Holidays or the festive seasons are the number one reason for new beginnings in life, either personal or professional. The excitement of holidays and celebrations brings a breath of fresh air in our lives. While holidays mean a relaxing and joyous vacation for everyone else, for recruiters, the seasonal hiring just begins.

Also called holiday hiring, it is quite a trick to source and attract candidates in holidays; particularly in the era of gig economy. Enterprises should know what are innovative recruitment strategies to hire the right talent.

On this note, we will uncover the secrets of winning the seasonal hiring game with recruitment automation. Let’s dive in.

READ: The Ultimate Guide to Holiday Hiring

What is Seasonal Hiring?

First things first. Seasonal hiring or seasonal employment is temporary and short-term by nature. A seasonal employee in the USA lasts for at least 6 months during a calendar year.

From the recruiter’s perspective, a seasonal employee or a holiday hire’s employment duration must begin and end around the same part of the calendar year.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) defines seasonal employee as an “one who is hired into a position for which the customary annual employment is six months or less and for which the period of employment begins each calendar year in approximately the same part of the year, such as summer or winter.”

Estimates show that 32% of Americans start looking for seasonal jobs in September. Everybody knows how the global pandemic changed the hiring pattern, but the stiff competition for holiday employees still exists in prime time. Like said in the beginning, the rise of gig economy has also sparked a huge demand for seasonal hires, like freelance jobs.

Why do Companies Hire Seasonal Workers?

Companies go for seasonal hiring for a multitude of reasons:

?Peak Shopping Pattern: Everybody knows people go on a shopping spree on holidays. Yes, shopping brings in so much excitement. But, if you think, peak shopping happens only in physical terms, then you are in for a surprise. Covid pandemic has peaked online shopping. Click and Collect trends like BOPIS (Buy Online Pickup In-Store) and BOPAC (Buy Online Pickup Curb Side) will continue to grow at 15% annually till 2024.

?Requirement of Additional Staff:  Do you know that UPS is planning to hire 100K seasonal employees this holiday season? With most of the shopping online, e-commerce will certainly experience turbulence in terms of logistics and transportation delays and increased shipping costs. It will also put extra burden on the existing workforce. Hiring additional staff in holiday seasons ease the workload to a great extent and make the business run fuss-free. For example, companies are hiring virtual Santa for Christmas!

?Easy on Cost and Time: Seasonal hiring of employees comes with many cost advantages. A holiday employment calculator can give you an idea about how long seasonal contracts can be. Most of seasonal employees are college students or interns who utilize the opportunity to make some quick money.

?Lesser Hiring Formalities: The ESRP Act makes insurance an exception while hiring seasonal employees. Additionally, companies can hire them without much-hiring formalities like exhaustive on-boarding processes as compared to FTE (Full-Time Employees). Instead, a clear and transparent job description and quick training will come to the rescue. But remember, seasonal employees also represent the company’s brand.

?FOMO – Fear of Missing Out: Companies do not wish to miss out on talented candidates, who are especially on job hunting mode during holiday breaks. Recruiters know that it is the time skilled talents come out from their burrow and look out for jobs or career changes. That’s why companies warm up to turn passive job-seekers into quality candidates.

?Business as usual: Rain or shine, some businesses treat holidays just like any other normal day in their timeline. So, for some companies, holidays do not make any difference when it comes to hiring and staffing. Candidates who are mindful of this fact can apply for jobs even during the holiday season.

How does Recruitment Automation help in Seasonal Hiring?

Normally, companies begun to churn creative hiring strategies as early as August, to avoid the last-minute rush to hire the best of seasonal employees. The much sought-after recruitment automation also steers the companies in sourcing the right talent need.

Doing the seasonal hiring right is one of the highlights of recruitment automation. The automation software scientifically tests job personas where a range of skills is auto populated against the job chosen by the candidate. The candidate can then answer the questions to assess his/her skills.

The 3 stages of Recruitment Automation are:

1. Pre-screening: Filter through a heap of resumes and job applications against a preset criterion.
2. Scheduling: Arrange interviews at the convenience of both candidates and the interviewer. Nowadays, one-way video interviews need only the candidate’s time.
3. Evaluation: The candidate’s assessment report is submitted to the recruiter and he/she is hired at the behest of his/her performance and other analysis.

Organizations compete for talent at across all roles and levels. In this sense, recruitment automation technologies help business enterprises source talent acquisition like no other. Right from sourcing to onboarding, the AI-based hiring technologies understand the hiring needs of organizations at all business seasons, for different roles, and at different locations.

Do you know, seasonal hiring or holiday workforce is easier to fill compared to full-time positions? But, there’s a catch.

Recruiters should proactively plan and brainstorm the seasonal hiring process. From hiring perspective, there are good reasons to use recruitment automation. For starters, it drastically brings down the mundane administrative load and streamlines the seasonal hiring process.

Thanks to recruitment automation technologies, much of Glider’s clients go worry-free, when it comes to hiring solutions.

How do Glider AI Products Simplify your Seasonal Hiring Process?

?Direct Sourcing: Hiring seasonal or temporary employees can be an easy task if organizations pursue direct sourcing through internal pool of talented candidates. As one of the best co-employment practices, Glider helps clients to engage talents from communities like past employees, alumni, retirees, army veterans, and freelancers through social media, email, and online marketing for seasonal hiring.

?Easy Onboarding: Companies can leverage recruitment automation for a smarter and stress-free onboarding process even for seasonal employees. They can be formally welcomed through offer letters, team induction and a quick tour of their job profile.

?On-the-go Hiring: Leveraging seasonal hiring to automation is a fuss-free way of winning the seasonal hiring games. From improving talent sourcing to increasing the reach of open positions across all media, recruitment automation platforms from Glider make seasonal hiring an easy process.

READ: How Glider AI Boosts your Talent Intelligence Process

?Cost-effective: Many studies suggest recruitment automation cuts hiring expenses by over 50%. The AI-based tools screen tons of resumes in a few minute. With reduced time-to-hire and cost-per-hire, winning the seasonal hiring game is a lot easier.

?Reduced Bias: Recruitment automation encourages DE&I workforce. With reduced bias across end-to-end hiring process, skilled and talented candidates are always upheld irrespective of their background, college, ethnicity, race or anything.

To Wrap up

Holidays are meant to be spent without much planning, but seasonal hiring is an exception. Though it is not a round-the-year process, it’s always better to keep an eye on the hiring trends. Using recruitment automation technologies from talent intelligent companies like Glider can turn talent quality into a reality, without compromise on skill and quality.

Give Glider AI a try today.