3-minute read
With customer spikes and demand increases quickly approaching, don’t wait until your industry’s busy season to scramble together a game plan. Keeping your full-time staffing as low as possible and learning how to manage seasonal employment as needed is the key to navigating peak seasons with ease. Whether your industry is food, hospitality, or entertainment, this is the most lucrative time for your business, and we want to help you succeed. Here are some seasonal staffing best practices to prepare well:
DETERMINE YOUR SEASON'S BUSY TIMES
First, determine what shift gaps you’ll need to fill and when your seasonal staff is most needed. Knowing what demand spikes to expect will allow you to better anticipate the workers needed. Whether it is extra servers to work the dinner shifts around the holidays, or event workers for the annual summer concert series, it’s critical that you understand the unique needs of your business.
However, even with the most well-researched plan, seasonal staff mapping can be difficult and there are often unexpected fluctuations that arise. You will need to make sure you have plenty of time for recruitment, interviews, hiring, and onboarding. To simplify the hiring process and spend less time recruiting, partner with TempIn and gain
access to our pool of highly-rated seasonal talent.
KEEP YOUR FULL-TIME STAFF MINIMAL
Over-hiring for the season leaves your employees frustrated and asking for more shifts, while under-hiring creates a stressed and overworked workforce. Choose to keep your full-time staff as light as possible and rely on seasonal staff to manage the fluctuations of peak season. Your full-time employees bring a core set of skills and experience to your operations, while seasonal workers can be used to fill gaps in specific areas that require less training.
MAXIMIZE THE COST-EFFECTIVE BENEFITS OF SEASONAL STAFF
When planned accurately, seasonal staffing can be a cost-effective solution for businesses with fluctuating demand. By keeping the cost of full-time employees (PTO, benefits, bonuses, etc.) to a minimum, and only bringing in extra help when needed, temporary hires are an economical solution for industries such as food and hospitality, event planning, sports, retail and more:
The benefits of seasonal staffing can only occur if all your planning falls perfectly into place, and anyone who has managed temporary hires knows that there are many unexpected pivots. Last-minute cancellations, higher or lower demand in certain work areas than planned, and more can eat up the time and money you were hoping to save.
However, with seasonal hiring tools like “The Bench” at TempIn, companies can save on staffing costs by only committing to employees when they actually need them.
As the busy season starts, you create “gigs” in the platform that get automatically filled by your pool of pre-qualified workers. Once you are sure you need the help, the automated process opens your gig to the first person on your Bench and filters down until the job is taken. No more unhappy workers with not enough hours or scrambling for last-minute replacements. No more house calls begging people to come to fill a shift—let the app do it for you!
BUILD A POOL OF QUALIFIED TEMPORARY HIRES
Pre-building a pool of temporary hires ready for work is critical to anticipating the needs of your busy season. Sourcing employees from online job boards is a significant time cost and weeding out qualified candidates is a challenging process.
While building this workforce can be done manually through extensive trial and error, partnering with TempIn takes the guesswork out of sourcing and recruiting. A monthly membership with TempIn allows you access to several features of our talent platform, including: