The holiday season is here and as always businesses are looking to add temporary workers to meet escalating demands through seasonal hiring. Specifically, in industries such as retail, manufacturing, and hospitality, a successful holiday season comes down to how effectively these temporary workers contribute to the business operation.
To ensure the success of their seasonal hiring efforts, businesses need to look for candidates with specific skills. While having these skills in general is ideal for the worker, during the holiday season, having workers with the appropriate skills can be the difference between success and failure.
Here are some of the critical skills to look for in your holiday workforce, factors to consider before extending a job offer, advantages of seasonal hires, and the possible challenges to expect from having a temporary workforce.
Skills to look for in candidates during seasonal hiring
Regardless of their industry and position, effective time management, customer service skills, adaptability, flexibility, attention to detail, and teamwork and collaboration are non-negotiable skills for a holiday workforce. While not everyone is equally equipped with the skills required for success in performing a specific role, it is best practice to ensure that there is a benchmark for the following skills that each hire needs to beat.
Time Management:
Effective time management is a critical skill to look for in candidates during seasonal hiring. The season brings increased demands and heightened workloads, making it essential for employees to prioritize tasks efficiently and meet deadlines. By mastering time management, the holiday workforce can significantly contribute to the overall success of a company during this busy period. With varying store/shift hours, unforeseen extensions, and responsibilities, supervisors and managers can benefit greatly from hires who can manage their time and priorities effectively.
Customer Service:
The holiday season poses an opportunity for businesses to enhance the customer experience, boosting sales revenues and profitability. Many customers tend to shop at new places during the holiday season and almost always the first person they interact with is likely to be someone on the shop floor. As customer interactions increase in retail jobs, employees need to be friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable about the brand, product, and service standards.
This will be critical in aiding customers in their purchases and addressing their inquiries or complaints, especially if it is their first time. Since having a positive customer service experience directly correlates to customer satisfaction, having a temporary workforce with good customer service skills can result in a lifelong customer.
Adaptability & Flexibility:
Given the dynamic nature of the season, adaptability and flexibility are key attributes for temporary workers during the holiday season. Given the short employment period, workers are expected to hit the road running. The ability to quickly adjust to such changing needs and navigate a fast-paced environment is essential. For instance, holiday workers may unexpectedly encounter managing a surge in orders or addressing a customer’s complaint. Those who demonstrate flexibility and agility in response will play a significant role in the seamless operation and success of the holiday season.
Attention To Detail:
Attention to detail becomes crucial during the festive period when workers often juggle multiple responsibilities. In environments like hotels, warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and retail stores, the accuracy and precision with which tasks are executed becomes even more critical.
Organizing the shop floor, accommodating changes to established processes that have been excepted for the holiday season, and ensuring best practices are followed all require a good eye for detail. Supervisors and managers must be wary of this since this skill in workers goes a long way in ensuring that every aspect of operations runs smoothly, maintaining high standards during the busiest days of the year.
Teamwork & Collaboration:
Effective communication and teamwork are essential for any work environment – the holiday season is no different. During this period, business operations tend to go off the rails quite often, making it imperative for staff to work collaboratively to ensure smooth processes and deliver exceptional service. Handling the pressure to meet service goals, being considerate of the skill limitations of fellow workers, and anticipating new challenges can be useful to foster collaboration and improve teamwork among workers and managers need to keep an eye out for candidates who display these traits.
Factors to consider before extending a job offer during seasonal hiring.
Before extending a job offer to a seasonal hire, here are some factors that businesses should consider to ensure the holiday season operations are unaffected.
Legal Compliance:
Businesses need to ensure that their hiring practices follow labor laws, including the Equal Employment guidelines, anti-discrimination laws, and other regulations specific to the industry or province. Businesses should conduct background checks and ensure that their temporary staff is eligible to work in the country they live in.
Cost Projections:
A realistic cost projection will help businesses manage their finances and allocate resources effectively. Businesses should calculate the costs of their seasonal hires keeping in focus the cost of recruitment, training, and payroll. It is generally a good practice to have a buffer for unforeseen costs that arise from absenteeism as well. Check out how Jombone can help businesses save by optimizing their workforce to organizational needs.
