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Good help is hard to find ...

... or is it? North Naples man is marketing Web tool he says can help restaurants cut down on employee turnover, theft

By RYAN MILLS (Contact)

Monday, April 9, 2007

As a sales manager in the pharmaceutical industry in the 1980s, Dan Longton spent a lot of time in restaurants around the country. But instead of just eating, Longton said he observed the behavior of wait staff and studied how the restaurants were run. In 1993 Longton used that knowledge to produce a sales training manual specifically for waiters and waitresses.

Now the North Naples resident is marketing a tool he has developed to help Florida restaurants hire better employees, and at the same time cut down on employee turnover and employee theft.

Photo by Tristan Spinski / Daily News

Dan Longton holds a prop he uses when giving public presentations to illustrate the idea of finding the right employees to fit in the right jobs and working environments. The North Naples man developed a new Web-based software program that measures the integrity of prospective employees.

The tool, an online program called TraitSet, offers a number of behavioral assessments to measure a potential employee’s readiness to work, work ethic and integrity, sales potential, customer service ability, leadership ability, ability to work with numbers, and antagonistic behavior.

“It’s important to prescreen employees because of the importance of getting great employees,” Longton said.

“A manager has a better day if they have good employees.” The assessments help measure a potential employee’s

“soft skills,” which focus on attitudes and behaviors.

The three most important behaviors for the general work force, Longton said, are showing up for work, not lying or stealing, and providing quality customer service.

When employees are fired, it is most often due to problems with soft skills, Longton said, but typically employers find it difficult to evaluate soft skills in interviews. The assessments help identify soft skills and can be used by restaurateurs and other business owners to prescreen candidates for specific jobs, Longton said.

The TraitSet program can be run on any laptop, desktop or touch-screen computer, Longton said. Each assessment is about 40 questions long and each question is graded on an eight-point scale. When the test is complete the employer can print out a report that presents the results.

The report also gives the employer suggested interview questions tailored to the test-takers’ responses. Longton is quick to point out that TraitSet, which is a behavioral assessment, is different than a personality test, which many employers use.

“Personality has nothing to do with whether this person is going to lie or steal,” Longton said. Longton said he had the idea for TraitSet for years, but it wasn’t until one of his employees, Craig Matteson — now Longton’s business partner — enrolled in an MBA program at the University of Michigan around 2001 that the idea really started to take shape.

Matteson had to present a Web-based solution to a business problem for one of his classes, and asked Longton for help. Longton, who lived in Michigan and at the time was a vice president of a software development company, suggested developing an online behavior assessment that would be applicable and affordable for hourly employees to take.

“I had the business problem,” Longton said.

“As we went through, the idea started to gain momentum. We found out that nobody was doing it.” Longton quickly realized the potential for the Web-based assessments, and decided to make the classroom idea a reality. Longton and Matteson started building the Internet engine to support TraitSet about five years ago, he said. Longton then hired a psychologist, Dr. Edward Murray, to develop the assessment. TraitSet has been developed, Longton said, to stand up in court.

“We had to go through extensive reliability studies to make sure it wasn’t biased to age, sex or race,” he said. After conducting an analysis of a number of industries, Longton decided to target restaurants, he said. Coupled with his interest in the restaurant industry, he found that nationwide there are more people employed in the restaurant industry than any other besides government. He also found that the turnover rate at most restaurants is between 150 and 200 percent per year. Longton, who was still living in Michigan, sent e-mails to restaurant associations around the country pitching TraitSet.

“Florida contacted me right away,” he said. Eventually Longton decided to target TraitSet to restaurants in Florida and Georgia, he said. He moved to Naples about two years ago and got to work.

“You draw a circle around Atlanta and all of the restaurants are there,” Longton said.

“In Florida you have pockets. You have west coast and east coast. ... Naples is strategically located. It’s at the vortex of all of this business for me.”

There are more than 100 businesses now using TraitSet, Longton said, including Beef O’Brady’s, R.J. Gator’s and Hungry Howie’s Pizza. The monthly service fee for the TraitSet program ranges from $59 for restaurants with less than 25 employees to $99 for businesses with up to 100 employees. There is also a $199 setup fee. Mitch Timoteo, vice president of operations for the Jupiter-based R.J. Gator’s, learned about TraitSet from the Florida Restaurant Association and has been using the assessments in the company’s restaurants.

“We’re looking for the best people we possibly can,” Timoteo said.

“It’s a great way for our managers to make decisions.” Beef ‘O’ Brady’s uses TraitSet to screen potential franchisees, and is starting to test it in a couple restaurants, said Nancy Bennett, director of new partner training and human resources.

“We use it as a guideline to ask questions in the personal interviews,” Bennett said.

“If somebody scored low in one subject, we might delve into that a little more in the personal interview.” Developing TraitSet wasn’t hard, Longton said, but it did require time and perseverance. He said he envisions becoming a partner with most of the more than 29,000 eating-and-drinking establishments in Florida.

“I see us building to where we are in 60 to 70 percent of every restaurant in the state of Florida,” Longton said.

“And I see us impacting the turnover rate by 20 percent and I see us impacting theft for our customers by 50 percent.” For more information about TraitSet contact Dan Longton at (239) 877-2110 or at dan@hrgems.com.