selective path with financial upside tied to the business. It’s all about creating the right incentives.

Reporting in the San Diego Union-Tribune also describes partners being compensated when they promote someone. That should matters to us because it attaches an incentive to directly developing another person, alongside sharing in restaurant profits.

In company-authored sponsored content published by USA Today in August 2025, Raising Cane's put Restaurant Partner turnover at 4% and said it had paid $32 million in long-term incentives since the program began.

I wouldn't turn that into a universal retention claim, but it's a concrete example of a restaurant employer making progression and financial participation part of the opportunity. Compare that with telling someone to act like an owner while giving them no additional authority, no development path, and no share in the result and decide why that's the case.

AI should help people qualify for the next role

AI could help employees learn from work that nobody has written down properly: the explanation a good manager gives, the exception they recognize, the reasoning behind a correction. The people who know the operation still have to check what the system learns.

That could make more of an experienced operator's knowledge available to a new employee without requiring the operator to repeat every explanation from scratch. It could also free that operator to coach the parts that need practice with another person; the human part.

In a customer-support study, less-experienced workers benefited substantially from AI assistance, and assisted agents with two months of tenure performed comparably to unassisted agents with more than six months. Technology helps distribute effective working practices rather than merely removing positions.

We want to use that capacity to give people progressively harder things to do: explain a decision, coach a colleague, understand why a shift worked, or take responsibility for improving part of the guest experience. The employee should be able to point to something they can now do that they couldn't do when they arrived.

Some will become the next generation of restaurant leaders while others will take those skills elsewhere. What we are also proposing is a person leaving for an opportunity they've grown into can be evidence that the job served them well.

We should still watch avoidable departures closely. Losing someone because they felt stuck is different from helping them take a genuine next step, and a single turnover number can hide that difference. But that’s exactly what this method should help eliminate.

That 63% is why we don't think this can remain a secondary employment benefit. A restaurant job should pay fairly, teach something useful, and offer a believable next step. Given how many people begin their working lives in this industry, we have an unusually large opportunity to make that promise mean something. The big enabler of this change is the right technology in the right places.