Sep 05, 2018

Preparing Your Recruiters for Hiring Seasonal Holiday Workers in Five Steps

Summer is over and before you know it the seasonal holiday hiring season will be here. For many staffing agencies, preparing for the holiday hiring season is one of the busiest times of the year with a lot of pressure to fill large orders in a short time frame. To make sure your recruiters are ready to handle the tough workload, here are five steps to help your team plan and work more efficiently.

1. Start the recruiting planning process early.

This one may be obvious but starting to prepare for your seasonal holiday workers months in advance will save both time and stress. Start by looking at what happened during this period last year. Do you expect to have the same number of clients and orders coming through? Or do you have new clients and new orders to fill? Do you have the internal staff in place and trained to handle the anticipated workload? Creating a benchmark to anticipate large orders is the first step to making sure that your team can handle anything that is thrown at them.

2. Create compelling and accurate job descriptions.

Writing job descriptions that are both attention-grabbing and accurate is an art. On one hand if you don’t make the job description compelling and exciting, you won’t get enough applicants. On the other hand, if the job description isn’t clear about what the job will entail then you may hire a lot of candidates who will leave before the end of the job order. Start by writing the job description with accuracy in mind and include any additional benefits the position may offer beyond the job period (e.g. any certifications that they may be eligible for or specific experience they can gain that may open the door to new opportunities). Once the description is accurate and focused on the benefits, then go back through the description and add any industry buzz words while still maintaining accuracy.

3. Define your target audience and figure out where to find them.

Depending on the qualifications required for your job orders, your target audience for recruitment may include a wide range of individuals. Make sure you’ve done your research on where these individuals look for job postings. Be creative in the methods you use to reach more candidates, including email campaigns, job board websites, online community forums, job fairs, and more. The more touchpoints that you create, the more potential candidates you can reach. Also, don’t forget to leverage any referrals from your current talent pool.

4. Invest in making your hiring and onboarding process smooth and painless.

The fastest way to scare away good candidates is having an arduous hiring process and delivering a painful onboarding experience. Make sure you have a fine-tuned hiring process to get candidates in the door and through the onboarding experience. Start by analyzing your current process and removing any unnecessary steps along the way, such as requiring background checks or drug screening tests if you’re able to. Next, your onboarding process should be an ongoing experience instead of a one-time event. Be supportive and check in to make sure the candidate doesn’t have any outstanding questions before their first day. It’s the little things that count to make workers feel valued and appreciated, so make a list of items that you can easily implement to make your candidate experience the best that it can be.

5. Retain good employees.

This last step is focused on making your life easier for next year’s seasonal hiring period. The key to retaining good employees is making sure that they have a pleasant experience with you the first time around. So, if you conquered step four above then you can focus on keeping in touch with each candidate both during and after the job order Get their feedback on how the job went and how the process can be improved. Make sure you focus on building a solid relationship with good candidates so that the next time you need to fill a job order fast, you already have a list of possible candidates with which to fill the order.

The seasonal holiday worker hiring process can be daunting to any staffing professional. By breaking it into smaller steps and starting as far in advance as you’re able will help give your team the key to successfully recruiting for the large orders coming your way. If you want to learn more about how TempWorks Software can help make your recruiting and onboarding process more efficient with staffing software tools, contact us today!

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