Workload & Staffing Needs:
Businesses should consider their workload and staffing needs in different departments, including customer service, product manufacturing, and distribution. This evaluation will help them determine the optimal number of seasonal hires required to handle the increased demands.
The Advantages and Flexibility of Seasonal Hiring
Despite the challenges, seasonal hires offer the following benefits:
Cost Savings:
Seasonal hires provide businesses with the convenience of staffing up to meet the seasonal demand without adding to their fixed labor expenses. This is particularly enticing for businesses that operate with slim budgets without impacting business operations during the peak season. Jombone’s staffing solution can help businesses save on temporary hires this holiday season.
Flexible Staffing:
Seasonal hiring allows businesses to adjust their staffing levels as demand changes, significantly lowering labor costs outside the holiday season. The added benefit is being able to integrate these temporary workers with experienced permanent employees so there is a lesser chance of a single point of failure arising from one temporary worker.
Knowledge Transfer:
On the flip side, seasonal hires can provide fresh ideas and best practices from other companies, enhancing the in-house expertise of the permanent staff.
Possible Challenges That Come from Having Seasonal Hires
While seasonal hires provide valuable support during the holiday season, they come with their unique challenges, including:
Poor Quality Work:
Some seasonal workers lack the necessary skills or experience to handle the demands of the role effectively, leading to poor-quality work. Some of them may not fully commit to the job since they may never be called back. Temp-to-hire strategy can help alleviate some of these concerns since workers have additional motivation to do well since their employment may extend beyond the season.
Turnover & Retention:
Traditionally, seasonal workers are more likely to seek other job opportunities once the holiday season ends, resulting in high turnover rates. Absenteeism is also a common issue businesses face. And because of this business operations are affected to various degrees causing breakdowns and bottlenecks. Working with a digital staffing provider like Jombone can help bring down turnover and improve retention of holiday hires.
Training & Onboarding:
With seasonal hiring, a major limitation is the time spent in training and onboarding candidates to the business process. Limited training and onboarding time pose challenges that can lead to ineffective and inefficient service delivery. This ultimately affects the business’s operation. Having appropriate training programs delivered to workers at the right time can go a long way in ensuring the workers are well-suited to handle the responsibilities assigned to them.
The importance of having a good interview process when hiring for the holiday season
Having a robust interview process is crucial to ensure holiday workers have the key skills for the role and fit into a company’s culture.
When hiring for the seasonal rush, the interview process plays a more critical role in selecting the right candidates for the role. Since the traditional hiring and onboarding process may not be applicable, a good interview process for temporary workers must enable companies to assess a candidate’s skills, experience, and cultural fit holistically within the interview period.
Though the workers may not be employed for a longer period, the process should be designed effectively, allowing interviewers to ask open-ended questions that require the candidate to explain their relevant skills and experience. Additionally, the interview process should provide insight into the candidate’s personality, work ethic, and professionalism, enabling companies to make informed decisions when selecting the right candidate for the role.
In conclusion, hiring seasonal workers is a crucial aspect of the holiday rush, and investing in the right employees can make a significant difference in the success of the season. By considering factors such as experience, skills, and availability, companies can ensure that they select the right candidate for the job. Moreover, looking for specific skills, such as effective time management, exceptional customer service, adaptability, attention to detail, and teamwork, can ensure that holiday workers are equipped to handle the demands of the season.
With extensive experience in catering to manufacturing, retail, and e-commerce fulfillment, Jombone is well-equipped to provide advice and support businesses throughout the holiday season.
Jombone offers solutions tailored to the specific needs of businesses during the holiday hiring frenzy ensuring that your workforce is not only skilled but also aligned with the unique demands of your industry. Furthermore, Jombone’s state-of-the-art digital staffing platform offers a 360-degree view that enables complete visibility of staffing operations in real-time, allowing companies to focus on providing a seamless experience for customers with the right human capital.
If you are looking to hire seasonal staff this holiday season, click here to talk with us and learn how Jombone can help businesses connect with the right blue-collar workers, streamline the hiring process, and help businesses optimize their workforce like never before.
