Barista for Hire:

Barista For Hire: Your Barista Success Starts With You

Finding success as a barista begins with professional self-promotion. Whether you realize it or not, you’re always promoting yourself. Often, many aren’t promoting themselves professionally.
You don’t necessarily have to have any experience as a barista, although some previous experience in the restaurant business or customer service would greatly benefit you.

There are some great ways to get a good jump on your barista knowledge. For example, you can read a few coffee books or get online barista training. These may give you extra points as you start your career in the retail coffee business.

Second, setting out on your professional journey means that you need to think seriously about your professional image. This includes your online and offline reputation. Promoting yourself online means increasing your chances of successful employment, disseminating information about your skills and talents, networking with other baristas and coffee professionals, and creating some added value to your expertise.

More and more often, employers or HR managers are checking their prospective employees' social media accounts. Coffee shops are not an exception here. On the contrary, coffee shops are looking for stable and reliable people to entrust their business to. What they are seeking is a reduction in turnover by hiring trustworthy baristas.

This is why your social media accounts have to be clean, neat, and free from online arguments about politics, religion, or race. Everything you do online today leaves a digital trace. Even if you delete party photos and online comments from your account, likely, they won’t be deleted from the servers and online profile aggregators.

If you have too many crazy party photos or too many comments and tags you can’t even remember, you might want to think about starting a new social media account and be sensible about it from the very beginning.

Your Barista Career Development

Your Social Media Accounts: Highlight Professionalism

The main social media platforms you will use as a barista are Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, maybe, even Twitter. Each of these platforms is oriented towards a certain audience, has its own concept and idea, with both advantages and disadvantages.

While Facebook was initially created as a social network for family, friends, and schoolmates, today, it’s being utilized by organizations, companies, and politicians. LinkedIn is great for job hunting and Instagram – for highlighting your talents and creativity.

However, you don’t need to post everything on social media. If you want coffee shop owners to view you seriously, don’t share only romantic pictures with your boyfriend/girlfriend or pictures from parties and clubs. At the same time, we don’t recommend sharing only coffee pictures and articles. While you should highlight your main interest (coffee), you need to show that you are a real authentic person, value your friends and family, enjoy sports, healthy lifestyle, and have your own interests and hobbies in addition to coffee.

Improve Your Digital Reputation as a Future Barista

• Highlight Your Value Serving Customers

If you have previously worked in the food industry, hospitality, or even volunteer work, you know the power of interpersonal communication. Helping people is the main focus of any service and requires you to be personable, friendly, and open-minded. These are the main traits that a barista should possess. While you can be trained on how to brew great coffee, you can’t change your personality. So if you don’t like communicating with people daily, a barista job might not be the right choice for you. On the contrary, if you like spending time among people, it’ll show in your personal and professional life.

Consider posting pictures from previous jobs that feature your team, you in your professional outfit, your happy customers, or members of the local community that you helped. Publish a few articles about ways to improve your customer service, tips for baristas and waiters, customer support specialists’ recommendations.

• Display Your Passion For Coffee

Use your social media as an instrument to demonstrate your excitement about the coffee world. If you ever visited a coffee expo or barista championship, share your impressions about it and post pictures of coffee equipment and barista drinks. If you like traveling and have visited a coffee-growing country, this is a great possibility for you to learn about coffee and share your knowledge with your online following. Both Facebook and Instagram are great for that purpose.

After reading an interesting article about coffee history or coffee chemistry, you may want to share it in your Facebook feed. This social media platform is also good for sharing barista training videos, blog posts, searching for barista events and latte art competitions, or following coffee organizations and barista champions.

• Post Smart

Your online communication is a sign of your literacy, communication skills, respect for others, and how you generally get along with people. Avoid disrespectful and humiliating comments by all means. Don’t fall for trolls provoking you, especially in discussions about politics or religion.

Posts: Before posting anything, think about your future employer reading this post. Do you feel comfortable sharing it with him or her? How would you feel if your coffee shop clients read it? If you don’t want your boss to read it, don’t post it.

Your Online Behavior Matters

Complaints: It’s not recommended to post comments about your work, co-workers, or managers online. Social media is not a good platform for complaints. If you face a problem at work, it’s a good idea to talk to your management and explain what you are not satisfied with. If your manager sees how you complained about your previous job online, this will decrease your employment chances. So delete such posts if you have any.

Friends/Followers: Be careful about who you add to your friends and followers. Add people you know personally or influencers and professionals who work in coffee or other areas of your interest. Join professional and local communities. Don’t add or communicate with suspicious people who can potentially ruin your online presence.

If you have friends who constantly post embarrassing pictures or inappropriate links on your wall, ask them to stop doing this through a private message. If they refuse to do so, it’s time to unfriend this person. Unfriend those people who behave inappropriately or disrespectfully online.

Photos: Share the photos of yourself that show you as a confident young professional. Sharing questionable pictures, late-night parties, or images with rude gestures, alcohol, drugs is definitely not a good idea. Stick with pictures that highlight your professional interests and your achievements.

Profile pic: If you want to be a barista, you might want to have a profile picture where you drink or taste coffee or operate an espresso machine.

Likes: Avoid liking controversial celebrities, political parties, or TV shows. If you want a barista job, follow coffee shops, barista magazines, coffee blogs, coffee associations, and barista competitions.

• What Other Additional Benefits Can you Bring to Your Café

Think about how you can use any of your hobbies as a potential benefit for your coffee shop.
For example, if you are involved in sports, you may have good stamina. You can work long shifts and lift heavy coffee bags. If you enjoy cooking food, you may be able to quickly make food. These include snacks, sandwiches, and desserts at your coffee shop. If you know a thing or two about the design, you may contribute to updating your coffee shop layout, design, or seasonal decorations.

Let's say you are tech-savvy. In this case, you can help strengthen your coffee shop's online presence, manage marketing campaigns and online advertising. This will make it easier for you to use any coffee shop POS system or online ordering apps, etc. If you know how to operate gadgets, it may easier for you to learn how to use, maintain, and repair an espresso machine! In other words, promote your skills, whatever they might be.

Present yourself as a valuable asset for your coffee shop as you write your barista resume and cover letter focus on how you can present your hobbies and other activities as something useful in your future barista job.

Other Barista Tips

Proactively manage your online presence. It’s a good idea to go through your social media accounts at least once a year and clean them from unnecessary tags and pictures.

Active two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of protection to your account and makes it harder for hackers to log into your account and send spam or junk to all your friends.

If your email address looks like cute.kitten777@yahoo.com or greenday500@hotmail.com, you want to have something more professional. The year 2005 is long gone now. 

Review your voicemail on your phone. Make it sound professional, speak clearly, state your name, explain that you are unavailable right now, ask who’s calling and promise to call back as soon as possible.

Get The Barista Training You Need

If you want to get a job as a barista, invest in your knowledge with our complete guide. Barista Training Academy is dedicated to preparing you to be the best barista you can be.

Brought to you by Barista Training Academy, “The Beginning Barista,” Your Ultimate Prep Guide to Getting Your First Job as a Barista” is an ultimate resource that is available online. It is affordable for anybody who is looking to start a career in the coffee industry. For more information, visit our blog.