8 Recruiting Secrets for Attracting and Finding Seasonal Temp Workers

With the winter holiday season fast approaching, multiple industries are feeling the pinch to get 700,000-plus qualified temp workers in place.

After all, their financial success is contingent upon the revenues they generate during this critical six-week stretch each year. For example, seeing upwards of 30 to 40 percent of their annual revenue during the winter holiday, retailers are busy hiring sales associates and stocking clerks for their brick-and-mortar stores and warehouse and shipping associates for their brick-and-click stores. Similarly, other sectors, such as warehousing and transportation, experience dramatic increases in openings: The numbers have more than quadrupled over the past decade, from 42,500 in 2006 to over 200,000 this past year. Just think of the number of Amazon retail sales over the holiday season, and this growth rate makes a lot of sense.

Indisputably, internal and external recruiters play a pivotal role in helping businesses meet seasonal staffing requirements. Indeed, without their support, retail, warehousing, and transportation companies would simply be unable to meet the seasonal staffing demands they face. Attracting and finding temp workers for seasonal openings requires finesse and a different approach than what it typically takes to find, attract, and hire full-time staff.

The following are eight recruiting secrets that recruiters can tap to come out on top during the holiday hiring rush:

1. Start Early

You’ve heard the saying, “The early bird gets the worm.” Well, when it comes time to recruiting temp workers for the holiday season, you need to get an early start. Those who get a late start find themselves playing catch-up throughout the season. This even means that you start planning for the 2017 holiday season now by building your own private talent pool of candidates for future reference (see below).

2. Centralize Candidate Sourcing and Management

Get all of your candidate sourcing and management activities into one dashboard. The last thing you have time to do is juggle multiple job board postings, prescreening systems, candidate tracking and messaging, social media posting, and your career website. Whew! The list is exhausting just spelling it out. With numerous clients and piles of jobs to fill, what you really need is a one-stop shop for all of your recruiting needs.

3. Create Compelling Job Descriptions

Job descriptions are too often overlooked when it comes to attracting and hiring – for both full-time and temp workers. When you’re competing with tens of thousands of other organizations for the same talent, you need to stand out from the rest. And with 64 percent of candidates indicating job descriptions aren’t compelling, a winning job description is a great chance to get the attention of more and better candidates. There are seven essential ingredients that you need to include in your job descriptions (all of which are contained in the 200+ fully customizable job description templates in MightyRecruiter).

4. Post with One Click

Posting a job to multiple job boards – and there are a lot of them out there – can consume valuable time. The ability to post to all of your targeted job boards in one click can add up to a lot of hours saved, which you can then spend on business-critical recruiting tasks. In most instances, you’re looking at several hours of time savings per job with one-click posting.

5. Hone Your Posting

Getting your jobs onto the right job boards is important. As there are thousands of free and job sites, knowing which ones are the right places for finding and attracting the right temp candidates can mean the difference between a no-hire or a bad hire and a great hire. Sometimes you may even want to consider tapping third-party experts, like MightyRecruiter’s JobPromote experts, to help you pinpoint the best boards for posting an opening.

5. Go Social

Jobseekers have certainly gone social. Seventy-nine percent use social media in their job search, and about 1 in 5 have applied for a job they learned about through their social media network. Posting job ads for temp workers to your social networks can provide an extra boost in your recruiting efforts, helping you to uncover candidates flying beneath the radar of most job boards.

6. Prescreen and Review Applicants

Paring down the list of candidates before you, fellow recruiters, or your hiring managers interview them can save a lot of wasted time and help reduce significant frustration for all parties involved. In the case of seasonal temp workers, prescreening applicants to find out what days and hours they are available (or not) to work will remove those who fail to meet your requirements. Prescreening questions should be built into the job application process. Recruiters should also consider other means to evaluate candidates, such as a resume checklist and scoring process, evaluation of cover letters, and investigation of candidate social networks. (Related Download: Reviewing & Assessing Candidates.)

7. Leverage Employee Referrals

Your full-time workers and temp workers are an extension of your recruiting organization. Getting them to post job ads on their social networks can generate a pile of previously hidden candidates – as can incentivizing them to refer skilled people who they think would be interested in applying for the job. Research shows that workers sourced via employee referral often outperform those sourced through other channels.

8. Build Your Talent Pool for Next Year

When recruiting temp workers for the 2016 holiday season, you’re already recruiting for the 2017 season. You should be able to rate and review candidates and add them to your private talent pool for future reference. Your private talent pool might include former workers, employee referrals, candidates who weren’t hired, retirees, among others.

If your business recruits seasonal workers, you’re likely in full gear right now. Getting a one-stop candidate sourcing and recruiting platform in place, like MightyRecruiter, could be the deciding factor in whether you find the right candidates, hire ones you regret hiring, or strike out altogether. Give MightyRecruiter a test drive by signing up for a Free Trial today.