For the third year in a row, restaurants are hiring fewer seasonal workers than they’d like, not because business is slowing down, but because the people who used to fill those jobs aren’t there anymore.

According to the National Restaurant Association’s 28th annual Eating and Drinking Place Summer Employment Forecast, restaurants are expected to add 450,000 seasonal jobs this summer, down from 469,000 last year. It’s the third consecutive summer that hiring has come in below 500,000. Summer is traditionally the busiest stretch of the year for most restaurants, and it’s getting harder to staff for it. The traffic isn’t going away. The teenagers and young adults who traditionally filled those shifts are.

That shrinking pool means the operators who staff up successfully this summer won’t be the ones who post the most job listings. They’ll be the ones who get the most out of the team they already have.

Widen who you’re recruiting from. If your seasonal hiring has historically leaned on students and young adults, this is the summer to look beyond that pipeline — retirees, parents wanting part-time hours, and people picking up a second job for the season are all viable sources that get overlooked when hiring habits run on autopilot.

Make scheduling flexible enough to keep part-timers. A seasonal hire who can’t get the hours they actually need, around school, a second job, or family obligations, won’t stick around long enough to be worth training. The easier it is for someone to submit availability and get a schedule that respects it, the more likely they are to stay through August instead of disappearing in July.

Cross-train early so a thin roster still covers a busy patio. With fewer seasonal hires to spread across the summer, every person who can flex between host, server, and expo gives you more coverage without more headcount. Cross-training pays for itself fastest in exactly the kind of tight labor market this summer is shaping up to be.

Build your schedule around actual demand, not last year’s roster size. If you’re staffing this summer with fewer people than last year, scheduling by gut feel gets riskier. Pulling your sales history by day and hour and building shifts against it, rather than assuming you’ll have the bodies to cover every shift the old way, is what keeps a leaner team from getting run into the ground.

A tighter seasonal labor pool isn’t a one-summer problem. It’s the third year of this trend, and operators who build scheduling habits that work with fewer people, not just more aggressive recruiting, will be in better shape for next summer too.