About the job

Cook - Restaurant

Prepare, season, and cook dishes such as soups, meats, vegetables, or desserts in restaurants. May order supplies, keep records and accounts, price items on menu, or plan menu.

Top activities and tasks for this job:

• Inspect and clean food preparation areas, such as equipment and work surfaces, or serving areas to ensure safe and sanitary food-handling practices.
• Ensure freshness of food and ingredients by checking for quality, keeping track of old and new items, and rotating stock.
• Ensure food is stored and cooked at correct temperature by regulating temperature of ovens, broilers, grills, and roasters.
• Season and cook food according to recipes or personal judgment and experience.
• Turn or stir foods to ensure even cooking.
• Observe and test foods to determine if they have been cooked sufficiently, using methods such as tasting, smelling, or piercing them with utensils.
• Portion, arrange, and garnish food, and serve food to waiters or patrons.
• Weigh, measure, and mix ingredients according to recipes or personal judgment, using various kitchen utensils and equipment.

The Cook - Restaurant Pre-Employment Assessment was designed to help you hire staff in this role. The test provides a whole-person evaluation by measuring job-relevant cognitive ability, personality, knowledge, skills, and relevant behavioral history. Each component provides important data for hiring decisions. Cognitive ability has been linked to overall job performance in most jobs and correlates with a candidate's ability to learn new skills and to solve complex problems. Personality characteristics determine how well the candidate will fit-in with a corporate culture. Knowledge and skills indicate how much training will be needed before a new employee becomes productive. Finally, relevant behavioral history detects counter-productive behaviors that can impact job performance.

The Cook - Restaurant test includes an animated work simulation in which candidates meet customers, colleagues and supervisors in a job-related context. Post-test surveys indicate the majority of candidates react favorably to these simulations.

The specific attributes measured include:

Following completion, the test produces a Candidate Selection Report that includes an overall score and detailed scores for each attribute. The overall score weighs each of the factors based on research and analysis from the U.S. Government's Occupational Information Network (O*Net). O*Net represents over a decade of dedicated research evaluating the relative importance of various factors that lead to success in almost 1,000 different job roles.

The Candidate Selection Report also provides expert interview questions that help you probe critical or low-scoring areas, along with a guide for noting your evaluation of the candidate's responses. Consistent use of an interview guide is an important part of gaining better candidate insights and making better hiring decisions.