About
From the floor to senior people leadership.
Vanda Peintler started on the restaurant floor and worked her way up into hospitality management, recruitment and senior people leadership. Her work is grounded in real hospitality experience, not generic HR theory.
Vanda currently works as Head of People for a multi-site London restaurant group, alongside advisory and recruitment work for founder-led hospitality businesses.
Background
Hospitality management background
Started as a waitress and worked up into general management, with hands-on understanding of restaurant teams, service standards and site-level pressure.
20+ years hospitality experience
Experience across restaurants, service operations and multi-site hospitality environments in the UK and Europe.
10+ years recruitment experience
A decade hiring senior operators, managers and head office roles for hospitality groups.
Head of People experience
Multi-site people leadership covering structure, hiring, retention, onboarding and management capability.
Founder-led hospitality specialist
Focused on founder-led groups where people pressure is starting to affect growth, consistency and founder time.
Practical, commercial support
Hands-on people leadership for hospitality businesses that need structure, better managers and stronger hiring without adding a full-time senior people role too early.
How I work
Senior people leadership, embedded in the business.
I work inside the business, not alongside it — sitting with founders, GMs and ops leads, walking sites, reading the rota, the P&L and the exit interviews. The diagnosis comes from what is actually happening, not a templated framework.
From there, the work is unromantic: clearer structure, better managers, sharper hiring, retention that holds. Most engagements start with a focused diagnostic and grow into embedded support only when the trust and the workload justify it.
I keep the engagement small enough to stay senior and hands-on, and short enough that the business owns the result — not me.
Working with Vanda