Articles

Seasonal (temporary) Help

Seasonal (temporary) Help

By admin | August 09, 2018

Finding good employees to help out during your busy season is tough. If you want to continue to meet the needs of your customers - and not lose sales - use these 15 tips that we use for finding and hiring seasonal help.

Is your business seasonal? If so, the key to maintaining good customer relations and satisfied customers during your busy season is to hire good seasonal help. Without extra help during those extra-busy times, customer may be left waiting online or waiting on hold on the telephone. If you ship products to customers, orders may take longer to ship (angering your customers).

The problem – especially for small businesses – is finding good seasonal employees. Employees who are willing to work hard, have the necessary skills (or the ability to be trained), pay attention to details, show up on time (or at all) can be difficult to find during busy seasons. But they do exist. Here are 15 tips for finding good seasonal employees.

Start early. You don’t want to wait until a week before your busy season starts to start looking for extra help. You need time to find, screen and train your seasonal workers.

  1. Start with an accurate job description. Will your seasonal workers have to lift heavy boxes in a storeroom? Will they be standing most of the time at a cash register or in a mail room getting boxes ready to ship? Will they have to have good phone skills? Good computer skills? Know how to operate a forklift? Be as specific as you would be in creating the job description for a year-round employee.

  2. Contact former seasonal employees. If you hired seasonal employees in previous years, contact those who were good workers and see if they are available to work for you this season. The advantage here is that they already have been exposed to your business and way of doing things.

  3. Contact former employees who left on good terms. These people can make terrific seasonal help – since they already know your business - and may be interested if they are retired, not working, or able to work for you as a second, temporary job.

  4. Ask employees if they have high school or college-aged students who want to work during your busy season. (Check state and federal labor laws for regulations before hiring individuals who are less than 18 years old.)

  5. Run help-wanted ads in local weekly newspapers and on Craigslist for your area.The cost of such ads will be lower than using a national resource, and are more likely to be read by people who are looking for local work.

  6. Contact local universities and colleges to see if they have a career center where you can post your seasonal job openings. If the jobs you need to be filled can be filled legally by teenagers, contact local high schools to see if they have any type of program that matches students with job openings.

  7. If you have a retail location, put help-wanted signs up in your window, and at your cash registers. Existing customers can make excellent employees.

  8. Post job openings to social media. Let your followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram know about your seasonal job opening. Take a photo of the help wanted sign in your store and include it in your social media posts.

The best modality is to simply brief on what you require and we shall do the rest, rest assured!