For restaurant chains

Cut 90-day turnover. Stop losing $5,864 every time a new hire quits.

Tera screens every applicant in 15 minutes — voice or chat, in 34 languages and shows your GM who to hire and why. Built for multi-location teams where the next shift can't go unstaffed, and one bad line cook can cost you a quarter.

Talk to us about your locations →See it on one location, free

Built for restaurant chains from 5 to 500 locations.

We see what your week looks like

The 90-day churn is the most expensive number in your operation.

Your GMs hire under pressure. The next shift can't go unstaffed. But the cost of a bad hire doesn't show up immediately. It shows up 90 days later — after you've already paid for onboarding, training, management time, and the productivity you never got back.

01 — Manager bandwidth

Your GM screens 30 resumes for one line cook opening. Three never show up to the interview. Two no-call no-show on day one.

02 — 90 day bleed

You hired ten people last month. By next quarter, four are gone. Half of those four left because of a manager misunderstanding in week two.

03 — Forced choices

The shift can't go unstaffed, so you hire on availability. Then you pay $5,864 to replace them ninety days later.

The industry math, in cold numbers

What the data actually says about restaurant turnover.

Industry data from 2024–2025. These are the numbers restaurant chain operators rarely put on slides but they shape every line of the P&L.

130%+

Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) annual turnover. Higher than any other industry sector.

BLS, DailyPay, CNBC reporting

75–100%

Full-service restaurant annual turnover, depending on segment.

Toast, Homebase aggregate

54%

of QSR hires never make it to day 91. It's one of the most expensive leaks in the operation.

Restaurant Dive, 2022 study

$5,864

the average all-in cost of a single turnover, including recruiting, onboarding, training, and lost productivity.

Restaurant industry research, 2025

5×

more likely to quit in the first 90 days due to manager miscommunication than after.

Industry studies on early attrition

37%

Front of House (FOH), Back of House (BOH), and Manager annual turnover. Managers leave less often but each departure costs significantly more.

7Shifts, Toast (2024)

What changes when Tera runs your hiring

Three steps. Designed for restaurant chains, not headquarters.

The whole system is designed around how restaurant hiring actually works at unit level. Central HR defines the role. The GM makes the decision from a ranked shortlist. No wasted screening time on candidates who shouldn't even make it to round one.

Define each role once, centrally.

HQ defines what "great" looks like for each role—line cook, server, host, GM, district manager. Tera translates that into role-specific conversations. Every location hires against the same standard, consistently applied.

Tera talks to every applicant.

15-minute voice or chat conversations in 34 languages. No screening queues. No manager time wasted on early filtering. Every candidate gets a clear profile at the end and most say it's better than a traditional interview.

Each GM gets a ranked dashboard per location.

Candidates are scored on outcome fit, standards discipline, and risk backed by verbatim evidence. Decisions take 10 minutes per role, not 10 hours.

Talk to us about your locations →See it on one location, free

The math at chain scale For a 50-location restaurant chain, every 10-point drop in 90-day churn is $551,000 a year. You don't need a deck for this one. One turnover costs $5,864 all-in. At the restaurant chain scale, that becomes a P&L line you can size instantly. The real lever is how many of them you can prevent. The baseline — 50 locations, 1,250 staff Annual turnover @ 75% 938 hires All-in turnover cost $5.5M / yr With Tera — 10-point drop in 90-day churn Bad hires avoided per year ~94 Annual savings (per chain) $551,000 At 100 locations: $1.1M / year. At 200: $2.2M / year. The return scales linearly with the location count — and that's before the manager-time savings get counted.

Proof from the build

What we've already seen — and why it matters at volume.

The data below comes from beta companies running Tera alongside their existing hiring process. At the restaurant chain scale, the accuracy gap compounds and so does the cost of leaving it open.

8 out of 10

Candidate resume rankings flipped after a voice conversation in our first parallel test.

A 9-person tourism company ran our voice screening alongside their resume-based ranking. Same shortlist. The two systems disagreed on 8 out of 10 candidates. And the resume got it wrong on nearly all of them.

90%

Voice ranking accuracy vs. 30% for resume-only.

In high-volume hiring, the voice signal outperforms the resume signal by 3x. Resumes are no longer a reliable filter especially when AI can generate them on both sides.

94%

Candidates rated the conversation as equal to or better than a human interview.

Across the first 100 voice screenings in closed beta, most candidates left more energized than they came in — and asked when they could speak to Tera again.

What you get

One platform for every applicant, every role, across every location.

