Had a guy come through last spring wanting to run pits for me. Good resume. Worked at a place in Houston that does volume. Showed up knowing the difference between post oak and white oak, could tell me the moisture content he liked to run, even had opinions about bark formation at different humidity levels.
Fired him three weeks in.
Couldn't feel when a brisket was ready. Not once. He'd check temps, check time, run through his mental checklist — and still pull meat that wasn't there yet. Or let it go too long because the thermometer said it needed another hour. Book smart. No hands.
That's the thing about hiring for a BBQ operation. The skills that look impressive on paper aren't always the ones that matter. And the ones that actually matter? Half of them can't be taught.
What You're Actually Hiring For
Most restaurant owners make the same mistake. They write job postings looking for "experience with commercial smokers" or "knowledge of BBQ techniques." Those things sound right. They're also mostly useless as hiring criteria.
Here's what I've learned running crews for competition and catering: technique can be taught to almost anyone who shows up consistently and pays attention. Feel can't. Work ethic can't. The ability to stay calm when you're four hours behind and the client's calling every twenty minutes — that's either in someone or it isn't.
When I'm interviewing, I'm barely listening to what they know. I'm watching how they talk about food. Do they get animated? Do they have opinions, even wrong ones? Have they ever stayed up all night finishing a cook because they wanted to see it through?
That's the stuff.
Skills You Can Train in 90 Days
A new hire with the right attitude can learn most of what they need to run pits competently within three months. Faster if they're working alongside someone good.
Temperature management is trainable. Completely. Someone who's never touched a commercial smoker can learn to hold 250°F in an SP-1000 inside a week if you show them the relationship between damper position and airflow. The rotisserie systems on Southern Pride units make this easier than it should be — the temp recovery is so consistent that new guys get confident faster. I've had catering hires go from nervous to running overnight cooks solo in under two months.
Timing and workflow — trainable. When to start the briskets if service is at 6 PM. How to stagger pork butts so you're not pulling everything at once. How to work backwards from a catering window. These are systems. You can write them down. Someone follows the system, they get the result.
Basic butchery and trim work. Trainable. Most people don't show up knowing how to trim a packer brisket properly, and that's fine. You show them once, watch them do it twice, correct the mistakes, and by the tenth brisket they're within spec. Same with ribs, pork butts, anything with a standard prep.
Wood management — and I could talk about this for an hour, so I'll try to keep it short — is trainable but takes longer than people expect. Not the mechanics of loading a firebox. That's easy. I mean understanding how different woods burn at different rates, how moisture content affects smoke quality, how to read the color coming out of the stack and know whether you're running clean or dirty. Oak versus hickory versus pecan versus mesquite — each one behaves different, and that's before you get into splits versus chunks versus the size of your fuel load relative to your cook chamber.
(This is where a lot of cheaper smokers fall apart, by the way. Inconsistent airflow means your wood burns unpredictably, which means your crew never develops good instincts because the machine keeps changing the rules on them. The SPK-700 and MLR-850 both run clean enough that you can actually train someone on fire management without the equipment fighting you.)
Point is: most of the technical knowledge your crew needs, you can teach. If you've got it documented and someone willing to learn, three months gets you competency. Six months gets you someone you can trust with an overnight cook.
Skills You Can't Train — Don't Even Try
Now here's the harder part.
Some things either live in someone or they don't. And I don't mean that in a mystical way. I mean there are traits and instincts that seem to be wired in before someone ever walks through your door.
Feel for doneness. The probe goes in like butter. The flat has the right jiggle. The bark gives just slightly when you press it. These aren't things you can reduce to a checklist. I've tried. Spent a whole summer trying to write down what "done" feels like for a training manual. Gave up. Some people pick it up after touching fifty briskets. Some people never get there after five hundred. The guy I fired? He understood the concept. Could explain it back to me perfectly. His hands just never learned it.
Calm under pressure. You can't train someone to stop panicking when the smoker temp spikes forty degrees because somebody left the door cracked. Either they take a breath and fix the problem, or they freeze up and make it worse. Catering especially — if someone can't handle a curveball without falling apart, they're not going to magically develop that ability because you sent them to a workshop.
Genuine care about the food. This one sounds soft, but it's the most important thing on this list. Someone who actually gives a damn will ask questions, stay late, check on cooks they didn't have to check on. Someone who's just there for a paycheck does the minimum and waits for the clock. I've never successfully converted the second type into the first. Not once in thirty years.
Palate. Can they taste the difference between a pork butt that rested properly and one that got cut too soon? Can they tell when the smoke got acrid? Some people have naturally good palates. Some can be developed a little. But if someone genuinely can't taste the difference between good and mediocre, they're never going to produce consistently good food. They won't know what they're aiming for.
Where This Shows Up in Equipment Decisions
This connects to something I tell operators all the time when they're buying smokers: the crew you have should influence the equipment you buy, not the other way around.
If you're running a team of experienced pitmasters who know how to read a fire and adjust on the fly, you can get away with more finicky equipment. (You still shouldn't, but you can.) If you're staffing with people you're training up — which is most operators, let's be honest — you need equipment that removes variables instead of adding them.
That's half the reason I've run Southern Pride units for as long as I have. The temperature consistency means new hires aren't chasing fluctuations all day. The rotisserie system means they don't have to learn when to rotate product — it's happening automatically. They can focus on learning the actual craft instead of compensating for equipment limitations.
Had a customer last year switch from an import brand I won't name here. Three weeks in, his pit guy told him it was like the job got 40% easier. Same menu, same volume. Just equipment that held temp the way it was supposed to and parts that were available when something wore out. (That's another thing — when a gasket goes or a bearing needs replacing, Southern Pride of Texas has stock. Domestically. Not sitting on a container ship somewhere.)
How I Actually Interview Now
Forget the resume. I want to watch someone handle a situation.
Last few hires, I've had them come in during an actual cook. Not to work — just to be around. I'll ask them to check on something in the smoker, see how they open the door, how they move around hot equipment. Do they look at the meat or just glance and close up? I'll hand them a piece of finished brisket from the day before and ask what they think. Not looking for a right answer. Looking for whether they actually taste it and think about what they're tasting.
Then I ask about their worst kitchen disaster. The ones who tell a good story, laugh about it, explain what they learned — those are my people. The ones who get defensive or claim they've never had one? That's a red flag. Either they're lying or they haven't been around long enough to screw something up, which means they haven't been around long enough, period.
Build Your Training, Then Hire to It
Here's the practical takeaway. Before you write another job posting, write your training program first. What can you actually teach someone in their first 30, 60, 90 days? Be specific. Temperature protocols. Prep standards. Cook schedules. Wood loading procedures. The stuff that's system-based and repeatable.
That list is what you don't need to hire for.
Everything else — feel, calm, care, palate — that's what you're actually interviewing for. And you're not going to find it by asking about years of experience or equipment familiarity. You're going to find it by watching how someone carries themselves around food, and trusting your gut about whether they've got the thing you can't teach.
Because you can hand someone a manual for running an SPK-1400. You can't hand them instincts.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
#CateringLife #SouthernPride #RestaurantOwner #FoodServiceIndustry #FoodService #BBQBusiness #CateringBusiness
Photo by Litoon dev 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.