Where are chef jobs actually advertised?

Why a lot of chef vacancies never touch a general job board

If you have been refreshing Indeed and LinkedIn and getting nothing, the problem might not be your CV. In kitchens, a head chef who loses a chef de partie often has a replacement within days, sourced through an agency they already use, a former colleague, or a call to someone who staged there last summer. By the time a role appears on a public board, in a lot of cases it has already been offered informally and the posting is there to satisfy an HR process or to build a shortlist in case the first choice falls through. This is more true the smaller and more independent the kitchen, and less true of large branded groups with a central talent function, who do post roles systematically because they need volume and a paper trail.

This matters for where you spend your time. Scattering CVs at general boards for independent restaurant roles is working against the grain of how those kitchens actually fill positions.

Where the roles that do get advertised actually sit

General boards are not useless, but they are not where the trade concentrates. The specialist channels are:

• Caterer.com and the trade press site BigHospitality carry a large share of published hospitality vacancies, including chef de partie, sous chef and head chef roles, and are checked routinely by people already working in kitchens.
• The Caterer (the magazine and its job listings) still functions as a trade noticeboard, particularly for hotel and contract catering roles.
• Specialist hospitality recruiters run their own live vacancy pages that are updated more often than their LinkedIn posts: COREcruitment, Berkeley Scott, Gary Ashworth Recruitment, and Springboard's job pages (Springboard also runs mentoring and career-change support specific to hospitality). These firms hold long-standing relationships with hotel groups, contract caterers and pub companies, and often know about a vacancy before it is written down anywhere.
• Craft Guild of Chefs has a jobs board and, more usefully, a membership network where openings circulate by word of mouth among working chefs — this is closer to a professional register than a job site.
• Michelin-starred and fine-dining kitchens frequently do not advertise at all. Movement between them happens through chefs who trained together, staged together, or worked a season together, and through direct approach by the head chef or executive chef. If you want into that tier, the entry point is usually a stage (an unpaid or low-paid trial shift, sometimes a day, sometimes a week), not an application form.
• Hotel groups and large contract caterers (Compass, Sodexo, Elior) run their own careers portals and increasingly use hospitality-specific applicant tracking systems — Harri is common in this sector — so a vacancy might exist only on the employer's own site and never syndicate out to a board at all.

The stage: hiring mechanism, not just tradition

The trial shift or stage is worth naming directly because it does not exist in most other trades in the same way. A kitchen wants to see your knife work, your pace on the pass, how you handle a Friday dinner service, before it commits. For you, a stage is also information: it tells you what the brigade is actually like under pressure, something no advert or interview will show you. If a kitchen you want to work in has no advertised vacancy, asking directly for a stage — a day working the section you'd be hired into — is a legitimate way in, and it is how a good proportion of kitchen brigades are actually built, especially below head chef level.

Agencies: what they are actually for

Hospitality recruitment agencies work two distinct markets and it helps to know which one you're in.

For chef de partie, commis chef and demi chef roles, agencies often work on a temp-to-perm or straight temp basis, supplying kitchens with cover for holiday, sickness or event spikes. Registering with one of these (COREcruitment, Berkeley Scott, Detour, Tiger Recruitment's hospitality desk) gets you shift work and, often, a permanent offer once a kitchen has seen you perform under service. This route suits chefs who want to try a few kitchens before committing.

For head chef, executive chef and development chef roles, recruitment is closer to headhunting. These searches are frequently confidential — a hotel group replacing an executive chef does not want the current one to know before it's public — so the agency approaches known candidates directly rather than posting an open advert. If you're at this level and not hearing from anyone, it may be because the right recruiters don't know you're looking. Being visible to them means a current, accurate profile on LinkedIn with your Rosette or Michelin experience, your menu style and covers-per-service clearly stated, not a generic CV upload.

Internal movement and progression

A large amount of chef hiring is internal and never reaches an outside candidate at all: commis to chef de partie, chef de partie to junior sous, sous to head chef, often within the same group or even the same building. Hotel groups and multi-site restaurant companies use this deliberately to retain staff, and it means an external applicant is sometimes competing against someone the kitchen already knows and trusts. If a group you want to work for promotes heavily from within, the more reliable route in is not the head chef vacancy but the commis or CDP role two levels below it, with a clear conversation at interview about progression.

Seasonality: when kitchens actually recruit

Chef hiring follows the trade's calendar more than the general jobs market does.

• Late summer into fond September and October is a genuine hiring peak: kitchens are gearing up for the festive period (Christmas parties, New Year, private events) and want staff trained and settled before December service gets brutal. If you're reading this now, this is close to the best window of the year to be actively applying.
• January and February bring a second wave, as post-Christmas resignations and burnout create vacancies, and some kitchens use the new year to restructure the brigade.
• Seasonal and resort work — ski chalets and mountain hotels for winter, coastal hotels and event catering for summer — recruits on its own separate timeline, often three to four months ahead of the season, through specialist seasonal recruiters and resort operators' own sites rather than general boards.
• Wedding and events catering businesses hire heavily in spring for the summer wedding season, with applications often wanted by February or March.
• Avoid assuming the market is dead in quiet periods (deep midwinter after New Year, or August when a lot of senior chefs are on leave and not making hiring decisions) — applications sent then can sit unread for weeks not because you were rejected but because nobody has looked yet.

What to do with this

Register with two or three specialist hospitality recruiters rather than one, since each holds different client relationships. Check Caterer.com, BigHospitality and the Craft Guild of Chefs board weekly rather than daily — that's roughly how often kitchen-level roles actually turn over. If there's a specific restaurant or hotel kitchen you want, find out who the head chef is and ask directly about a stage, even with no advertised vacancy. Time a serious push for September–October or January–February if you have flexibility about when to move. And if your target is executive chef or head chef level, put real effort into a recruiter-visible LinkedIn profile, because at that level the vacancy you want may never be advertised publicly at all — it goes to whoever the recruiter already has on file. jobmarket.pro is built for the part of this that's hardest to keep up with alone: it searches across these specialist boards and agency listings for you, reads each advert in full, and tells you honestly where you fit and where you don't, before preparing the application.