Project reference · Restaurants
When the candidate is the one deciding.
A restaurant group in the Gulf needed hostesses and waiting staff from Ukraine — dozens of them, on modest salaries, two years from home. Finding people who could do the job was never the hard part. Finding people who would still say yes after reading the offer was the whole project.
3,246 screened in one wave
Reach
240 matched the brief
Fit
Five recorded reasons for no
Feedback
Four briefs across three years
Continuity
The numbers
What volume hiring actually converts at
These were counted at the time, three weeks into the campaign — not modelled afterwards. They are the reason we can price a brief like this honestly instead of optimistically.
The brief
What the client actually needed
Not a shortlist of people who could carry plates. A repeatable supply of front-of-house staff — hostesses, waiters and waitresses, supervisors and assistant managers — who would sign a two-year contract, pass a medical, obtain a visa, fly to a country they had never seen, and still be there in year two.
The group ran a well-known international restaurant brand under franchise and was opening new sites faster than it could staff them. The roles were entry-level and the salaries were entry-level. Everything difficult about the project followed from that one fact.
The hard parts
Where it gets difficult
The offer has to survive being read
At this wage level the bottleneck is not finding people, it is keeping them in the process once they see the numbers. We logged why candidates walked away and sent it back to the client as part of the reporting, because it is the only thing that tells you whether the package needs changing or the message does.
Advertising a job you cannot name
The client did not want its brand used in recruitment advertising or named to candidates before offer stage. That removes the strongest asset an entry-level overseas role has. The campaign had to sell the work, the country and the terms on their own merits, and be honest enough that nobody felt misled at signing.
Volume at this wage is a media buy
Job boards across dozens of Ukrainian cities, plus paid social, plus posts placed in regional community groups — each line costed before it ran and re-costed after. The second event in the same year was scaled to one day and fifteen candidates rather than three days and thirty-five, because by then we knew what the first one had actually produced.
The medical decides, not the interview
Pre-departure medicals with certified translations sat between a signed offer and a boarding pass, and the client had lost people at that stage before. So had the visa queue. Neither is inside a recruiter’s control, which is exactly why both belong on the plan from day one rather than in the last fortnight.
A two-year contract is not a job change
Shared accommodation, transport, duty meals, uniform, flights home on a fixed cycle — the terms around the salary matter more than the salary does, and candidates ask about them first. When one of them was missing from the brief, it showed up immediately as a reason people stopped answering.
Someone has to fly in, and be let in
Selection happened in Kyiv with the client’s own operations people in the room, which meant invitation letters and Ukrainian visas for them, a booked venue, an agenda and printed materials. And on arrival day at the other end, a named person waiting at the airport — without that detail confirmed, people genuinely do not board.
Feedback
Why the answer was no
Five reasons were recorded by the call team and reported to the client. Three of them are about the offer, not the candidate — which makes them the client’s to fix and ours to say out loud.
What we did
Advertise, screen, select, mobilise — then do it again
- A costed campaign across national job boards and paid social, budgeted line by line before it ran and reconciled after.
- Telephone screening against the client’s own criteria, with the reasons for every drop-off written down rather than absorbed.
- Candidate submissions in a fixed format — reference number, role, application form, photographs — sent daily during the busy weeks so the client could keep pace.
- Selection events in Kyiv with the client’s own managers, including their invitation letters and visas, the venue, the agenda and the printed materials; Skype rounds when flying in made no sense.
- Offer letters, a bilingual employment contract, pre-departure medicals with translations, visas, tickets and written mobilisation guidelines — through to a named person meeting the group on arrival.
Four briefs over three years, with the same people on both sides. The last one asked for roughly six times the headcount of the first — which is the only endorsement of this kind that means anything.
How we work
We do not show you another company’s name
The client, the brand and the people are not named here, and they will not be named in a meeting either. This one asked us to keep its brand out of recruitment advertising while the work was live, and that does not expire because the work ended. We are glad to talk this project through in detail — what we cannot do is discuss the last client that way with you, or you with the next one.
Next step
Hiring at volume, on a tight package?
Tell us the roles, the salary and what comes with it, and we will tell you what the funnel is likely to look like before you spend anything on advertising. Thirty minutes is usually enough.
