You Might Be Filtering Out Your Best Hire

"Cert required" is the default line in half the kitchen ads out there. But when we asked working chefs and operators what they actually hire on, the gap between what the ad says and what the venue does was glaring - and it could be costing you candidates.

Short answer: no. Cooking is an unlicensed trade in Australia, so you aren't legally required to hire a qualified chef for most roles. In a market this tight, a blanket "qualification required" line in your ad can screen out the experienced operators you'd actually want - so it should be a deliberate choice, not a default.

We recently put a hiring scenario to our Barcats Chef Exchange groups in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane: a cook with ten years' experience and no certificate, versus a Cert III graduate who's never worked a real service. The overwhelming answer from operators? They'd take the experience. Every time.

Which raises an awkward question for anyone writing a kitchen ad. If most venues would hire the skilled, uncertified cook - why do so many job ads still open with "qualification required"?

The answer, uncomfortably, is often habit. As one chef put it in the thread, a lot of ads are "from venue owners with no real idea of what they're doing." The requirement gets copied from the last ad, which was copied from the one before. And every time it goes up, it quietly shrinks your applicant pool in the tightest hiring market in years.

The market can't afford a filter you don't need

This isn't a soft "be more open-minded" argument. The numbers make it a commercial one.

Chefs and Cooks remain on Jobs and Skills Australia's 2025 Occupation Shortage List, in shortage across nearly every state and territory. And recruiting for the trade is harder than for almost any other line of work: in the June quarter 2025, Technicians and Trades Workers - the occupation group cooks and chefs sit in - recorded the highest recruitment difficulty rate of any group at 67%, with 61% of those vacancies taking more than a month to fill. The pipeline behind you is thinning too: trade apprenticeship commencements fell 5.4% in the year to December 2024, so the supply of freshly-qualified cooks is going backwards.

Put those together and the logic is simple. When qualified candidates are scarce and roles already sit open for weeks, a "must have Cert III" line in your ad is a filter that screens out exactly the experienced operators you'd happily hire - before they ever click apply.

What operators in the thread actually do

The chefs and owners who responded weren't anti-qualification. They were anti-assumption. Their hiring logic was consistently about demonstrated capability:

"Always on the lookout for experience over qualifications," one operator wrote of his ongoing kitchen hiring. Several others made the same point: the trial tells them everything the certificate can't. "If it's worth its salt, the chef will just test you."

The most experienced voice in the thread - an operator of 30-plus years who's run large venues - put the capability-vs-paper reality bluntly: "I've had people with a cert I wouldn't hire for kitchen hands, and ones without that can run my kitchen for me." His take wasn't that certificates are useless. It was that the certificate predicts pay grade, not performance.

What the cert does signal

That said, dismissing the qualification entirely misses something the thread also surfaced. A certificate is a signal - just not the one most ads treat it as.

"A certificate doesn't replace experience, but it still has value," argued one operator. "Attending TAFE two or three days a week while still working, completing assessments, meeting deadlines - it shows commitment, reliability and follow-through. It shows the person can learn, solve problems, and is open to being trained the right way."

That's the useful way to read a qualification on a CV: not as proof someone can run your pass, but as evidence they can stick at something, follow a system, and take coaching. For a junior hire or an apprentice you intend to develop, that signal genuinely matters. The mistake is letting it stand in for hands-on capability in a senior role - or screening out the proven operator who simply never took the course.

Where a qualification genuinely earns its place

To be clear, this isn't a case for stripping qualifications out of every ad. There are real situations where they matter, and the thread surfaced them honestly:

Pay classification

This is the big one operators raised. Under the Hospitality Industry (General) Award, the "qualified" cook classifications (Grade 3 and above) hinge on the appropriate level of training - which carries a higher minimum rate. So a qualification is partly a budget question: a qualified hire must be paid the qualified rate. Worth modelling against your award position before the new financial year, especially alongside the 2026 wage increase.

Kitchen culture and complexity

As one chef noted, requiring a qualification can be a deliberate way to "filter for classically-trained chefs" - legitimate if you run a structured, technique-heavy or fine-dining kitchen where that training genuinely shows on the plate.

Apprentice supervision and specialised roles

If the role involves training apprentices or sits in a context with its own requirements, the qualification stops being optional.

The point isn't to never ask for a qualification. It's to ask whether this role actually needs one - or whether you've inherited the requirement by default.

What good looks like: writing the ad

A few practical shifts that widen your pool without lowering your bar:

Lead with capability, not credentials

Describe the job - covers, cuisine, sections, pace, what a great shift looks like - and ask for the skills to match. Let candidates self-select on whether they can do it, not whether they hold a specific piece of paper.

Make qualifications "desirable," not "required" - unless they truly are

If a cert genuinely changes the role (pay band, supervision, fine dining), say so and say why. If it doesn't, dropping it from "essential" can meaningfully lift application numbers in a market where every applicant counts.

Use the trial as your real filter

The operators in the thread were unanimous: skill shows up in the trial. Build a sharp, structured trial and let it do the screening your ad shouldn't.

Know your award position before you advertise

If you do want a qualified hire, price the qualified rate in deliberately rather than discovering it at the first pay run. Our guide to what head chefs are really earning in 2026 is a useful gut-check on where the market actually sits.

The bottom line

In a shortage this entrenched, the venues that win the hire are the ones that don't filter out talent by accident. A qualification requirement should be a deliberate choice tied to pay, culture or compliance - not a line you copied from the last ad. Get clear on which roles genuinely need the paper, lead with capability everywhere else, and let the trial do the rest.

Writing your next kitchen ad? Post a job

Sources: Jobs and Skills Australia - 2025 Occupation Shortage List; Jobs and Skills Australia - Recruitment Experiences and Outlook Survey, June quarter 2025; NCVER - Apprentices and trainees 2024: December quarter; Fair Work Ombudsman - Appropriate level of training in the hospitality awards; and Barcats Chef Exchange community discussions, June 2026.