Scaling Restaurant Hiring at the Frontline: The Restaurant Group Company's Story with Maki

Company

A Multi-Brand Restaurant Operator Hiring at Scale

TRGC is a leading operator of multiple restaurant brands across major airports and transport hubs, with 300+ locations and over 15,000 employees. The business depends on frontline talent to deliver high-quality service in fast-paced, customer-facing environments.

The Challenge

Scaling Frontline Hiring Without Overloading Managers

TRGC hires thousands of people every year to support its operations across brands and sites. High application volumes meant hiring managers were spending too much time manually screening candidates, taking focus away from running the business.

At the same time, candidates were not always getting a clear understanding of the role or the specific brand they were applying for. In a complex, multi-brand environment, this lack of clarity early in the process created friction and limited meaningful engagement at the top of the funnel.

TRGC needed a way to handle volume efficiently while improving both candidate understanding and experience.

“Managers had to sift through a lot of applications manually instead of focusing on what really drives the business forward.”
— Head of Talent, TRGC

The Solution

Automating Screening While Preserving Brand and Experience

TRGC partnered with Maki to redesign the top of its hiring funnel around automation, clarity, and scale. Maki implemented:

• ‍AI-powered phone screening to handle early-stage screening consistently across high volumes
• Immersive, role-specific assessments to evaluate candidates beyond CVs and reflect real job expectations
• A branded candidate journey tailored to TRGC’s multi-brand environment

Implementation was highly collaborative. Maki worked closely with TRGC’s talent team and general managers through workshops, onboarding sessions, and iterative configuration to ensure the solution fit operational reality across brands and locations.

“Maki felt like the right fit - strong screening capabilities, but also a great candidate experience.”
— Head of Talent, TRGC

What Changed

From Manual Screening to Scalable, High-Quality Hiring

The partnership between Maki and TRGC enables TRGC to:

• Remove manual screening as a bottleneck in high-volume hiring
• Give hiring managers time back to focus on leading teams and running operations
• Set clearer expectations for candidates early, improving engagement and role understanding
• Improve decision quality by focusing managers on the most relevant candidates
• Scale hiring consistently across brands and sites, without sacrificing experience or control

“It’s about giving managers time back, while helping candidates really understand who we are as a business.”
— Head of Talent, TRGC

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