How to Recruit and Onboard Seasonal Employees for Summer

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year for many sectors, such as health, recreation, hospitality, retail, tourism. It can be a great opportunity to capture revenue, as long as you have a talented workforce that can meet the growth in demand.

So, how do you scale up your seasonal workforce without sacrificing payroll accuracy or compliance? You need to have a streamlined seasonal recruitment and onboarding strategy that helps you attract and deploy the best candidates quickly.

Keep reading for advice on how you can hire and onboard seasonal employees (with a little extra assistance from some powerful workforce management tech).   

Plan your capacity 

How many people do you need to hire for the holiday season? Start with reviewing what did and didn't work last year. In foundU, you can export last year’s approved shifts to see how many hours were worked and when. Use that to make your schedules more efficient and work out how many employees you need to meet demand.

To budget for the spike in seasonal wages, run the Labour Management Report. It breaks down ordinary time, overtime, leave costs, and shift penalties. You can group it by day, roster, or employee position to review last summer’s wage costs. From there, set roster budgets for each week or day, so roster managers know what they’re working with as soon as they start building.

Use your networks 

When everyone in your industry is trying to recruit the same pool of employees at the same time, you need to stand out as a great employer. 

You should constantly be building your employer brand and creating a positive experience for existing employees. This increases the chance that your team will refer their friends, family, or contacts who are looking for seasonal work to supplement their income.  

You could also offer a referral program, with bonuses for staff who refer successful hires. This is an easy way to reduce recruitment costs, improve candidate quality, and increase employee engagement. 

foundU also offers an employee profile self-reactivation tool, which makes it easy to re-onboard last season's best workers. 

Integrate applicant tracking and workforce management 

Recruitment platforms will also help you build a database of applicants and recruiters. You can use these systems to streamline many aspects of recruitment, such as posting job ads, reviewing applications, and responding to candidates. This helps you move fast. Speed of contact can win candidates, and with the right recruitment tech in place, you can aim for valuable metrics, like same day contact, and make the application process seamless.

foundU integrates with a variety of applicant tracking systems, so you can pass over valuable employee information straight into the onboarding and workforce managment platform. This creates a seamless flow of data, helping you to manage compliance information, roster your new team members, and pay them correctly once they get started.

Make onboarding easy 

Onboarding and training new employees can be time consuming, especially when you start getting busy and HR staff take their holiday leave. 

Using foundU’s workforce management technology, you can capture all of the important employee onboarding documents and signatures you need digitally. You can also run VEVO checks, create a tailored onboarding journey, and automatically tick off tasks as they are completed. The employee's information can then be referenced by payroll, helping to ensure that the first pay slip is right.

Integrating with a learning management system like SuperPath will also help you facilitate, streamline, and record workforce training. This is very helpful when you’re trying to upskill new team members as demand is picking up.  

When HR is spending less time on manual onboarding, they can also focus more on enhancing the employee experience – increasing the chances of you retaining your seasonal staff throughout the holiday season and beyond. 

Create a positive employee experience 

It’s easy to enhance the employee experience and attract staff when you have the right workforce management tech in place.  

• Earned wage access is a great financial wellbeing tool which gives your employees access to a portion of their earned wages before their regular payday. This can be a great work perk for hourly, seasonal employees and can incentivise them to pick up extra shifts. 
• Automate your payroll so that you don’t have lose precious time ensuring that you’re paying flexible staff on varied awards correctly. Your seasonal team will appreciate being paid accurately and on time. 
• Implement seamless clock in and clock out solutions so that employees can easily update their work times amid the hustle and bustle. 
• Use an employee app so that you can share work schedules, shift offers, and roster updates with your team with just a few clicks of a button – keeping them in the loop throughout the busy holiday season.
• Think about how you could provide additional work perks, such as free employee benefits
• Fair Work also offers some great guidance on hiring new employees, so you can put your best foot forward and get the process right.

Developing your seasonal recruitment and onboarding strategy 

Attracting the best talent over the holiday season requires forward planning. You don’t want to be figuring out how to scale your workforce when demand is already picking up.  

Using workforce management technology, you can build a network of top talent, recruit the right candidates, speed up onboarding, and meet demand. Better yet, you can create a great employee experience and encourage your seasonal staff to come back next year. 

If you want to do some more summer prep, then check out this on-demand webinar onbuilding your seasonal team fast — and defensibly. This session will help you maintain speed and compliance in peak season, and strike the right balance between the role of humans and AI.

Ready to scale your workforce? Then book a demo for a personalised exploration of foundU.