"The Quickest Hire I’ve Ever Made"
How SetMenu hired their new Business Development Manager in two weeks flat
Beth Prior · 26 Aug 2026
SetMenu is the preordering platform behind smoother group bookings for some of the UK's best-known hospitality names. When Commercial Director Louise Jooste needed to hire fast without lowering the bar, she turned to Candid and made the quickest hire of her career.
🤔 The hiring problem
“I know what I want and I know what it is when I find it. It's so hard to qualify that, and a traditional CV comes nowhere near close enough to giving me enough insight into a candidate's personality to want to interview them. Hours spent on informal chatting with the wrong people.”
Louise Jooste, Commercial Director @ SetMenu
For a role like Business Development Manager, Louise wasn't looking for a specific list of skills. She was looking for mindset, resilience and ownership: the things a CV can't show and coaching can't fix.
🎯 Why Candid
“The fact that it was designed by people who really understand hospitality, that it felt safe and risk free. It’s also a really fun way to recruit. I could see the success other businesses were having and it felt like a no-brainer for me to sign up.”
Louise Jooste, Commercial Director @ SetMenu
No surprises once she got started, either. Sign up, get the role live, and let the matches come in.
🧡 Meet 'Maple Glazed Celery' aka Faye
Louise had already interviewed one other candidate, plus a handful more through other channels, when she matched with Maple Glazed Celery on Candid.
“From the first conversation with Faye, it felt like I'd found my match. We were so aligned on so many things, almost finishing each other's sentences. She just had the something that was missing from previous interviews. Her Candid match with the role was 80%, but having now met her in person and offered her the position, I would argue it's higher than that.”
Louise Jooste, Commercial Director @ SetMenu
2 weeks
room opened to offer
80%
culture match
BDM
role hired
From the room opening to the offer going out took exactly two weeks: the fastest hire in Louise's recruiting history. Faye joins SetMenu as Business Development Manager, welcomed the SetMenu way, with an oversized bar of Cadbury's, a face-to-face team day, and food and drinks with a customer to round it off.
🤝 What it means
“The pseudonyms. Love the F&B theme and creativity, I feel like Faye will always be known as Maple Glazed Celery.”
Louise Jooste, Commercial Director @ SetMenu
For Louise, the takeaway is simple. Sales skills can be coached. Attitude can't. Candid gave her a way to hire for the thing that actually matters, in a fraction of the time a traditional process would have taken.
🍽️ Who SetMenu are
SetMenu is the preordering platform behind smoother group bookings for some of the UK's best-known hospitality names, including Comptoir, Bill's, Signature Pub Group, Cote, Yalla Yalla and Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group. It doesn't just collect pre-orders - it captures guest-level data: every diner's email, dietary requirements and ordering behaviour, turning one-off group bookings into real CRM data operators can use to drive repeat business.
That positioning has made SetMenu especially popular heading into Christmas, when group bookings spike and guest expectations go up with them. Growing fast off the back of it, Louise needed to hire without losing momentum.