Well, Summer is well and truly coming to an end and as we welcome the dawn of Autumn (or Fall for my transatlantic friends), some recruiters and talent acquisition leaders are starting to turn their thoughts to hiring for seasonal surges. And if you’re not, then you should be.
As we enter the fourth quarter of the year, we start to see preparation in certain sectors for their busiest time of the year.
For industries that target consumers, the last quarter of the year is generally the busiest time of the year, when many companies expect to make a very large amount of sales and revenue. Think Black Friday. Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving Sales, Christmas and then Boxing Day Sales. Customer spending is at an all-time high during this period and hiring needs to accelerate to ensure that staffing levels can keep up with customer demand and activity.
The busiest sector for seasonal hiring is retail. But with online shopping taking over a lot of this during the pandemic, we see recruitment in transportation, logistics and warehousing becoming ever more important.
So how do you recruit the best people? And at volume and speed.
It’s a good question and I thought I’d take a look at how some of the best-known retailers do it.
One very large supermarket told me that they start again every year – hiring for their surge demand from scratch. They advertise a short code to send an SMS to in their stores. So I tried it. I got an SMS back from them thanking me for my interest, with a link to complete an application form on their website/ATS :face-palm:
I asked them how many candidates they have hired over the last several years. The answer: “oh, we have a separate ATS for seasonal hiring with millions of candidates on there”. Another :face-palm:
It was the same across lots of retailers – some use automated assessment, and some don’t assess. Some screen CVs, and some don’t. The crux was that most people I spoke to started again, every single year. Some had put thought into how to re-engage previous workers – inviting them to update their profiles if they want to work again this year, but that was delivering minimal results.
So what would the difference be if you introduced Hollaroo into the equation?
Well, firstly, Hollaroo is about creating long-term relationships via talent communities. So at its core, we would encourage you to create a community of your seasonal workers, which could be hundreds or even thousands of people.
Once your community is in the system (and you keep inviting new candidates in), you can then start creating groups. These could be common interest groups, groups for job types, or even geographical-based groups. These groups could be to serve up group-related content, job adverts or just let former colleagues keep in touch with each other. However, the lovely thing about Hollaroo is that you can automate as much of the content delivery as you like – through integrations with your social media, website news feeds as well as your ATS for jobs. Your community would also be encouraged to keep their profile up to date. And through automated newsletters, they would be nudged to keep coming back to the community.
And when the time comes to start your seasonal hiring process, you have a wonderful community of highly engaged seasonal workers, who you can give early access to the process, who don’t need to apply again, who are already trained up in the role and can hit the (shop) floor running.
You’ll solve your seasonal hiring challenges rapidly, at scale and very simply.
Let’s get your seasonal worker ATS into a Hollaroo community and start creating long-term relationships with your seasonal talent, which will deliver real ROI – reduce your marketing spend, speed up your process, enhance the candidate experience and deliver results year on year.
