It’s no coincidence that Mondays deliver especially busy mornings for Nando’s in-house recruiters. Lingering in the minds of some new job-hungry souls is the memory of good times over the weekend at a Nando’s, perhaps having feasted on grilled peri-peri chicken and sipped a cold beer or two, set against an aurally colourful backdrop of world music. And voila, the restaurant chain’s online recruitment inbox fills up to a weekly high with CVs.

Sean Thomas, the restaurant chain’s new head of HR in the UK, understands this ongoing scenario.

“I always remember talking to someone who worked in the fire brigade, and she said after London’s Burning had been shown on a Sunday night, the amount of calls they got on a Monday morning from people who wanted to join the fire brigade was unbelievable,” says Thomas, smiling sagely. “And it’s the same at Nando’s. On Monday, we have a massive amount of traffic because people have been engaged in the business over the weekend.”

That said, those CVs could come in handy. Over the coming months, Thomas and his recruiters will be stepping up their search for more new recruits who buy into the Nando’s ethos of ’life and soul’. Over the next five years, Nando’s plans to add 100-120 new eateries across the UK. New outlets will open in Edinburgh and Glasgow this month and Thomas told Recruiter that Nando’s will hire “quite a lot - in the hundreds” of restaurant managerial staff this year alone.

Thomas is a new recruit to Nando’s himself, having recently joined from housewares and furniture retailer Habitat (see Recruiter, 20 January). Barely two months into the new job, Thomas is closely scrutinising and troubleshooting Nando’s candidate attraction system. In addition to enjoying that post-weekend application flurry, and receiving an average of 50 to 60 direct applications per day, the restaurant chain currently works with three external recruiting partners. However, Nando’s would like to increase the percentage of applications received directly from the website to 20% from “running around 10 to 15%”, he says.

“We have an awful lot of traffic to our site. But what we don’t do is convert enough of that traffic into the number of applications into management roles. What we need to do is attract top management talent, and direct that traffic to our website more than we do,” he says.

To date, 48% of the promotions made at Nando’s involve internal candidates. Ideally, along with increasing the percentage of hires made directly through website applications, Thomas and company would like to see 15% of applications acquired through word-of-mouth and recruitment agencies contributing about 25%. The last figure reflects an aim to reduce agency spend, but he adds: “There is great opportunity for the partners who work with us to provide a number of great people in the coming year.”

A missing ingredient in maximising Nando’s direct recruitment process for now is an applicant tracking system, “so the applications come direct into an email inbox”, he says. “What we’re going to be looking at over the next six to nine months is to an application into our website, and then we can have a database of candidates we can actually search. Currently, we’ve got a dedicated person who does that, but through the email inbox.

“There’s a lot of traffic coming our way, but it’s more entry level. We’re looking for more restaurant managers.”

To understand Nando’s restaurant staffing philosophy, one starts with the concept of the patrao. The Portuguese word means “head of the family”, and at Nando’s, which celebrates its dual Portuguese-South African heritage, the patrao is the restaurant manager, a familial figure as the name suggests, entrusted with taking care of customers and employees. Each restaurant also has two or three assistant managers. Rounding out the staff are the Nandocas - supervisors, training buddies, cashiers and the grillers. Thomas estimates that each restaurant would have “between 18 and 25 [fulltime and part-time] staff to run that restaurant really well”.

Anyone who’s ever enjoyed Nando’s casual dining experience knows that even though it cheerfully bridges the gap between fast food and fine dining, it retains one key benefit of the fast food model: you pay for your food at the beginning. For Nando’s, that equates to sparing the expense of waiting staff.

“My second week [at Nando’s], I worked in a restaurant. I needed to understand how it worked, and what the processes were like,” Thomas explains. “What I have learnt is the simplicity of the process: why you can get your food quickly to your table, why you don’t need a lot of people to actually deliver that kind of experience. I don’t think I would have understood that had I not been behind the scenes and seen what everyone’s role in the restaurant is. The business model is extremely slick.

“That puts us in a great place in the market,” he adds.

Positioning Nando’s as the top choice employer in the restaurant industry is a key challenge for Thomas this year - an ambition shared undoubtedly by most of Nando’s competitors. Fortunately for Thomas, it appears that at Nando’s, some of the groundwork has already been established; for example, patrao turnover is under 10%. “Once people get into that position and are performing, they don’t leave. There isn’t a better job as a restaurant manager,” Thomas contends.

From a careful start last year of four graduates, Nando’s graduate recruitment scheme is set to expand to an intake of six to eight this year. Thomas also wants to grow the programme both in terms of the universities it targets for talent and its developmental scope once the graduates are in place. “It’s very early days, but I think it should give the people coming in the opportunity to experience all parts of the business, and it should test them and give them responsibility to deliver - and show themselves to be the talent they are identified to be,” Thomas says.

Thomas first got a taste of restaurant life as a store manager at McDonald’s. He later joined Sainsbury’s where he stayed for 10 years, working first in “very much operational” roles. But he found a new direction during a year’s secondment into a regional level of the supermarket chain’s learning and development department.
After the secondment, he moved into HR. “It felt like the perfect transition - to have the operational background, a learning and development background and then moving into HR,” he says.

“Sainsbury’s were very good to me,” Thomas adds. However, when he reached his 10th anniversary with Sainsbury’s, he felt it was time to move on. Thomas’s next job was at Gatwick Airport with airport consortium BAA, where he spent 15 months working on a restructuring project. Then the call came from Habitat.

There, the key challenge was finding “really commercial retail managers” with strong sales skills able to empathise with customers looking for just the right pieces to decorate their homes. “We did it. There are some fantastic, great people there. But it’s a tough thing to find,” he admits.

Equally hard to find is a restaurant chain with a sense of humour. But Thomas has a good laugh when asked what he thinks about Nando’s being identified as a “guilty pleasure” in a recent issue of TimeOut magazine. “Nando’s is about having fun while making money,” he says. “Happy people equals happy customers equals happy bank manager - that’s one of our key straplines. That says we have a sense of humour. I think a sense of humour runs through the organisation.” So being referred to as a guilty pleasure is OK for the employer branding? “Absolutely!” he enthuses.

The ’life and soul’ theme is at the heart of Nando’s attraction and recruitment strategy for its candidates - and the same vibrancy and shared values such as courage and integrity are also core to what Nando’s is looking for in its suppliers. “We have a trusting, lively culture, and we want people to have fun while making money. If we’re going to have a partnership, we want the third parties to understand how it works and how the culture is lived throughout the organisation,” Thomas says.

“We probably wouldn’t use anyone who wouldn’t be willing to do it,” he acknowledges. “But I’ve found that with the organisations that want to work with Nando’s, it’s not me instigating that conversation, it’s them.” With external recruiters, for instance: “I’m impressed that recruiters are thinking differently, and in 2010, thinking very much about how to engage with the organisation and how it works.”

Clearly the external recruiters become believers in the Nando’s ’life and soul’. So much so, in fact, that all four of Thomas’s in-house recruiters joined as a result of working as external recruiters on the Nando’s account. “I guess you feel a brightness when you walk into a Nando’s,” he muses. “It’s a great place to be.”