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Getting A Job
You are what you get paid for, and if it’s nice to be a backyard barbeque bartender once in a while, it’s even sweeter to get paid for it.
Bartending is the ultimate trick to have up your sleeve: I don’t know why they don’t begin with Fisher-Price shakers in kindergarten. It’s the best-paid part-time job you can get during school and college, you can work pretty much anywhere, it allows you to travel and earn cash, you can do it part-time in the weekends, in the summer, during the holidays. Your days are free: your nights teach you all you’ll ever need to know about human nature (and it’s venality) and you’ll learn a ton about drinks and drinking which will stand you in far better stead in a business career then being able to lose manfully to the boss at golf.
But how to get that first job? Any senior bartender will advise you to choose a bar you’d like to work in and get an entry-level job there such as busboy or barback (the bar’s equivalent of a busboy) and move up. But…..if you move up quickly, you have to ask yourself why bartenders are leaving so often. If you don’t move up quickly….you have to ask yourself why you’re doing this at all.
My advice is to do what the vast majority of bartenders do, which is to take any bartending job you can get, even if it’s in a crappy place, so you can learn on the job. You usually get to start right away, and you make all your mistakes in a crappy bar with let’s say, evolutionally challenged drinker, so what do you care? You’re being paid to learn about bartending, serving people, running a cash register, setting up, cleaning up, maybe even making easy drinks. With all that under your belt – plus some cash, because you’ll earn more than you would have as a busboy or barback – you can waltz out of Crappy Bar and into a job as a junior bartender or trainee at Good Bar. If you’re smart, you’ll have bought a decent book like The Joy of Mixology while working at Crappy Bar and started learning liquor and cocktail knowledge and practicing making more complex drinks, the better to prepare you for Good Bar. It is far easier to get a job as a bartender if you already are a bartender.
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How do you get those jobs, though? Well, newspaper ads and the Internet are OK, but managers and owners want to see real-live people in front of them before they hire anyone. And they’ll want staff that look like they fit in, i.e. that look like their current staff, especially the current staff who work the prime shifts (usually evenings Wednesday – Sunday). If the place is staffed by slim, stylish young men in Joseph shirts who look like they cleanse, tone and moisturize daily, it may be a good idea to cover up your Sepultura neck tattoo and borrow a suit. If it’s a good-time party bar, go for the smart-casual look, also known as the Bobby Ewing: suit jacket, T-shirt and jeans. You can be the best of the best, but the first step to a job is looking like you belong. Research the bars you want to apply to: don’t become a regular, but go in for a drink once in the daytime, once during the week and once at night in the weekend. Visit their websites: read their food and drink menus. Get a feel for the place.
If you’re asking straight out if there’s a job, or coming to an interview, the best time is between about 1400h and 1600h, the dead hours. Make sure your CV has a photo of you smiling, is one page long, and one page only. If you’re an al-Quada terrorist and you don’t want anyone to know, print it on the second page of a CV: no-one will ever, ever read it. Get a cellphone with voicemail and an email address.
So you look the part and you’ve got a one-page CV. Now to sound the part. If you used to work in Crappy Bar and you want to work in Good Bar, you need to have done your homework: what are the other bars in the area? What other bars cater to the same guests as Good Bar? What drinks do they make, what brands do they stock? If you can sound like you know your way around Good Bar’s niche in the bar business, you’re making it even easier for the interviewer to hire you. This is now the time to be honest. If you haven’t worked in a bar of this standard before, say it, and follow up by detailing exactly how much you want to learn and how much you’ve already studied on your own. Don’t be shy to mention you’ve worked in Crappy Bar: everyone has, and it tells the interviewer you’ve got the basic moves of a bartender. Managers or owners want someone who looks and sounds the part, seems honest and turns up on time, every day. Be honest, polite and enthusiastic, and you’re most of the way there. Two days after the interview, if you haven’t heard anything, email the manager/owner to thank them for taking the time to interview you. Then you wait. Don’t contact them again after that: no-one likes a stalker.
If you score a job in a good bar, think long and hard before you jump ship for the first job offer that comes along. It feels pretty good to be asked to join a team instead of having to apply, but the risk of opening a new bar is very, very high: it, and you, may not make it. You can take the risk if you’re genuinely bored, have some money in the bank and there are no promotion possibilities at work, but otherwise stay put. There is, in every big city, a loose collective of promoters, bartenders, waitstaff, doormen, DJs and so on who flit from hot new bar to hot new bar – but you have to be in with the in-crowd, and you have to be ready for that peripatetic lifestyle. At the end of the day you’re unlikely to make any more than you would have staying put. That said, if a real opportunity does come along, be a gentleman: give your current employer notice, help train the new guy if asked, and generally leave on good terms. The bar world of the better bars is incestuously small even in cities of ten million people, and what goes around very definitely comes around. And speaking of rounds, mine’s a Bramble.
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