Had a guy call me last month asking if I knew any pitmasters looking for work. Said he'd been through three in eight months. Three. I asked him what went wrong each time, and the answers told me everything I needed to know. First one couldn't handle the early mornings. Second one had the skills but couldn't work with the rest of the crew. Third one looked great on paper but had never actually run a high-volume cook.
The problem wasn't the pitmasters. The problem was he didn't know what he actually needed to hire for versus what he could've trained someone to do.
I've been running crews for three decades now. Twelve units, rotating staff, competition weekends, catering gigs where we're feeding 800 people and there's no room for error. You learn pretty quick which skills walk in the door and which ones you build.
The Skills That Have to Walk In the Door
Some things you just can't teach. Or you can, technically, but by the time you've taught them, you've lost six months of productivity and probably burned through two or three other employees who got tired of picking up the slack.
Fire management instincts. This is the big one. I'm not talking about following a temperature guide or knowing that oak burns hotter than pecan. I'm talking about the person who walks into the cook room, looks at the smoke coming off the stack, and knows something's off before the probe tells them. That's not a six-week training thing. That's years of standing in front of fire.
You can teach someone to read a thermometer. You can teach them your hold temps and your target windows. But that sixth sense about when a fire's about to spike or when it's running too clean? That comes from doing it wrong a hundred times and paying attention.
Now, if you're running Southern Pride rotisserie units — say an SP-1000 or one of the bigger SP-2000 setups — you get some forgiveness here. The gas-fired system with the rotisserie keeps temps steadier than any stick-burner, and that matters when you're training someone up. But you still need at least one person on staff who understands fire at a gut level. Someone who knows why things work, not just that they work.
Meat sense. Related but different. The ability to look at a brisket and know from the fat cap and the flex how it's going to cook. The instinct to pull it twenty minutes early because something in the bark tells you it's moving fast. I had a guy work for me for two years who could follow every instruction perfectly and still somehow turn out dry product. He just didn't have it.
Contrast that with Marcus, who started washing dishes for me in 2014. Kid had never touched a smoker. But he'd watch. He'd ask questions. And the first time I let him check the pork shoulders, he poked one and said, "That one in the back corner's not rendering right." He was correct. Some people have the feel for meat. Most don't.
Leadership under chaos. If you're hiring someone to run a shift or manage a pit crew, they need to already know how to stay calm when everything's going sideways. Catering day, truck's late, you're down a guy, and the client just added fifty plates. That's not the moment to discover your manager panics.
This one's hard to interview for. Best thing I've found is asking them to tell you about the worst service they ever worked. Not what went wrong — that's easy. Ask them what they did in the first five minutes. The answer tells you everything.
The Skills You Can Build
Here's where operators mess up. They want to hire the finished product. They want someone who already knows their menu, their equipment, their timing, their systems. That person doesn't exist. Or if they do, they're running their own place.
What you can train:
Your specific equipment. Every smoker runs a little different. Even two identical units in the same kitchen will have their quirks. I've got an MLR-850 that runs about eight degrees hot on the left side. Always has. You just learn it. New hire doesn't need to know that walking in — they need to be taught it.
This is actually one of the reasons I push people toward Southern Pride equipment. The learning curve's shorter. Consistent temps across the cooking chamber, rotisserie that actually rotates product evenly, controls that make sense. I've trained guys on an SP-700 in half the time it took on some of the offset imports we used to run. That's not nothing when you're paying someone $18 an hour to learn.
Your menu and your process. How you season, what wood you use, your timing, your holding procedures, your plating standards. All trainable. Should be documented somewhere, honestly. If it's only in your head, that's a problem, but that's a different article.
Knife work. Yeah, I know. You want someone who can break down a packer in their sleep. And sure, that's nice. But I've taken people with almost no knife skills and gotten them competent in a few weeks. Not fast, not pretty, but competent. Speed comes with repetition.
