Pared app helps restaurants get staffed on short notice

It was a Friday night in the middle of the holiday season when chef and owner of San Francisco eatery Frances ran into a miserable obstacle: staffing shortage. The dishwasher didn't show, and someone else had called out.

But 35 minutes later, after hopping on the Pared app: "A dishwasher walked in the door.”

Perello’s predicament is a long-standing problem for the industry, and it’s only getting worse. The number of full-service restaurants in major cities is increasing—in New York it rose to 9,809 in the third quarter of 2018, from 8,563 in the third quarter of 2016—but millennials are less inclined to commit to a full-time schedule. This makes dishwashers harder to hold on to. Staffing problems ultimately affect diners, who might be wondering why their roast chicken is taking so long to come out. According to statistics from the scheduling app 7shifts, the average tenure of a restaurant employee is one month and 26 days.

The Pared app, designed to solve this problem, was introduced in December 2015 by Will Pacio, a Stanford graduate who cooked at the French Laundry, the legendary Napa Valley restaurant, and Dave Lu, a veteran of Apple and Yahoo! who founded fan club network Fanpop. At the start, Pared was a Bay Area-based program for filling such jobs as dishwashers and prep cooks. It’s since grown to include many more positions, including servers, baristas, and even oyster shuckers. In March 2018, Pared expanded to New York, where it now has several high-profile clients, including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Tom Colicchio, and Tao Group. Pacio and Lu are expanding to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., by the end of the year, with the goal of being in all the major U.S. metropolitan markets by 2020. “Every day, I beg them to come to Los Angeles,” says Perello, who’s opening a restaurant, M. Georgina, there in the summer.

For employers, Pared’s benefits are easy to see: The cost of losing and replacing an hourly worker is $5,864 per employee, according to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. The 2016 Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the restaurant sector experiences annual employee turnover of 73 percent; over the course of 16 months, a restaurant can expect to lose its entire staff.

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