Construction of the new Yard House restaurant in the River Park shopping center is far from complete but the popular chain eatery will be looking to fill more than 250 positions starting Tuesday.
"We start our journey to get a hold of 263 new team members for Yard House Fresno, so tomorrow we expect to talk to at least 1,000 to 1,500 people," said Tim Dolan, regional manager for the Yard House. Dolan says dozens of people have already stopped by expressing interest in the many different positions that will be available.
"We're hiring servers, bartenders, all what we call hard of the house, our kitchen employees, our team members, cooks, line cooks, prep cooks. We're looking for bus boys, hosts," said Dolan.
As far as the ideal employee goes, the Yard House says it is looking for energetic people who can appreciate the restaurant's mission of providing the world's largest selection of draft beers.
"A lot of the things that you see at a Yard House are not common to any other restaurant. The beer head with 130 chaps, 110 different flavors of beer," said Jim Leroy, who is supervising the construction of the Fresno Yard House. He says the construction project alone has added at least 70 jobs to the economy.
"From local subcontractors, at least half of them that we've used are our demolition contractor, our concrete contractor, our structural steel contractor," said Leroy.
And Although opening up a new restaurant during a recovering economy can be challenging, Dolan says the company chose a prime location in River Park to set up shop.
"Just seeing the traffic around here and seeing the amount of people around here, I think there's definitely room for many restaurants to be successful and hopefully we're one of them," said Dolan.
Even though Tuesday will be the first day the Yard House will be taking applications, they expect to see thousands of people outside their hiring office, so they say it's best to come early.
