For those who’ve always considered a career in fast food to be a fallback, the new recruitment program at some European McDonald’s locations is sure to disappoint. But the result, says Shaz Quereshi of Kenexa, is a crew that is well equipped to serve customers and boost the chain’s bottom line.

Quereshi, who manages the McDonald’s account at Kenexa, says the fast-food chain has been using the recruitment and retention consultancy for two years to develop more efficient ways of finding the right managers. Now, however, the focus is on having the right crew to report to those managers.

And this is no small task. Applications for McDonald’s crew in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland total 400,000 annually, Quereshi says. But the volume has provided ample data to work with.

“Essentially over time we [have determined] what top performers look like at McDonald’s restaurants,” says Quereshi, who adds this profile has been determined through company data, focus groups and other research gathering. As such, the restaurants now have applicants take an online questionnaire to determine where they fit on that range of top-performer attributes.

The 75-item questionnaire takes about 15 minutes or so to complete, and gives store managers insight as to who would work best with their staff. The average tenure of a crewperson at McDonald’s is about two years, and while Quereshi says this new hiring process isn’t likely to extend that average employment, it should put someone of a higher competency in that position for that two-year stretch.

“Some people will transition through very quickly, but other people will stay a lot longer,” Quereshi says, adding that those who thrive in the environment will likely move up to management where the skills the assessment looks at, such as personality type and energy level—“all the things that you would expect someone in a customer-facing role to be confident and comfortable doing,” Quereshi says—will be even more important.

And while it’s rewarding to be offered a job, especially with the added psychological hurdles, the true reward is for the fast-food company. “Having the right people working efficiently means they can make the internal targets [and] improve service levels,” Quereshi says.

The questionnaire, while intended to highlight which candidates are best suited for the job, however, isn’t meant to ostracize anyone for whom a job focused on french fries and Filet O’ Fishes isn’t a match, Quereshi says, pointing out, “Everybody who’s an applicant is a customer, current and future.”