How to Post a Job Opening for Your Restaurant on Instagram

There is a piece of printer paper taped inside the door of half the restaurants on Warren Ave. It says NOW HIRING in big letters, and under that, a phone number. It has been there a long time. The tape is yellow.

The Instagram version of that paper is a plain white square that says NOW HIRING, posted once at eleven at night, never mentioned again. A restaurant hiring post on Instagram can work better than the door sign, because the people who follow you already like your food and already know where you are. But it only works if the post answers the questions a person has before they will bother to message you. Most of them answer none.

Your followers are customers first, applicants second

This is the part owners get wrong. Your Instagram audience is not a job board. It is mostly people who ate your food once and liked a picture of it. Some small slice of them need a job, or have a cousin who does.

That changes how you write the post. You are not posting to a crowd of applicants. You are posting to regulars, and asking them to pass it along. So write it like you are telling a regular, out loud, at the register: we need a cook on the grill, nights, weekends included, start around this much, come in and ask for Sam.

It also means the post should not be ugly. A plain text square on a feed full of food looks like a mistake. It gets scrolled past by the exact people who would have told their nephew about it.

Say the shift, say the money, say where to go

Here is what somebody deciding whether to message you needs to know, in order:

What the job is. Not "staff." Line cook. Server. Cashier. Dishwasher. Shawarma guy. Delivery driver with own car. Barista with latte art or barista we will train. Be exact, because "staff" gets you fifty messages from people who want whatever is easiest and none from the person who has been on a grill for six years.

The hours. Full time or part time. Days or nights. Weekends required or not. This filters more people than anything else on the list, which is the point. You do not want eleven conversations that end at "oh, I can't do Fridays."

The pay. Say a range, or say "pay depends on experience, starts at" and give the floor. Owners hate this one. They want to negotiate. But a post without pay reads as a post that is hiding something, and the strongest candidates are the ones who will not waste an evening finding out. A range costs you nothing and kills the back-and-forth.

Where to apply. One place. Not "DM us or call or come in or email." Pick one. We will get to which.

Whether you train. If you will take someone green and teach them, say it in those words. There are people who will never message you because they assume every kitchen wants five years.

That is five lines. It fits in a caption. It fits on a Story with room left over.

Pick one door and keep it open

If you send people to your DMs, somebody has to actually read the DMs, every day, and answer. Applicants assume silence is a no. Three days later they are working somewhere else. If nobody on your staff checks the inbox before close, do not use DMs.

A phone number works for a lot of family-run spots, especially when the owner is the one hiring. The downside is calls during the dinner rush. Tell people when to call: "call between 2 and 4."

"Come in and ask for" is still the best one for kitchen roles in metro Detroit. It screens for people who will actually show up, which is the whole problem. Give a name and a window. "Come in Monday through Thursday, 3 to 5, ask for Hassan."

Whatever you pick, put it in the bio too while the role is open. People will find the post, then go to your profile to check if you are real.

Shoot the kitchen, do not design a flyer

The hiring post that works best is thirty seconds of the actual job. The grill at 7pm. The espresso machine. The prep table at 9am with nobody around yet. Somebody who already works there saying what they do and how long they have been there.

Two reasons. It stops the scroll in a way a text graphic never will, and it tells the applicant what they are walking into. People take jobs at places that look organized and look like they treat the staff alright. You can show both in half a minute without saying either out loud.

If nobody on your team wants to be filmed, shoot the room and the hands and talk over it. Hands on a knife, hands on a pan, hands on a cup. That is enough.

Post it more than once, and post it in Stories

One post is a day of reach and then it is gone. Run the opening as a thread: feed post on Monday, Story reminder midweek, Story again on the weekend when people are off and scrolling. Keep a highlight called Hiring so anyone who lands on the profile a week later still sees it.

If you want to put money behind it, know that Meta treats job ads as a special category and limits how narrowly you can aim them. You will not get the tight local targeting you get on a food ad. A small boost on a job post can still reach past your followers, but do not expect it to behave like your usual Meta ads. Often the better move is posting it organically and asking your staff to repost it to their own Stories. Their friends are the hire.

Take it down when the job is filled

A hiring post that stays up three months after you hired somebody tells people you cannot keep staff. Delete the post, archive the highlight, pull the line out of your bio. Then post something about the new person. A ten-second clip of them on their first week does more for your next opening than any flyer, because the next person applying can see somebody got hired and is still there.

If staying on top of all of this — the shoot, the caption, the reposts, the archive once it is filled — is the part that never happens, that is the part we take over; you can book a call with us and we will handle the posting schedule while you handle the hiring. Or just call (313) 633-5714 and tell us what the opening is.