As is customary in the restaurant industry, Chipotle was facing steep turnover and a 50% retention rate. CEO Scott Boatwright’s strategy called for the taco-bowl chain to hire 10,000 workers to staff more than 300 new restaurants in 2025—with thousands more needed in the coming years. And ultimately, the senior team wanted a more stable, well-trained workforce that could embrace the company’s culture and advance up the ranks.
“We often have high turnover, so we were solving for two things,” said Ilene Eskenazi, chief human resources officer at Chipotle, speaking at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit in California this week. “In the restaurants that have higher turnover, where we’re constantly having to train and retrain new employees, performance is not as high as teams that have longer tenure. And in addition, we have been on a really high-growth trajectory.”
