- Heather McGee
Seasonal hiring: How to hire quickly and compliantly
As the busy summer season gets underway, seasonal hiring is on employers’ minds as they work to meet the increasing demand from customers. Seasonality impacts a wide range of industries, but is more commonly seen in; retail, hospitality, leisure, entertainment, travel, construction and facilities management.
Short-term hiring brings many benefits to a business, enabling them to manage fixed costs more efficiently and adapt to seasonal peaks by scaling up or down their workforce as needed. But it can also become difficult and complex. Sourcing seasonal hires causes recruitment bottlenecks as the contracts are often short term, which decreases the interest from applicant pools. It also becomes increasingly difficult for businesses to manage the high volumes of new employees in such a short timeframe.
In order to meet increased demand, employers must hire their new staff quickly and compliantly. So, how can you do this? Read our top tips below.
Identify your busy season
To effectively manage a seasonal workforce, the first step is to understand when your busy season typically falls. Not all companies and industries will have the same busy time period, and some, such as retail, will have several seasonal peaks within the year.
Pre-plan your recruitment process
By writing clear job descriptions in advance, you’ll have a greater awareness of the job roles and skills requirements that you’ll need to recruit for. By advertising these jobs in advance and on multiple job boards, you’ll maximise the reach of potential employees which will likely deliver a wider range of applicants to choose from. You may even consider reaching out to previous seasonal employees and rehiring them.
Onboard your hires quickly and compliantly
Regardless of the length of an employee’s contract, all new hires should undergo background checks before starting in their new role. Vetting is often an area of the onboarding process that slows down getting new hires working. But, by introducing an in-house background checking platform with high levels of automation, you can eliminate these long admin tasks by managing all of your background checks in one place. Not only does this speed up your time-to-hire, a reputable in-house vetting platform also ensures you remain compliant to the latest GDPR guidelines, as well as removing the need to store paper documents by providing online secure storage for sensitive data.
Focused training
Seasonal employees don’t need to know everything about your company, but they should have enough knowledge to enable them to do their job effectively. Their training plan should also be comprehensive and focused to the job role they will be carrying out.
Treat them like all other employees
Although they may only be with the business for a short amount of time, it’s important that your seasonal hires are treated like all your other employees, which will boost morale and ultimately lead to increased productivity. If they feel they’re treated differently they may feel uncomfortable and become demotivated. You should leave a positive lasting impression on them, as bad experiences may lead to a negative employer reputation.
When hiring seasonal employees, being organised and completing tasks in a timely manner is extremely important. Introducing in-house software can help you manage high volumes of staff more effectively and ensure you remain compliant.
At VettingGateway, we can help to streamline and smoothen the essential task of background checking your applicants, alleviating one element of the ever-lengthening hiring process. Ready to find out more? Simply book a demo with one of our vetting team members to find out how we can help you.
