Unlocking the Potential of Seasonal Hiring Initiatives

Seasonal recruitment cycles affect your hiring strategies all year, so it’s important to make sure you are getting the most out of your hiring initiatives. You might be wondering, ‘If they affect me all year, why are they called seasonal?’ We call them seasonal because the time of year makes huge impact on the strategy you should implement to get the most out of your recruitment efforts. For example, if your company knows they will need more employees during the holidays, the talent acquisition team will need to be in full force in the Fall so that the new employees are ready to hit the floor during the Winter holidays. Many companies also increase their Summer hiring, but recruiting for Summer employees should begin in the early Spring. In summary, seasonal recruiting takes place all year, with certain time periods needing more focus on certain tasks than others.

Challenges in Seasonal Hiring

Seasonal hiring may come with some unique challenges. There continues to be increased competition for talent and many organizations are offering incentives, such as increased benefit packages and more competitive wages. Here are some ways you can set yourself apart:

• Designing attractive offers to position your open roles in a positive light
• Offer sign-on bonuses
• Offer PTO and Flex Schedules
• Provide an increased hourly pay rate during the temporary timeframe
• Provide seasonal hires the opportunity for continued employment
• Offer a bonus at the end of the temporary timeframe to incentivize them to stay for the full duration

Other challenges you may face include an inefficient process. Make sure you are asking yourself these questions before beginning your seasonal hiring initiatives. Do you have a strong seasonal recruitment plan in place? Are candidates aware of your organization and seasonal needs? Are you planning early and starting your efforts early enough? As seasonal recruitment cycles create higher demand for jobs at key times throughout the calendar year, employers can develop strategic hiring initiatives to capitalize on these trends. In this blog post, we’ll give you some key insights on strategies you can implement to boost your Summer Hiring efforts.

Host Live Events

Live events, also known as job fairs, are like speed dating for recruiting. At a set time and set place, companies and job seekers meet and try to find out if they’re a match. To make sure you promote yourself properly at a job fair and attract the most qualified candidates, you need to take some time to plan your job fair recruitment strategy. Here’s what we suggest:

1. Decide what positions you need to fill and the type of candidates you want to target to determine the type of event to attend or have. For example, if you’re hiring for entry-level roles or offering paid internships, it’s best to attend or host a college job fair or career day. If you are looking to fill seasonal positions only, it’s best to attend or host a career event targeted high school and college students, teachers looking for additional employment and previous seasonal employees.
2. Choose team members that will best represent your company during the event. Recruiters and HR Staff, Hiring Managers and current employees can provide an authentic perspective on what working for your company is really like.
3. Develop strong marketing materials and advertising for the event. More on this next!
4. Make sure you know what to do and expect during and after the event. Our team is happy to have a deeper conversation with you and your team to assist with planning your next event so everything runs smoothly and successfully.

Looking to participate in campus recruiting events? Check out our infographic for more information on campus recruiting.

Invest in Digital Marketing

As we mentioned above, developing strong marketing materials and advertising for your event can have a huge impact on its success. Digital marketing is a process that involves the creation, management, and running of various digital campaigns to increase not only the awareness of an event you might be promoting, but also the positioning of your employer brand within your needed markets. The main objective of this entire process is to ensure that your company not only achieves that greater awareness, but significantly improves and increases the traffic to your website. There are many potential touchpoints a candidate can and will have with your company before they finally apply, so it’s important to have a well-developed ecosystem that ensures you’re keeping in front of candidates, but also that you’re staying ahead of your competition as well. While there are many strategies that work and provide great results, there are a few standard ones that are better to focus on to get a good mix of active and passive job seekers.

• Google search: 70% of job searches start here. These are your text ads on Google at the top of the page.
• Display: This form of banner advertising reaches 90% of internet users across various websites, apps and other online platforms.
• Retargeting: With a retargeting strategy in place, candidates are 70% more likely to come back and apply after they’ve left your career site without applying.
• Social: 22% of social users use it for work-related networking and research. What does this mean? It means that when a candidate is interested in a company, they are going to the company’s social profiles to learn more about them and see if they would be a fit based on the company culture and information posted on their social media.
• Job Boards: 50% of applications come from job boards. This can be direct through specific job boards, programmatic advertising, or a mixture of both. There’s no denying that jobs boards are a vital part of a recruitment marketing strategy.

Optimize Your Use of Technology

Optimizing your use of technology can improve your seasonal hiring initiatives.

1. Ensure your career site and applications are mobile friendly.
2. Utilize technology to quickly communicate with candidates. Did you know there is a 98% open rate for mobile recruiting texts versus a 20% open rate for recruiting emails? Texting is a quicker and more effective way to reach candidates today.
3. Optimize your career site with a spotlight on your temporary opportunities. Highlight previous temporary workers with videos or testimonials. Although seasonal roles are short term, candidates want to feel comfortable knowing they'll be in an atmosphere that fits their needs.

Develop your Creative Assets

Now that you’ve got your event scheduled and you’re advertising it, you need a set up for your company at the event. A table and some expertly designed banners to promote your company offer a simple and effective strategy.

Another important piece of creative material you want at your events are flyers and brochures. Flyers and brochures contain information about your company as well as recruiters’ contact details. These are a great way to highlight your company culture, benefits, incentives and more. Finally, you may consider a full marketing plan that includes door signs, yard signs, window clings, tv graphics, social media creative, pens, balloons and more. When developing these materials, you want to ensure that they contain the look and feel of the overall employer brand. Why is that important, you ask? Employer branding is the business identity of your company and helps you stand out to candidates. NAS works closely with you and your team to develop a strong employment brand and ensure all your creative assets display your brand.

Take Aways

To get the most out of your seasonal hiring initiatives, it’s important to plan ahead. As a general rule of thumb, you should be planning your Summer hiring in March/April, your holiday hiring efforts should start in August and your campus recruitment can essentially take place all year. During your planning process, it’s important to ensure you have the people, processes and technology in place to tackle the influx of hiring.

So, whether you’re just coming off of the busy Summer hiring season, or you are gearing up for holiday hiring, make sure you have the right strategy in place. NAS is happy to partner with you on strategy and implementation for a campaign customized to your needs.

Ready to build your seasonal hiring strategy? Contact NAS today.