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While the holiday season is filled with joy and time spent with family and friends, it’s also a crucial time for most businesses — especially those in retail, shipping, logistics or warehousing. One of the biggest challenges this time of year is ensuring proper staff levels.
From front end sales and customer service reps, to warehouse workers and truck drivers, a great deal of time and effort must be put into quickly hiring the extra help you need during the hectic holiday season.
Conducting large-scale hiring in a short amount of time can be difficult. While finding qualified talent ready to step in and help your organization has always been challenging, it’s gotten more difficult in recent years. For one, with continued low unemployment, there are far fewer people looking for work. Additionally, since customer service is one of the most common roles businesses seek to ramp up hiring for during the holidays, it’s also one of the most in-demand skills, making it more challenging to fill these roles. And talent are increasingly selective about the companies they work for, making it more important than ever to highlight the company mission and values and what candidates can expect on the job.
Further complicating the issue of seasonal hiring is that talent teams are increasingly stretched thin, with 64% of talent leaders reporting that HR is expected to do more with less. As the busy holiday season approaches, HR and recruiting teams don’t have the time to recruit and interview the great deal of candidates to find the people they need.
How can you ensure proper staffing levels to keep up with the busy holiday season? There are three key strategies to help you do so — both quickly and cost effectively.
Rely on contingent talent
While its normal to increase temporary staffing for the holiday season with contingent talent, this typically requires a great deal of effort: creating job descriptions, identifying candidates, conducting interviews, extending offers and getting new hires set up with payroll. That’s a lot of time and effort that could be better spent on onboarding and training the new talent who join your team so they can hit the ground running.
Instead, consider leveraging a third-party managed services program (MSP) to help hire your contingent workers. MSP providers typically have extensive talent databases and relationships with leading talent suppliers. By working with a provider, you can quickly find qualified and flexible talent with the skills your organization needs, while leveraging your company brand to help attract them. You can also gain access to robust talent market intelligence and workforce data, like skills availability, compensation and more to further help find the right talent at the right time and at the right cost.
An MSP program doesn’t just stop with talent acquisition; it can also include end-to-end talent management. From onboarding to payroll to off-boarding at the end of their contract, the MSP provider handles much of the administrative tasks associated with leveraging contingent talent, freeing up your teams to focus on more strategic priorities during this busy time of year.
Leverage project-based hiring
What if you’re looking to welcome more people to not just help with the holiday season, but stay beyond for the long term? If that’s the case, a project-based recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) program can help you hire as many people as you need in a short amount of time.
With project-based RPO, you can offload all the work that goes into recruiting permanent talent to outside experts. But, just like with MSP, your RPO provider will go far beyond recruitment. For instance, they can assist in conducting workforce planning, so you know how many employees you need for each position across locations. By using project-based RPO, the provider can conduct talent marketing using your unique brand and employee value proposition to attract right-fit talent, and then carry out all the key recruiting tasks, like pre-screening and assessment, interviews, offer management and more.
As the technology for recruiting and other talent management tasks continually evolves and improves, it can be hard to keep up. Fortunately, RPO providers can connect you with these latest advancements to enhance your recruiting, which you might not be able to access on your own. This can include tools such as AI-powered matching technology to target the best talent, candidate nurturing platforms that ensure candidates remain engaged throughout the hiring process and don’t drop out, and programmatic advertising to ensure the job ads get in front of the right people.
Equipped with such advantages, you can welcome the best people to your team before the competition does, ensuring you have the support to get through the busy holiday season and beyond.
Redeploy current talent
Another way to access talent during your seasonal peak is by looking internally and determining who among your current staff can be redeployed.
Through this strategy, you can give top performers, and those who show strong potential, new duties and responsibilities. For instance, if you’re looking to fill a warehouse manager position, consider who among the current team could be a strong candidate for being promoted to that role. Not only does this help fill any gaps by beefing up key roles with individuals who already know the business, but it can lead to greater engagement and retention among your staff.
Given the opportunity to advance — even just temporarily — will show that they’re hard work is valued. It also serves as motivation for other employees, giving them a goal to work towards.
By redeploying talent, you can avoid the talent scarcity many businesses face when looking to fill key roles. You get experienced internal talent who can quickly assume a more advanced position, while minimizing the time and costs it would take to hire externally – a key advantage during the busy and competitive holiday hiring season.
A successful holiday hiring strategy
With the holiday season rapidly approaching, now’s the time to plan how you’ll ramp up hiring. From looking to hire an influx of contingent workers or quickly add new employees to stay for the long term, to identifying high-potential current talent who can step up and assume new roles, there are several ways to meet your seasonal staffing needs. Whether you choose one strategy or all three, a robust plan will ensure you get the right talent at the right time to help you manage the busy holiday spike successfully.
Liz Newnham is a Managing Director at Randstad Sourceright (RSR), where she brings extensive expertise in Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) solutions. Specializing in the Financial Services and Technology sectors, Liz oversees both local and international client portfolios, ensuring operational excellence and strategic delivery.
Her career began in recruitment consultancy at Michael Page, followed by account management at Hays, and a subsequent role as Operational Director at Resource Solutions from 2013 to 2020. Since joining Randstad Sourceright in 2020, Liz has continued to drive innovation and efficiency, applying her in-depth industry knowledge to deliver tailored workforce solutions that meet the complex needs of global clients.
Based in the UK, Liz is a recognized leader in the industry, known for her commitment to transforming talent strategies and advancing the future of recruitment
