Many companies are seasonal in nature, while others simply have busy seasons. Retail stores see an influx in business around the holidays, ski resorts are only open in the winter, accountants are busiest during tax season, and agricultural companies need all hands on deck during the warmer months. When business is booming during these seasons, companies enjoy increased profits, but they can also suffer from higher levels of stress, lower employee morale, reduced customer service and satisfaction and other consequences due to staffing shortages.
If you don’t take care to recruit, hire, and onboard seasonal workers, your busiest season could also be your most stressful time of year.
If business is about to peak and you need to find and hire seasonal workers fast to maintain productivity and optimal performance, then your best bet is to engage a temporary staffing agency. Here’s why.
Hiring Seasonal Workers in House Is Costly
The recruitment and hiring function is costly, but when it comes to full-time permanent workers, these costs are worth it to find the best workers who will become long-term assets. However, when you’re hiring workers who will only be with you for a short time, it might not be worth it to pay for expensive advertising, background or criminal checks, skills assessments, training, and more.
Engaging a temporary staffing agency can reduce your cost because the agency will pay all of these expenses, meaning that your ROI will be higher for your temporary workers.
Hiring in House Is Time Consuming
Writing job descriptions, advertising open positions and waiting a certain window of time for candidates to apply, reviewing resumes, and performing interviews takes a lot of time. When you start the hiring process from scratch in house, you could be spending weeks trying to find your short-term workers.
When you need to hire seasonal workers fast, you simply do not have this luxury of time. A temporary staffing agency, though, will have a large candidate pool filled with temps who are already pre-screened and pre-approved, so you can finish the hiring process in a matter of days, and sometimes, even hours, and have your new workers start right away.
Finding Temps Can Be Difficult
While the unemployment rate is high, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have an easy time finding temporary workers. Most people aren’t interested in short-term assignments. You could post open positions and not get any applicants, or at least any qualified applicants, because no one’s interested in even reading advertisements for temporary work. They’re strictly focused on finding permanent positions. If you don’t know where to look, you might not be able to hire the seasonal workers you need in time for the rush.
Your staffing agency will already have connections with candidates who prefer to work short-term roles, so hiring temps under time constraints will be a breeze. These candidates will be ready and able to take on temp work right away.
Finding Qualified and Trained Workers Is Tough
You don’t just need warm bodies to get through your busy season—you need a robust, knowledgeable, and trained work fleet that can hit the ground running on the first day and keep your operations running at an optimal level. If you hire just anyone off the street or make hiring mistakes, you could be doing more harm than good. A temporary staffing agency will have the hiring expertise and experience to ensure that you only onboard capable seasonal workers who will be assets.
Hiring temp workers has become more popular for businesses that face seasonal influxes in work. If you need seasonal workers fast to beat the rush, then your best bet is to work with a temporary staffing agency for your hiring needs. It’s the most cost-effective and timely way to ensure that you have the qualified temporary workers you need, when you need them.
