It’s undeniable that hiring early for the holiday season is a good practice. Given the low unemployment rate, it was even more important to start recruiting early this year as there are less people searching for work. As we near Thanksgiving, you probably already have your orders filled and placed for the holiday season. Give yourselves a pat on the back!

Proactive recruiters should now move on to the next step in the employee engagement and retention cycle. The next step is asking yourself: How do we retain our holiday workers to place them on another job order after the holiday season or entice them to come back to us for next year’s holiday season?

It doesn’t take a ton of work to be proactive. It just takes a handful of small actions to make a positive impact on the candidate experience. Here are a few ideas you can implement to increase engagement with your top workers to make them come back time and again to work with you:

Request feedback about the onboarding process.

• What worked? What didn’t work? Where could we have improved your experience? By asking for feedback right away, you show your candidate that you care about their individual experience and making sure that you’re meeting their needs rather than just a quota. Also, be sure to take it one step further. If you do receive helpful and insightful feedback, make sure you take action to improve your onboarding process.

Communicate throughout the holiday season, not just during the hiring and onboarding process.

• Don’t hire and then disappear. Create some natural touchpoints to stay in contact and keep them aware of your presence. For example, send them an email or a short survey asking them how it’s going after the first couple of weeks on the job. Even if they don’t respond, it’s still showing them that you’re focused on creating a positive experience for them.

Ask for referrals from candidates that you’d rehire in a heartbeat.

• Not only will asking for referrals show candidates that you value their opinion, it also shows that you value their skills and want more workers with the same standards and work ethic. Beyond having engagement with a candidate that you already know is a good worker, you also have the potential to find more qualified and skilled workers.

Make sure your job descriptions are optimized (and personalized) to
engage candidates.

• If you have a group of skilled candidates with some of the same characteristics (whether it’s technical or soft skills), create some simple customizable email and text message templates that let them know they’re doing a great job in their current position and that you want to see if they had interest in a similar type of position once their assignment was finished. For example, you could say, “You’ve been doing exceptional work with client interactions in the XYZ position that I wanted to see if you’d be interested in this position too.” Simply sending a more personalized communication complimenting their hard work and skills can go a long way to winning a candidate’s loyalty.

These are just a few ways to keep candidates engaged throughout the busy holiday season and many staffing agency recruiting teams may already have these items as common practice. If that’s the case at your staffing agency, then make sure you’re asking yourself and your team if there are other ways to improve the candidate experience and heighten candidate engagement during the holidays. Creating new ways to provide regular communication and customized content can help build trust and loyalty, leading to better engagement.