Matobo Hills Lodge · est. 1994
Line and Sous Cook
Assessment
Seventeen chalets inside the UNESCO Matobo Hills, an hour from Bulawayo. One kitchen, thirty-four guests on a full house, and a set menu cooked fresh every night. This is the working part of the application.
- Time
- About 20 minutes. You can close this and come back, your answers are kept on this device.
- Four parts
- About you · How you work · Five situations · Four short tasks
- Scoring
- The situations are scored against a key. Part Two has no right answers and is not scored as ability.
- Your data
- It goes to the two people hiring, and nowhere else. Kept twelve months unless you ask us to delete it sooner.
Before you start
Write the answers yourself. Use a dictionary or a spellchecker if you want to, we are not marking your grammar. But the words need to be yours, and here is why that is in your interest rather than just ours.
Every written answer you give here gets printed and read back to you at interview. You will be asked to go further into it: who you spoke to, what the figure was, what happened next, what you would do differently. That conversation is where we decide, and a candidate who cannot talk about their own answer does not get past it. It is a short conversation and it is not a pleasant one.
So a rough four sentences that are clearly yours will get you further than a polished paragraph that could have been written about any lodge anywhere. We are reading for what you have actually done, not how well it is phrased.
Nothing here has a trick in it. The situations have no single right answer, and we are looking at how you order things rather than whether you guessed what we wanted.
Part One of Four
About you
All of it is used, and none of it is optional. We have had kitchen applications arrive with the experience box empty, which leaves us nothing to go on.
In the kitchen
Practicalities
References and CV
Part Four of Four
Four short tasks
This is the part that tells us most, and the part we will read back to you. Keep the writing short. Three or four lines in your own words beats a paragraph.
One. Six o'clock, and six things at once
Seventeen chalets full, thirty-four guests, dinner at half past seven. Six things land on you inside the same five minutes. Number them 1 to 6 in the order you deal with them.
Two. A fillet and a number
A whole beef fillet comes in weighing 3.4 kg. Trimming it down to what you would serve loses 25 per cent of that weight. You portion at 170 g.
Three. Two plates came back cold
Two mains went out cold tonight and both came back from the table. It happened because the pass and your section were not talking, not because anyone was lazy. Some of the cooks have been here longer than you. Write the message you would put in the kitchen WhatsApp group afterwards.
Four. Something you changed that cut waste or cost
Describe something you changed in a kitchen that cut waste, cut a cost, or stopped food going in the bin. Include the actual figure, roughly, and how you knew it had worked.
Thank you, that is in.
We read every one of these properly, which takes time. If your application is going forward you will hear from us within ten working days.
If you have not heard by then, assume we have gone another way this season. Do keep an eye on the careers page, because we recruit through the year and we keep the ones we liked.
Josh ElliottMatobo Hills Lodge