Waldo, l’appli qui repense l’embauche en restauration

The rite of passage of the in-person CV drop at restaurants and bars has changed since COVID. It’s anecdotal, sure, but ask around: younger generation of hospitality workers aren't interested in walking into a neighbourhood and handing their resume to whoever happened to be near the door, hoping it made it to the right person. Restaurants have since adapted, throwing listings on Indeed or going so far as to post stories and in-feed posts, either way hoping for the best.

It hasn’t really been working, though. "You'll put a job posting on Indeed for a server position and get flooded with applications, a lot of whom don't even live in the country," says Dillon Griffin, co-owner of NDG Luncheonette and the pub Honey Martin. "It's just not a tool that really understands the personable nature of what we do."

Indeed, he argues, was built for corpos like Tim Hortons, not for owner-operated restaurants where the person doing the hiring is also the one wiping down tables at the end of the night. The sign-up process is complicated, the costs are steep for small businesses—charged per CV received, not per interview—and the platform optimizes for volume over fit.

Instagram hasn't fared much better. The audience following a well-regarded restaurant is mostly customers and tourists, not the pool of enthusiastic industry workers a GM needs to find on short notice. "If you're a top spot and you're nationally ranked," Griffin says, "having to put on your Stories every four months that you need a line cook—it's not that great of a look."

The best case, according to Griffin, is that you get flooded with DMs, set up a round of interviews, and half the candidates ghost you. Worst case, you find nobody and start again.

Griffin has been watching this play out for 14 years across restaurants in NDG, Saint-Henri, Costa Rica, the Caribbean, and Los Angeles. He's owned and operated enough rooms to know that the staffing problem is a universal truth of the industry.

"I would say that's one of the things about owning spots in multiple geographic locations," he says. "You realize the problems you're experiencing as a restaurateur are just problems that other restaurateurs are experiencing."

About 13 years ago, he had an idea for something better and waited for someone else to build it. Nobody did, so earlier this year, so he set out to co-found an app that could address the problem.

Build it and they will come

Waldo is a Montreal-made hiring app built exclusively for the hospitality industry. Job seekers browse a card stack of available positions at restaurants, cafés, bars, and hotels actively hiring in the city, swipe to apply, and when a match is mutual, a direct chat opens between the applicant and the hiring manager.

"By the time you've created a match on the app," Griffin says, "the user has decided they're interested in you and you've decided you're interested in them." A CV, he points out, tells you nothing about whether someone actually wants to work at your specific place while a mutual match does.

The swipe mechanic is a structural choice. One of Griffin's core frustrations with existing platforms was how easily they'd been gamed by automated applications. A card-stack interface is significantly harder for bots to infiltrate, which keeps the signal-to-noise ratio higher for the business owners who can’t afford to waste time sifting.

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The best case, according to Griffin, is that you get flooded with DMs, set up a round of interviews, and half the candidates ghost you. Worst case, you find nobody and start again.

About 13 years ago, he had an idea for something better and waited for someone else to build it. Nobody did, so earlier this year, so he set out to co-found an app that could address the problem.