How To Accelerate Holiday Hiring

Why Hire Seasonal Workers?

There are many reasons folks in retail and hospitality expand their teams over the holidays, including the obvious ones like accounting for scheduling when people are taking time off for vacation or sick time.

Smart hires during the seasonal holidays are crucial for businesses to handle the increased demand and maintain customer satisfaction. With a surge in sales and customer traffic, additional staff is essential to ensure smooth operations and prevent overwhelming existing employees.

Well-selected seasonal workers can enhance customer service, expedite processes, and contribute to a positive shopping experience. More importantly, strategic hiring can uncover potential full-time candidates who demonstrate exceptional skills and align with the company culture.

Ultimately, smart holiday hires not only bolster short-term performance but also lay the groundwork for long-term success.

The top three reasons why teams are hiring seasonal workers are to:

• Support with the high volume of customers
• Improve customer service experience & processes
• Enhance operational efficiency

With that said, there are also common challenges HR leaders need to account for when going through the seasonal hiring process. Things like high turnover, skills shortage, and competition for top talent come to mind.

There are ways to overcome these seasonal hiring challenges that can help you find the perfect employees to help your business thrive during the chaos.

With an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Mitratech TalentReef, you’ll be able to find the most qualified candidates and meet them where they are through integrations with the top job boards & social media – and get them hired and ready for day one.

How to Accelerate The Seasonal Hiring Timeline

In order to have a scalable seasonal hiring process, you need to invest in the right applicant tracking system that allows you to connect to all of your systems. This includes everything you use from application to post-hire.

Choosing a system that integrates with the following will set you and your new employees up for success in a timely manner:

• Job Boards
• Social Media
• Payroll/HRIS
• Training/LMS
• Background Checks
• Candidate Assessments
• Work Opportunity Tax Credits (WOTC)
• POS

Bouncing between multiple systems is a way to slow you down and can make the entire process feel daunting & tedious. Through meaningful integrations, your systems of truth will receive real-time updates throughout the process, so you don’t have to spend time copying and pasting information from one place to another. When you avoid that, you also avoid costly human error.

Access your entire talent management ecosystem from a single platform to stand out from the competition this holiday season and beyond.

Best Practices for Posting Seasonal Hiring Roles

You’ll want to make sure you’re being thoughtful about your job descriptions in order to find the best-fit candidates to fill your seasonal roles.

Our friends at Indeed provided some great tips for writing your seasonal job descriptions, including:

• Relevant Keywords: Ensure you’re using the word “seasonal” or “temporary” with the start and end dates so that the applicant knows that this role is only for a certain period of time.
• Knowing your needs: Be specific about what exactly you need – what skills are required in order to be considered & successful for the position
• Highlight benefits: As mentioned earlier, seasonal candidates are finding very competitive positions on the market, so be sure to share any discount, perks, etc. that will help your role stand out amongst the competition.

So You’ve Found The Best Seasonal Employees, Now What?

Yay! You’ve gotten the hard part over: you found your perfect seasonal employees and they accepted their offer.

Well, not so fast. The hard part isn’t over yet.

You still need them to show up, be successful, and have a great experience during the holiday season.

Enter Onboarding.

Onboarding is a vital part of the hiring process for any role, and especially for seasonal workers. Some processes may change during the holidays and will need to be outlined during onboarding to ensure your employees are set up for success.

You’ll want to provide relevant training that is digestible & realistic for your new hires to get off to a fast start, while feeling confident and empowered to do their job day one.

Having something as simple as a checklist for necessary equipment access, uniforms, system information, etc. will be a great way to set your team up for a fruitful season this year and moving forward as well.

If you want to learn more tips like these, we’ve got a full list you can bookmark here.

Are You Ready To Get Started with Holiday Hiring?

If you’re ready to take the next step in optimizing and accelerating your seasonal hiring timeline, we’d love to help.

Mitratech helps thousands of retailers and hospitality organizations successfully hire year-round, and is the trusted ATS for the busiest times of the year.

We can support you by sharing what’s working in your industry and map out a clear and effective hiring strategy for the holidays and beyond.

We’d love to show you Mitratech’s applicant tracking system in action – schedule a demo today!