News

November 24, 2013 By David Hall

Chefs are you reading? – Recruitment Scams, How To Spot Them!

If there is such a place as Chef Jobs hell (aside from the one I inhabit) then there’s a special place reserved there for a certain Sir Chirr Rouchael. To western ears, especially those of us born and raised in the Anglosphere, that might sound like an unlikely name to choose when cooking up a catering & hospitality recruitment scam. You’d assume, wouldn’t you, that any recruitment scammer or shakedown merchant wouldn’t want you to pause, for long enough, while reading his “job pitch” to wonder to yourself about the peculiarities of their fictional name.

August 27, 2013 By David Hall

Cage Fight Between Michelin Chef and Prominent Food Critic Highlights Power Shift

Chefs, Foodies, Restaurant Critics and even the general public in Ireland will, in the last 48 hours, have found it difficult not to have noticed a bare knuckle fight has broken out between one of Ireland’s most celebrated Chefs and one of it’s more well known restaurant critics. Chefs, all of them, hate a bad write up and critics, some of them, are believed to relish writing them. A, ahem, recipe for conflict. However until recently it’s been the critic who’s held the whip hand. Not anymore. Oliver Dunne the chef in this brawl has created and successfully steered

August 1, 2013 By David Hall

Dear Chef De Partie here’s your Job Requirements! Now shut up and apply!

In a recent post I raised the question of whether Chefs Pay and Benefits are a Problem in Ireland? In the course of examining the thorny topic of chefs pay I found that before long I got to the subject of competing for chefs, competing for their services and how, it seems to me at least, despite everest sized pile of data that says a real competition is in play, most caterers, hoteliers, and restaurateurs etc have somehow managed to

strict photo — Is This What People See When They See Your Ad?

July 18, 2013 By David Hall

Chefs Pay and Benefits a Problem in Ireland?

It’s acknowledged that there is a severe shortage of chefs in Ireland right now. Not just right now, it’s been ongoing for a several years already and employers are really feeling the pain. The jobs are there, but the chefs are not. The job boards are full of employers advertising these jobs and, for the most part, after their campaigns have expired they still have that gaping vacancy they started out with, they’ll be a few hundred euro lighter and they’ll have lost precious time. Then they call us, or someone like us,

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May 21, 2013 By David Hall

Chefs! Don’t Doctor Your CV

Is there a Chef, whether in the hunt for a job or not, who doesn’t think their CV could be a little better with some subtle surgery? If there are, then my guess is they account for a very small percentage of active chefs. I’ll pin my own colours to the mast right now and say that it’s always better to resist any temptation to doctor a CV or Resume. I’ll now spend the rest of this post justifying my very rigid and inflexible position on the matter. If you can’t be bothered reading to the end then it amounts to this,

April 17, 2013 By David Hall

Chefs – How Long Should You Stay in Your Job?

There’s no “one” correct answer to how long a chef should stay in a given chef job. What’s acceptable and what’s beneficial, to the chef and the employer, will be different according to context and the stage each chef is at in his or her career. Move job too often and your value as a chef will fall, your Chef CV will become ragged. Employers don’t and won’t want to have to go back to square one and look for your replacement in six months time (exception being seasonal operations or fixed term contracts). On the other hand stay too long in the same kitchen and you risk a couple of things, the first is being typecast i.e. he/she is an Accor Chef, or a IHG Chef, or a Hilton Chef. The other risk is that you become a prisoner of your employer. They’ll realise that at a certain point you long passed the optimal time to move and that making an advantageous move would now be very difficult for you. You’re theirs, and all that implies, and the one thing strongly implied here is that you’re going to be taken for granted, and that’s seldom got much in the way of an upside.