Don’t Rush Your Hiring During The Holiday Rush

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When I started working with HR professionals three decades ago, holiday hiring was neatly wrapped: retailers needed people to stock shelves, field customer complaints, and handle purchases. The massive shift to e-commerce, however, has made seasonal hiring more nuanced, as job positions evolve from in-store staff to warehouse positions and transportation talent.
 

This need coincides with a severe labor shortage in the trucking and logistics industry and a decreased reliance on seasonal work to supplement holiday income due to gig positions like ridesharing and food delivery apps. The current realities of the hiring landscape mean a company’s seasonal hiring procedures need to be perfectly packaged—with a bow on top.
 
Here’s what we’ve learned:
 

The backbone of your seasonal hiring strategy requires that you begin sourcing talent in advance of the rush. Best practice requires that you post the job three to four months ahead of the need. This gives your hiring manager time to find the right people but, more importantly, it provides ample time to train your new recruits.
 
Padding your onboarding timeline to account for training and screening is inarguably better for your bottom line because it mitigates the risk of costly mistakes. In traditional seasonal positions, like stocking up on cashiers and customer service personnel at retail outlets, you’ll want your A-team on the floor when droves of holiday returns come piling in. In the more skilled positions, like truckers and manufacturing personnel, training time is imperative to prevent accidents and keep processing times low. 

The HR industry has moved past posting job ads online and then waiting for an onslaught of applications. We’re well into the digitalization of human resources, and daily releases of new technology make sourcing and vetting talent easier. Improving your hiring process is even more important for seasonal hiring; companies are competing with each other for highly sought-after talent, many of whom started recruiting in July, with holiday hiring set to hit a multiyear high in 2018.
 
So how can you get a better ROI on hiring and make it easier for your team? Choose the right technological assistance. Particularly in manufacturing and trucking positions, which are traditionally dominated by men, your talent pool will expand if you implement identity-blind resume reviews or apps that rewrite job descriptions to make them gender neutral. For more traditional hiring, automated application screening weeds out unqualified talent, allowing your hiring managers to focus on interviewing and training the incoming recruits. Even your interviews could be streamlined; an increasing number of companies are conducting preliminary interviews via chatbots or text messages.
 
Technology can also help you onboard your new talent quickly, too, which is important because studies show that candidates will move on to a different position rather than wait out a lengthy hiring process.
 
Implementing new technology comes with a price tag, but it saves your hiring managers time—and time is revenue. Choose the innovations that work best for your business model. 

The tight labor market—a byproduct of low unemployment and the ever-disruptive entity that is the sharing economy—is causing a lot of employers to look to non-traditional talent, such as older individuals and ex-offenders.
 
Expanding your recruitment pool is fine, but don’t compromise on your company’s safety. Employee fraud over the holiday season is estimated to top $15.4 billion this year. Quick, comprehensive background checks protect your company from revenue lost due to theft and poor productivity. In skilled positions, this step in the hiring process is even more important. Manufacturing positions are ripe for expensive on-the-job accidents, and trucking companies are held to compliance standards set by the Department of Transportation.
 
You may be tempted to skimp on background checks to save time and money, but an effective screening partner will keep this process quick and easy for your team while saving you money in the long run. The best way to accomplish this? Choose a partner with a mobile-friendly platform; it appeals to the majority of your applicants and gets candidates onboarded faster. 

New generations entering the workplace are forcing recruitment practices to evolve. Traditional benefits are being replaced by the perks that millennials value. These trends have typically only impacted office jobs, but reports on 2018 holiday hiring claim that worker demand is even driving retailers to up their minimum-wage compensation, begin offering increased employee discounts, and provide “associate shopping days.” 

Seasonal hiring comes in many packages. Whether you’re asking Santa for cashiers, truck drivers, or hospitality workers, everyone benefits from checking their “hiring processes” list twice. The labor shortage is impacting every type of employer, and holiday hiring is no different, so better your recruitment practices with a documented strategy, effective use of technology, a streamlined screening process, and attractive benefits packages.