5 Tips For Seasonal Hiring

Some employers are looking to ramp up hiring during the holiday season, while others do it in the summertime. Either way, a busy season doesn’t mean it’s time to make rash decisions. Your customers won’t forgive you for poor customer service or delayed shipments, so don’t make poor hiring choices. Instead, use these five tips to start with a strong season.

Ask for Employee Referrals

Your current employees are doing a great job, and they know better than anyone who would fit in at the company and handle the job well. Employee referrals not only provide you with quality candidates, but also cuts time out of the hiring process. Candidates that were referred by employees typically start ten days sooner than those found by job boards.

If you’re looking to increase your employee referral pool, incentivizing your employees is the best way to do it. It’s a common practice for companies to offer monetary rewards for referrals. When it comes to seasonal hiring, a good starting point is offering $100 for referrals who get hired. Your employees will refer good people, and it will still cost you less than finding and recruiting a person on your own.

Connect with Previous Employees

It’s important you maintain communication with your previous seasonal employees, but if you haven’t, it’s not too late to reach out.

If they’re once again looking for seasonal work, they’re probably applying to many different jobs and are flooded with emails. You can stand out by texting your old employees instead of emailing or them. The average person receives over 100 emails a day, so consider text messaging as a quick and easy way to make sure your opportunity gets noticed. Text messaging also provides a quick way for the other person to communicate back to you. In just 90 seconds, you will know if your previous employee is interested in the job or not.

Rehiring old employees saves you money on the hiring process and in training. It costs 50% less to rehire a former employee, and they are 40% more productive in their first quarter of work. If someone has already worked for you, you don’t need to spend as much time training them because they’ve already done the job. Even if a few things have changed since last year, it’s easier for previous employees to catch on.

Automate Your Hiring Process

If you are looking to ramp up your hiring quickly, you'll find much of your time taken up with dozens of manual, housekeeping tasks like reviewing resumes, rejecting unqualified candidates, and confirming the person is still interested. These tasks are hard to scale without investing in a tool that can automate some of these repetitive HR tasks.

HR automation is the process of enhancing the efficiency of the HR department by freeing employees from tedious manual tasks and allowing them to focus on complex tasks like decision making and strategizing.

HR automation won’t replace you or your employees, but instead it will streamline processes for your hiring, communication, and more. Investing money in a new tool while also investing money into seasonal hiring sounds risky, but HR software can actually save you $552 annually per employee.

Hire Early and Train More

Taking extra time to train and onboard your new employees makes a big difference between a good season and a bad season.  While it may be tempting to shorten training for seasonal workers since they will be with you a shorter amount of time, it's just not worth the risk. The real cost of inadequate training is measured in the lost sales that badly trained seasonal workers can cause. If you start your seasonal hiring process earlier, then you can onboard new employees earlier and leave more time to prepare them for the busy season.

Update Your Job Posting

The last thing you want to happen during your busy season is for your temporary workers to leave before the season is over. If a seasonal worker starts a job with the wrong expectations, then things may go awry. Many companies re-use the same job description from years ago because they’re hiring for the same position, but this doesn’t mean that the job requirements haven’t changed in the last few years. The best way to make sure you have the correct requirements listed is by speaking to your current employees that are in this position. They’ll be able to put into words what is expected of them on the job and what knowledge new employees need to be prepared with.

If you’re looking to re-write or write new job postings, we put together a guide to writing job descriptions for hourly workers.

Seasonal hiring may have you swamped this time of year, but following these tips will help you end the season on a triumphant note. If you’re looking to automate your hiring process, try a risk-free trial with Team Engine. Our software will automate many of your tedious tasks for you and help you keep your seasonal employees engaged and up-to-date.