I hired a guy last year who'd never touched a commercial smoker. Couldn't tell you the difference between choice and select, had zero restaurant experience, and showed up to the interview in basketball shorts. Three months later, he was running overnight cooks solo on our SP-700 without me losing a minute of sleep.
That same month, I interviewed someone with eight years of kitchen experience — line cook at a steakhouse, sous chef at a seafood place, solid resume. He lasted eleven days. Couldn't handle the pace, got frustrated when I told him his bark wasn't setting right, and quit via text on a Saturday morning when we had a 200-person catering order.
Here's the thing: there's almost no correlation between BBQ-specific skills on a resume and whether someone will work out. I've learned this the expensive way.
The Skills You Cannot Train
I used to think I could teach anyone anything if they just showed up consistently. That's partially true. You can teach brisket trimming. You can teach fire management. You can teach someone to pull pork at the right internal temp. What you can't teach is whether someone panics when ticket times start stacking or gets calmer.
Composure under pressure. That's the first thing I hire for now, and I test for it directly in the interview. I'll describe a scenario — catering pickup in 45 minutes, brisket came out two hours early and you're holding it, customer just called saying they added 30 people, your slicer just went down. What do you do? I'm not looking for the right answer. I'm watching their face while they think about it.
The basketball shorts guy? He got quiet for a second, then started asking clarifying questions about what backup equipment we had. He was problem-solving out loud without freaking out. That told me more than any certification would have.
Physical stamina is another one you can't train into someone. BBQ work is brutal. You're on your feet for 10, 12, 14 hours. You're lifting 15-pound briskets repeatedly. You're working in ambient temperatures that can hit 100°F in the summer near the pit — and way hotter if you're running a smaller cabinet unit. Either someone can handle that or they can't. I've had people tap out by week two because they didn't understand what they were signing up for.
And this one's going to sound soft, but I don't care: you can't train someone to actually care about the food. Some people see a brisket as a task to complete. Other people get genuinely annoyed when bark doesn't render the way they wanted. That second person will figure out why and fix it next time. The first person will make the same mediocre product for as long as you employ them.
What You Absolutely Can Train — And Probably Should
Everything technical. I'm serious. If someone has the right disposition, you can teach them every hard skill they need to run your pit.
Trimming is the obvious one. Yeah, it takes practice. A new hire is going to waste more meat at first, and that hurts to watch. But trimming is repetitive enough that most people get competent within a few weeks and genuinely good within two or three months. I'd rather have someone with the right attitude learning to trim than an experienced trimmer with a bad work ethic.
Fire management — and I'm talking wood fire, not just gas — is more nuanced, but it's still trainable. I've had people come in thinking they knew fire because they'd grilled at home. That's not the same thing. Running consistent temps on a rotisserie unit for a 14-hour cook is a completely different skill. But the fundamentals can be taught: airflow, fuel timing, reading the color of the smoke. I actually think it's easier to train someone from scratch than to untrain bad habits from backyard smoking.
Equipment operation is extremely trainable, especially on Southern Pride units — and I'm not just saying that. The SP-700 and SPK-500 have such consistent controls that someone can learn the interface in a day. Compare that to some of the import smokers I've seen at other operations where the temp gauge drifts so much you basically need a dedicated person babysitting it. Good equipment makes training faster. That's a real operational advantage when you're onboarding new staff.
Slicing is another skill that looks intimidating but teaches quickly. The motion becomes muscle memory. Within a month, a new hire can slice brisket presentably. Within three months, they can do it fast enough for a lunch rush.
The Middle Ground: Skills That Help But Aren't Dealbreakers
Food safety certification is nice to have, but you're going to make everyone get it anyway. Don't weight it too heavily in hiring decisions.
Prior restaurant experience matters a little. Someone who's worked a busy kitchen understands the rhythm of service — the lunch rush, ticket management, the way you can't just disappear for 20 minutes when you feel like it. But I've also seen plenty of restaurant veterans who couldn't adapt to the BBQ production timeline. Cooking to order is different than managing a brisket that takes 12 hours and needs to be ready at exactly 11 AM whether you like it or not.