Designed for operators who already have a tech stack. We don't replace your ATS, POS, scheduler, or payroll. We sit on top — or run standalone — and handle the one thing the stack doesn't: screening people, not paper.

✓Voice screening for every applicant — voice or chat, 34 languages.
✓Role-specific scoring — FOH, BOH, GM, district manager templates.
✓Per-location dashboard for your GMs.
✓Pre-onboarding conversation for every new hire — the 90-day-churn killer.
✓Manager-prep brief — one page, ready when they walk in.
✓30 / 60 / 90 retention tracking on every hire.
✓Integrations with Toast, Paychex, Paradox, Paylocity, 7Shifts, Homebase — or works standalone.
✓Candidate's own portrait — they leave the process with something worth keeping.

Talk to us about your locations →See it on one location, free

What we are not

Toast, Paychex, Paradox, 7Shifts — keep them. We're not them.

Restaurant tech is crowded. Most operators have already paid for tools that solve adjacent problems. We're sharp on one thing — screening — and we work with what you already run.

We are not a POS or payroll system.Toast, Paychex, Paylocity handle that. We don't touch transactions or paychecks.

We are not an ATS.Paradox, Paylocity, Greenhouse keep their job. We sit above them — or we work without one.

We are not a scheduling tool.7Shifts, Homebase, Deputy keep their job. Once Tera helps you hire the right person, the schedulers manage them just fine.

We are not a personality test.We refuse to flatten your line cooks into four colors. The portrait is prose, evidence, and what the candidate actually said.

Why we built this for you

The restaurant chain is where the math gets brutal and where the product earns its existence.

I ran a company that grew from 9 people to 40, and past 40 I stopped seeing the people behind the functions. A 50-location chain has that same problem multiplied by every general manager. The math is unforgiving — but it also means the product pays back faster than anyone wants to believe.

Valer Pinderi Co-founder & CPO · Teracrowd

No-risk pilot

Run it on one location for 30 days. Free. No card. No procurement.

Pick one location. One role. We turn on Tera for thirty days, your GM uses it on the next openings, and you see the dashboard, the candidates, and the 90-day retention signal. If the math doesn't work for your chain, you've lost nothing.

Talk to us about a pilot →Get the chain-pricing sheet

FAQ

The questions restaurant chain operators ask in the first meeting.

Will my GMs actually use this, or is it another tool they ignore?

GMs use what saves them time. Tera removes screening — the most time-consuming part of hiring — and replaces it with a ranked list and verbatim evidence per candidate. Most GMs save 4–6 hours per role per week. In the pilots we've run, GMs are the loudest internal advocates by week two.

How does this integrate with Toast, Paychex, Paradox, or 7Shifts?

We have ready integrations with Paradox, Paylocity, and Greenhouse, and we sit standalone next to Toast, Paychex, and the schedulers. The candidate flow goes through Tera; the post-hire workflow stays in your existing tools. Most chains are live in 7–10 days from contract signature.

Can the GM screen, or does central HR have to be involved?

Both, depending on how you want it. Central HR defines the role standards once per role type. Every GM then runs hiring from the per-location dashboard without needing HQ approval for each candidate. HQ keeps visibility into aggregate metrics — 30 / 60 / 90 retention, ranking accuracy, applicant flow — across all locations.

How does this handle seasonal hiring volume?

Volume scales without limit — we screen 50 or 5,000 applicants in the same operational footprint. Chains hiring for summer or holiday season can spin up campaigns per location, get ranked candidates in the same timeline as off-peak, and shut down the campaign when fully staffed. Pricing is volume-based, not seat-based.

What's the EEOC and compliance story for AI-based screening?

Tera scores against behavioral evidence drawn from the candidate's own words — not protected characteristics. Every score is backed by a verbatim quote, so any audit (EEOC, state-level, or internal) can trace a decision back to what the candidate actually said. We're in active conversation about NYC Local Law 144 and Illinois AIVIA compliance for chains operating in those jurisdictions.

Does this work for tip-credit, minimum-wage, and hourly roles?

Yes. The role definition is what changes — not the product. A line cook conversation is different from a manager conversation, but the framework is the same: 15 minutes, voice or chat, behavioral, scored on Outcome / Standards / Risk. We run the same flow for $13/hour line cook hiring and $80K district manager hiring.

Ready when you are

See it on one location. Decide for the restaurant chain.

Thirty days, one location, one role. No card, no procurement, no procurement deck. The dashboard will tell you whether the math works for the rest of the chain.

Talk to us →