How to Recruit Seasonal Employees for the Summer Holidays

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year for many sectors, such as hospitality, retail, and tourism. It can be a great opportunity to capture revenue, as long as you have a talented workforce that can meet the growth in demand.

So, how do you scale up your seasonal workforce in the summertime when many people just want to kick back, relax, and catch up with their loved ones? You need to have a seasonal recruitment and retention strategy to attract talented and reliable employees in this peak period.  

Keep reading for advice on how you can attract and retain seasonal employees (with a little extra assistance from some powerful workforce tech).   

Plan your capacity 

How many people do you need to hire for the holiday season? Using a workforce management platform like foundU, you can review last year’s rostered and approved shift data to find ways to make your schedules more efficient and figure out how many employees you need to hire to meet demand. You can even review your labour costs so you can budget for the spike in seasonal wages.  

Use your networks 

When everyone in your industry is trying to recruit the same pool of employees at the same time, you need to stand out as a great employer. 

You should constantly be building your employer brand and creating a positive experience for existing employees. This increases the chance that your team will refer their friends, family, or contacts who are looking for seasonal work to supplement their income.  

You could also offer a referral program, with bonuses for staff who refer successful hires. This is an easy way to reduce recruitment costs, improve candidate quality, and increase employee engagement. 

Recruitment platforms will also help you build a database of applicants and recruiters. For example, JobAdder is an applicant tracking system and CRM that recruiters can tap into when they want to hire quickly. TalentVine is a recruitment marketplace that makes it easier for you to connect with Australia's top recruiters and talent. 

Be competitive 

Think about the work perks you could offer to your employees. You might want to consider offering a higher hourly wage to attract seasonal employees and encourage them to return in the future. This will save you time and energy in recruiting new hires every holiday season. 

You could also consider offering extra training programs that will benefit your employees in the long run, or access to free employee benefits platforms like Flare.  

Fair Work also offers some great guidance on hiring new employees, so you can put your best foot forward and get the process right.

Make onboarding easy 

Onboarding and training new employees can be time consuming, especially when you start getting busy and HR staff take their holiday leave. 

Using foundU’s workforce management technology, you can capture all of the important employee onboarding documents and signatures you need digitally. You can also run VEVO checks, create a tailored onboarding journey, and automatically tick off tasks as they are completed.  

Integrating with a learning management system like Tribal Habits will also help you facilitate, streamline, and record workforce training. This is very helpful when you’re trying to upskill new team members as demand is picking up.  

When HR is spending less time on manual onboarding, they can also focus more on enhancing the employee experience – increasing the chances of you retaining your seasonal staff throughout the holiday season and beyond. 

Create a positive employee experience 

It’s easy to enhance the employee experience and attract staff when you have the right workforce management tech in place.  

• Earned wage access is a great financial wellbeing tool which gives your employees access to a portion of their earned wages before their regular payday. This can be a great work perk for hourly, seasonal employees and can incentivise them to pick up extra shifts. 

• Automate your payroll so that you don’t have lose precious time ensuring that you’re paying flexible staff on varied awards correctly. Your seasonal team will appreciate being paid accurately and on time. 

• Implement seamless clock in and clock out solutions so that employees can easily update their work times amid the hustle and bustle.  

• Launch an employee app so that you can share work schedules, shift offers, and roster updates with your team with just a few clicks of a button – keeping them in the loop throughout the busy holiday season. 

• Consider using an employee engagement platform, such as Prosper EX to boost people performance and retain your top seasonal talent in the new year. 

Developing your seasonal recruitment strategy 

Attracting the best talent over the holiday season requires forward planning. You don’t want to be figuring out how to scale your workforce when demand is already picking up.  

Using workforce management technology, you can build a network of top talent, recruit the right candidates, speed up onboarding, and meet demand. Better yet, you can create a great employee experience and encourage your seasonal staff to come back next year. 

If you want to scale up your seasonal workforce, then book a demo of foundU to see how we can streamline employee onboarding and communication.