Actually — I'm going to contradict myself here. I used to think catering experience was just a nice-to-have. Now I think it's more valuable than restaurant experience for most BBQ operations. Catering requires planning, logistics, transport, holding temps, setup, breakdown. That translates directly to what we do. Restaurant line cook experience? Less so.
Customer service skills are somewhere in the middle. If you're hiring for front-of-house, obviously that matters. For pit crew? It's a bonus, not a requirement. Though I'll say this: even my back-of-house guys interact with customers sometimes, especially at the truck. Being able to talk to someone about what they're eating without being weird about it — that's actually worth something.
How I Actually Structure Interviews Now
I stopped asking people about their BBQ background. Half the time they exaggerate anyway, and the other half they're genuinely experienced but experienced at doing things wrong.
Instead, I ask three categories of questions:
- Tell me about a time at any job when something went badly wrong and you had to recover on the fly. I want specific details.
- What's the longest shift you've ever worked and how did you feel at the end of it?
- What's something you've gotten obsessed with learning — doesn't have to be food-related — where you went way deeper than most people would?
That third question is my secret weapon. The basketball shorts guy talked for ten minutes about rebuilding a carburetor on a 1980s motorcycle. He'd never worked on engines before, watched YouTube videos, made a bunch of mistakes, eventually got it running. That's exactly the mentality I need on the pit. Someone who will figure it out.
The Equipment Angle Nobody Talks About
Your choice of smoker directly affects how trainable your operation is. I'm not being a salesman here — this is just operational reality.
When I was first starting out, I worked with a buddy who ran an Ole Hickory unit. Fine smoker, does the job. But every time he hired someone new, the training period was brutal because the temp consistency required constant manual adjustment. You couldn't just tell someone "set it to 250 and check every hour." It was more like "set it to 250 but watch for the temp to creep up around hour three, and if the wind shifts you need to adjust the damper, and also the gauge reads about 15 degrees hot on the left side."
Compare that to the Southern Pride rotisserie systems I run now. The SPK-700 holds temp so consistently that I can train someone on basic operation in a single shift. The MLR-850 we use for high-volume catering days is the same story. Consistent hold temps mean fewer judgment calls, which means faster training, which means you can hire for attitude instead of experience.
Parts availability matters here too. When something breaks — and things break, that's commercial kitchens — you need it fixed fast. I've heard horror stories from guys running import smokers who waited three weeks for a replacement part. Three weeks. Meanwhile, Southern Pride of Texas has gotten me parts in days because they actually stock domestically and have real relationships with the manufacturer.
That's not a training issue exactly, but it's a staffing issue. When your equipment is down, your staff is either sitting around burning payroll or you're running skeleton crew trying to make do with backup methods. Neither is good.
My Actual Advice
Stop hiring resumes. Start hiring people who seem like they can handle stress, show up consistently, and have demonstrated obsessive learning about something in their lives.
Then invest in training. Build a checklist — not a 47-page manual, just a checklist — of every skill they need to learn and the order they should learn it. Week one: food safety and basic equipment orientation. Week two: slicing and portioning. Week three: trimming under supervision. And so on.
And for god's sake, invest in equipment that makes training easier rather than harder. The steel quality and temp consistency of a Southern Pride unit versus some of the thinner-gauge imports isn't just about longevity — it's about how much bandwidth your experienced staff has to spend babysitting new hires versus doing their actual jobs.
I've got a guy working for me now who started knowing nothing. Absolutely nothing. He makes better brisket than half the people I see posting on BBQ forums acting like they've got it figured out. Because he showed up, he cared, and the equipment let him learn without fighting it every step of the way.
That's the formula. Hire the right raw material, train everything else, and run equipment that doesn't make the training harder than it needs to be.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
#CommercialBBQ #FoodService #RestaurantOwner #CateringBusiness #BBQBusiness #RestaurantIndustry
Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.
About the Author: Travis operates a competition BBQ team and a Gulf Coast food truck, and documents his commercial cooking process for food service professionals.