How best to handle the influx of customers and make seasonal staffing a success?

Every year, the holiday season always brings about a spike in seasonal staffing. It would be best if you prepared for this high time as soon as you can to compete with lots of other businesses for temporary staff during the season. Meanwhile, you must guarantee that the teams can deliver excellent service as usual.

Check out before working on your seasonal staffing strategy:

Start an employee referral program

A referral program benefits your business in many ways. As your current employees know the job, they’re more likely to bring in a like-minded person who is possibly a good fit. It is also more enjoyable for your team to work with someone they know and trust during the panic peak time. Meanwhile, these new hires tend to go through the training program faster because they’re already aware of their duties and surely will get great support from their friends-turned-coworkers.

Conduct panel interviews

For permanent employees, it’s essential to conduct more than one interview to learn about their suitability for a position. However, when it comes to temporary roles, applicants are not likely to go for many interviews. Hence, to save your and the candidates’ time in these busy holiday months, think over panel interviews.

Only choose people who have the authority to make the hiring decisions to be the interviewers, usually no more than four. Make sure you have a consistent structure, which can include a list of essential interview questions to ask and evaluation forms, for all applicants to assess them fairly. This strategy also works for group interviews or phone interviews.

Promote the job online and in-store

You might be surprised at how your customers and fan base can help speed up the hiring process. Whether they are loyal customers who follow all your social media accounts or new ones who just visit you once or twice, they’re all interested in your products or services. Offer good deals and discounts for internal positions could make them more appealing to many shoppers during the holiday season. Thus, consider utilizing your online presence to promote your vacancies with attractive job ads, or set a noticeable area in the stores to update your customers with the latest opportunities. 

Prioritize flexible candidates

During the holiday season, you will need a contingency plan to deal with emergencies, such as sudden resignations or higher customer volume than the initial estimation. Then, you will need your employees to extend their working shifts urgently to cover the staffing shortage while you’re looking for new hires. For this reason, you should have a candid discussion with your potential candidates about their availability to work more hours or change shifts when needed. These flexible employees will help you ease the tension when encountering unexpected incidents.

Bottom line

As the holiday is going to be busy, make sure you give seasonal staffing enough attention that it deserves. If you’re struggling to focus on both business activities and recruitment during this high time, outsourcing for a staffing agency is a smart move to approach a larger talent pool with minimal time and effort. Let us bring you the right candidates to run your business smoothly through this busiest time of the year. Contact us now for more information!