How To Recruit Seasonal Employees: Strategies for Effective Hiring

Hiring a permanent employee can feel stressful, but recruiting temporary staff often isn’t any easier. There are often tight timelines, uncertainties, and applicants with difficult-to-evaluate resumes. However, with the right seasonal hiring strategy—and the right tools—it’s easier to get the quantity and quality of temporary staff your business needs.

Understanding Seasonal Hiring Needs

Seasonal work is very common; perhaps more so than you think. One could argue the oldest job in the world is “farmer,” and that’s a very seasonal role. The modern agriculture business relies heavily on temporary workers, and back in the day, people had to make sure they did the right seasonal labor to keep their families and communities clothed and fed. Even our nomadic hunter and gatherer ancestors had seasonal jobs: to hunt mammoths, you had to go where they were at the right time of year.

Philosophy aside, seasonal employment is a staple of many businesses and industries today. There are numerous reasons why organizations have seasonal roles. But whatever the reasons, each company needs a coherent hiring strategy to secure the staff it needs when it needs them.

What Businesses Need Seasonal Employees?

Some types of businesses that experience significant seasonal demand include:

• ​Agribusinesses: Farms are very season-oriented. Individual farmers and large agribusiness corporations rely on temporary workers to pick crops when they’re ready for harvest.
• ​Holiday-related businesses: Some seasonal festivities are big enough to warrant their own industries. For example, a Halloween costume pop-up shop and Christmas/winter holiday festivals are big seasonal employers. Retail businesses often hire temporary staff to keep up with increased demand in November and December.
• ​Hotels: For most places in the world, there’s a “busy season” for tourism. Hotels and other hospitality businesses often have to augment their staff to keep up with the increased seasonal demand.
• ​Landscapers: In places with significant seasonal variation in the weather, landscapers are much busier when it’s warm. While they may also provide winter services, such as snow removal, they often have to hire seasonal workers in the summer.
• ​Personal tax services firms: Not many people need tax help in November. Come late March, though, financial services businesses field countless anxious calls from folks trying to file before the tax deadline. To meet this demand, businesses often have to hire additional tax professionals.
• ​Seasonal businesses: Whether it’s a kayak rental business or an ice cream shack by the beach, these businesses—and sometimes entire towns—see their customer bases swell in the summer. Many of these businesses don’t even operate year-round, meaning they have to time their seasonal hiring strategy just right.

5 Steps To Recruit Seasonal Employees

Here are some steps you can take to hire the seasonal candidates your organization needs:

1. Assess Your Business’s Staffing Needs

To create an effective seasonal hiring process, you must accurately predict your seasonal demand. You can’t hire the right number of seasonal workers if you don’t know how many you need. Figuring out this number involves analyzing historical sales information, customer traffic patterns, and operational needs from previous busy periods. By crunching this data, you can determine exactly how many extra hands you need and for how long.

It’s not just about quantity, however. You need to identify the specific roles you need—e.g., sales associates, stockers, concierge staff, etc.—and the skill sets required for each position. By creating a detailed staffing forecast that accounts for different shifts, potential absences, and peak hours, you can develop clear hiring goals and avoid both under- and over-staffing.

2. Craft a Competitive Compensation Package

Money isn’t the only thing job seekers care about, but it’s usually the thing they care about most. Successful seasonal hiring often requires offering more than minimum wage.

If you research local market rates for similar temporary roles and establish a competitive hourly wage, you better your chances of attracting top seasonal talent. Beyond the base pay, a strong package might include incentives. These could be performance bonuses, employee discounts, or even a completion bonus for those who stay through the entire season. This last perk is often a prudent offer to make for businesses that hire for physically taxing roles.

Furthermore, clearly articulating these benefits in the job posting demonstrates the value you place on your seasonal team and can be a powerful motivator to both attract and retain reliable seasonal talent.

3. Utilize the Right Recruitment Channels

Finding qualified candidates often means going where they are. Looking beyond standard job boards and utilizing a mix of targeted channels can help you pinpoint and connect with your target demographic for temporary work.

