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Seasonal hiring remains a recurring challenge for retailers, logistics providers, hospitality companies, customer-service teams, and other employers that need to expand their workforce quickly during peak periods. Even when overall hiring slows, organizations may still need to fill large numbers of temporary or part-time roles without compromising candidate quality.
For companies preparing for holiday or peak-season demand, the challenge is often a form of high volume hiring: recruiters must engage more candidates, screen them consistently, move qualified applicants forward quickly, and confirm that the people they hire have the right skills for the role.
The seasonal labor market has changed since this article was first published. For the 2025 U.S. holiday season, the National Retail Federation expected retailers to hire between 265,000 and 365,000 seasonal workers, compared with 442,000 seasonal hires in 2024. Challenger, Gray & Christmas later reported 372,520 announced seasonal hiring plans in the fourth quarter of 2025, the lowest level since it began tracking those announcements in 2012.
When the original article was published in 2023, large employers were still publicly announcing major seasonal hiring plans, including:
Those 2023 examples are useful historical context, but today’s seasonal hiring environment places even more pressure on employers to do more with fewer recruiting resources, use automation effectively, and validate candidate quality earlier.
Seasonal jobs can include retail associates, warehouse staff, customer support representatives, delivery workers, hospitality employees, temporary specialists, and other roles needed for a limited period. Demand can rise quickly, but the number of available candidates, hiring budgets, and consumer expectations can change from year to year.
That makes speed important, but speed alone is not enough. Filling roles too quickly without validating skills or job fit can create avoidable turnover, poor customer experiences, and additional recruiting costs during the busiest time of the year.
What makes some recruiting teams more successful during high-demand, high-volume seasonal hiring? Historical customer data from Glider AI shows that seasonal hiring can be an opportunity to improve talent quality while meeting skill requirements and diversity goals through a more structured screening process.
Although adding screening and assessment steps can appear to slow the process, validating candidates earlier can reduce wasted interviews, help recruiters prioritize qualified applicants, and lower the risk of making rushed hiring decisions.
Beyond starting outreach early, data collected from more than 300 enterprises and staffing firms has shown that seasonal hiring success is supported by the following five practices.
Use pre-screening tools such as text recruiting and AI-supported chat or outreach to engage and qualify candidates at high volumes. A structured pre-screen can quickly identify basic eligibility, interest, availability, location, shift preferences, and other role-specific requirements.
This helps recruiters focus their time on candidates who meet the minimum requirements instead of manually reviewing every applicant.
Use AI and automation to help scale the creation of interview questions and automate appropriate next steps for qualified candidates. Seasonal recruitment often involves repetitive workflows, so automation can help reduce administrative delays and keep candidates moving.
The goal is not to remove recruiter judgment. It is to automate repeatable tasks so recruiters can spend more time evaluating candidate quality and resolving exceptions that require human attention.
Scale interviews with asynchronous video interviews, allowing recruiters and hiring managers to review candidate responses without requiring every applicant to join a live interview at the same time.
This approach can be especially useful for seasonal hiring across multiple shifts, locations, or time zones because it reduces scheduling bottlenecks while helping teams use a more consistent set of interview questions.
Initiate skill assessments to validate hard skills such as technical competency and soft skills such as communication, attention to detail, customer service, and problem-solving.
For seasonal roles, employers can keep assessments focused on the skills that directly affect day-one performance. A shorter, job-relevant assessment can help distinguish candidates who are available from candidates who are actually ready to perform the work.
Validate candidate integrity with AI proctoring and other appropriate identity or assessment controls when the role or hiring process requires them. This can help recruiting teams identify suspicious assessment behavior and protect the reliability of candidate results.
Integrity controls are especially important when organizations are hiring quickly at scale and relying on remote assessments or interviews to make decisions.
Seasonal hiring demand can change from one year to the next, but the underlying recruiting challenge remains similar: companies need to hire quickly without lowering the quality bar. The strongest approach is to validate skill and fit early rather than rushing candidates through the process and correcting poor hires later.
Pre-screening, automation, asynchronous interviews, skills assessments, and candidate-integrity controls work best when they are connected in one consistent workflow. Together, these practices can help hiring teams manage volume while keeping candidate quality visible throughout the process.
Seasonal hiring is the process of recruiting temporary, part-time, or fixed-term workers to meet increased workforce demand during a specific period, such as holidays, peak retail months, tourism seasons, or major business events.
Companies should begin planning before demand peaks so there is enough time to source, screen, assess, interview, onboard, and train qualified candidates. The exact timeline depends on role complexity, hiring volume, and local labor availability.
Employers can use structured pre-screening, recruiting automation, asynchronous interviews, job-relevant skill assessments, and clear decision criteria to move qualified candidates faster while maintaining consistent evaluation.
Skill assessments help confirm whether candidates can perform the work before they are hired. This can reduce wasted interviews, improve job readiness, and help recruiters prioritize qualified applicants in high-volume hiring.
A common challenge is balancing speed and hiring volume with candidate quality. Employers may need to fill many roles quickly, but rushed screening can lead to poor fit, early turnover, and additional hiring costs.
Seasonal hiring does not have to mean sacrificing talent quality for speed. By starting early and using structured pre-screening, automation, asynchronous interviews, skills assessments, and appropriate integrity controls, recruiting teams can manage high applicant volumes more efficiently. The goal is to identify qualified candidates earlier, reduce unnecessary steps, and build a seasonal workforce that is ready to perform when demand peaks.
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