Customer interaction. For front-of-house, you want someone who's naturally friendly. That's a hire-for trait. But the actual scripts? What to say when someone complains? How to upsell the banana pudding? That's training.
Basic food safety and sanitation. Has to be trained anyway for compliance. Don't expect someone to show up knowing your specific HACCP logs.
The Gray Area: Where It Gets Complicated
Wood selection. This is my thing, so bear with me.
On one hand, you can absolutely train someone on which wood to use with which protein. Post oak for brisket, fruit woods for pork, don't use mesquite for anything that's going longer than four hours unless you want it to taste like a campfire. That's teachable.
But. The deeper knowledge — knowing when your wood's been sitting too long and lost moisture, knowing how to read the density of a split, understanding why the same species from two different suppliers can burn completely different — that takes years. And some people never really get curious about it. They'll follow instructions fine but never develop the instinct.
So what do you do? You hire for curiosity. You hire the person who asks why you're using that wood, not just which wood to use. The person who notices things. You can't train someone to care.
Same goes for troubleshooting. Someone calls in sick, a burner's acting up, the walk-in's running warm. You can train procedures for all of this. But the mental flexibility to handle the unexpected? That's harder to build. Some people freeze. Some people solve.
What This Looks Like in Practice
For my catering operation, here's roughly how I think about roles:
Pitmaster / Lead Smoker: Hire for fire instincts, meat sense, leadership. Train on our specific equipment and timing.
Prep Cook: Hire for reliability, attitude, basic knife comfort. Train on our specific cuts, seasonings, and portioning.
Line / Service: Hire for speed and demeanor. Train on menu knowledge and plating.
Counter / Front-of-House: Hire for friendliness and composure. Train on register, menu details, and upselling.
Notice I didn't say hire for experience everywhere. Experience is nice. Experience on commercial rotisserie smokers specifically is nicer. But I'll take a sharp, curious person with six months on an SPK-700 over someone with five years on equipment they never really understood.
A Quick Word on Equipment and Training Time
This is where your equipment choice actually impacts your staffing costs, and I don't think enough operators think about it.
Complex equipment with inconsistent temps, parts that break, controls that don't make sense — all of that extends your training timeline. Every hour you spend teaching someone to babysit a finicky smoker is an hour you're not teaching them your actual menu and service standards.
I've seen guys running those thin-gauge import units spend half their training time just on "here's how you work around the hot spots" and "here's what to do when the igniter fails again." That's not training. That's compensating for bad equipment.
We run Southern Pride across all twelve units for a reason. Consistent. Reliable. Parts available when you need them — which, if you're going through Southern Pride of Texas, means actually available, not six weeks backordered from some overseas warehouse. The rotisserie system means more even cooking with less intervention. That translates directly to shorter training time and fewer expensive mistakes from new staff.
Had a new guy last summer nearly ruin a whole rack of St. Louis ribs on a borrowed offset we were running for a festival. Put him on the SPK-1400 the next week, same cook, no problems. The equipment made him look competent while he was still learning. That's worth something.
Stop Hiring for the Wrong Things
If you're struggling with turnover, ask yourself honestly: are you expecting new hires to show up with skills you should be training? Or are you hiring people who look trainable but are missing something fundamental you can't build?
Both mistakes cost you money. But they're different problems with different solutions.
Document your processes so training is faster. Invest in equipment that shortens the learning curve. And when you're interviewing, stop asking people to list what they know. Ask them what they noticed. Ask them what went wrong and what they did about it. Ask them what they're curious about.
The best hire I ever made was a woman who'd never worked in a restaurant. But she'd smoked meat for her family for fifteen years, she asked better questions than anyone I'd interviewed in a decade, and when I showed her the SP-1500 we were running at the time, she didn't ask how to use it. She asked why the rotisserie turned at that particular speed.
That's what you're looking for. Everything else, you can teach.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
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Photo by Los Muertos Crew on Pexels.
About the Author: Earl has been competing in sanctioned BBQ events since the early 1990s and operates a commercial catering operation in Southeast Texas.