Alternative channels could include:

• ​Posting flyers around colleges, universities, and community centers
• ​Leaning on your permanent or recurring staff for employee referrals
• ​Leveraging social media platforms for quick, visual, and highly targeted job advertisements
• ​Hosting a dedicated seasonal hiring event or job fair for high-volume hiring, creating a streamlined, one-stop process for interviewing and making on-the-spot offers

4. Develop an Efficient Seasonal Employee Onboarding Process

Seasonal workers often need to be working and up-to-speed quickly, so the onboarding process must be fast and effective. This involves streamlining the necessary paperwork and dedicating time to job training rather than lengthy corporate orientations.

By developing standardized training materials, such as short videos or checklists, you can quickly cover safety procedures, key company policies, and the core tasks for roles. This enables your business to onboard and train each seasonal hire fast and effectively. Utilizing the right onboarding solution can be critical for this, too.

5. Leverage the Right Technology and Tools

Technology is crucial for managing a temporary workforce efficiently. For example, an applicant tracking system (ATS) can manage the high volume of seasonal applications, allowing for quick screening and communication. An ATS with automation features can scan resumes, cover letters, and applications for keywords, such as desired skills or required credentials.

What Are the Right Solutions for Seasonal Recruitment?

An ATS like ApplicantStack can do a lot more than sift through resumes. It can also help with interview scheduling, enabling hiring managers to collaborate with other HR team members and find meeting times that suit everyone. An effective ATS also aids in onboarding, hosting all files in a centralized hub that’s easy to access. Here, everyone can see and share the necessary documents to get a new hire onboard and into training or on the job.

Beyond an ATS, many seasonal businesses or those that experience varying demand can benefit from financial software that allows them to go through data and create sales and demand forecasts. This makes it easier to hire the right number of seasonal employees.

FAQs About Recruiting Seasonal Employees

Here are some frequently asked questions about hiring seasonal staff:

How Can I Retain Employees for Future Needs?

Some seasonal workers are only there for one season, such as a backpacker working at a hostel while in the area. Others might be there for a few seasons, like a college student joining a landscaping team for a few summers before graduating. And some people make seasonal work their livelihood, thriving in the feast or famine lifestyle.

As an employer, how can you pinpoint the temporary workers who might be willing to come back next season and whose work you’ve appreciated? First, an ATS can store workers’ information securely so you can contact them again next season. But also, before the season ends, tell them you admire their work and would love to have them again. They may be happy to have some certainty lined up for their future work. And last, if you can, offering them a bonus and/or a raise the following year is a great way to retain their services.

What Are the Legal Considerations of Seasonal Recruitment?

It’s mandatory to comply with wage and hour laws, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which establishes minimum wage and overtime pay for most workers. Employers must also abide by non-discrimination laws, workplace safety regulations, and tax requirements, which are largely the same as for permanent employees. There’s also the “1,000-Hour Rule.”

What’s the 1,000-Hour Rule for Temporary Employees?

The 1,000-Hour Rule is an IRS guideline that requires organizations to allow every employee, even a seasonal worker, to participate in a retirement plan after they complete 1,000 hours of service in a 12-month period.

This is also called the “long-term, part-time” (or LTPT) employee rule, and it applies to plans such as 401(k)s. It’s approximately equal to working 20 hours per week for a full year. It’s rare that a seasonal worker would log this much time, but it can happen.

What’s the Minimum Wage for Seasonal Workers?

There is no difference between the minimum wage for temporary and permanent employees. In the U.S., the minimum wage is the higher of the federally mandated wage of $7.25 per hour or the minimum wage of the state in which a business operates.

Leverage ApplicantStack To Level Up Your Recruitment

ApplicantStack has all the features a business needs to get the qualified candidates it requires to meet seasonal demand. From automatically posting seasonal positions on numerous job boards and simplifying interview scheduling to facilitating document sharing and onboarding, ApplicantStack can help you secure the best seasonal job seekers efficiently.