CulinaryHR: Structured Hiring for Restaurant Kitchens

CulinaryHR is a structured hiring platform for the restaurant industry, built to replace gut-feeling hiring with documented, observable proof of skill. I'm designing and developing the platform in collaboration with a Cornell doctoral candidate from the School of Hospitality.

Restaurant hiring is broken. Kitchens rely on unpaid trial shifts, gut instinct, and paper resumes to make hiring decisions. There's no structured evaluation, no documentation, and no way to build a bench of trusted talent over time. The result: high turnover, mismatched expectations, and a system that exploits chefs.

CulinaryHR introduces the concept of a structured, paid stage: a 1, 3, or 7-day working interview in real service conditions. Not a simulation. Actual production under actual pressure.

For Restaurants Restaurants post stages with structured role templates that capture station, cuisine, and brigade expectations. During the stage, they track skill, consistency, and brigade alignment in real time through structured evaluation that removes bias and replaces gut feelings with recorded evidence.

For Chefs Chefs create profiles and prove their skills through paid stages with real evaluation. Every stage is documented and fair by design. Their hands tell the story a resume cannot.

Retention Tracking The evaluation extends beyond the stage itself. 30, 60, and 90-day retention tracking lets restaurants know who truly belongs, turning a single stage into long-term hiring intelligence.

Talent Bench Over time, restaurants build a verified bench of chefs they've already seen in service. No more starting from zero every time a position opens.

TanStack for routing and data management

Convex for the real-time backend and database

Cursor as the AI-assisted development environment

Vercel for deployment and hosting

Pre-launch. Currently in active development.