The job market is indeed is vibrant during holidays. In last year 2021, US Seasonal job postings crossed 1.3 Million, a 11% increase compared to 2020. But, ever wondered how do companies hire the right talent in the holiday seasons? The answer lies in AI. As irresistible as it is, AI based recruitment tools can come to the rescue in making the right choice for seasonal hiring.
As a part of our ‘seasonal hiring series blogs’, we are here again to explore the role of AI in the seasonal hiring process.
READ: Why is AI imperative in New age Recruitment
What is Seasonal Employment?
Seasonal employment is strikingly opposite to permanent hiring. A seasonal employee works for only a limited duration or working hours for an organization. Also called holiday hiring, employees are hired to manage the holiday shopping surge, especially in the retail and e-commerce sectors. Their duration of employment ceases to exist once the holiday season comes to an end.
As per Affordable Care Act (ACA), “a seasonal employee is hired into a position for which the customary annual employment is six months or less and for which the period of employment begins each calendar year in approximately the same part of the year, such as summer or winter.”
In short, a seasonal employee is one who is hired for a position that lasts for 6 months or less than that and he/she works no more than 35 hours and/or less than six months in the year.
Key Sectors that Hire Seasonal Employees
Generally, at least 27% of the businesses rev up their seasonal hiring strategy from September as seasonal employees are hired from October to December, every year.
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is a surge in holiday employment in these 8 industries:
- Furniture and home furnishing
- Electronics and appliances
- Health and personal care
- Clothing and accessories
- Sporting goods, hobby, books and music
- General merchandise
- Miscellaneous
- Non store retailers
Traditionally, retail and trade-related sectors hire for seasonal jobs to manage the rise in holiday sales. Thanks to intense competition and shopping that happen during holiday sales, seasonal hiring is more popular than ever in marketing, social media, and technology domains.
Skilled and talented candidates in these areas are of utmost necessary to drive:
- Sales and marketing
- Creatives
- Social media
- Budgets
- Employer branding
- Customer experience
- Website management
- Tech support
7 Ways to Level up your Seasonal Hiring with AI based Recruitment Tool
It’s no secret that AI-based recruitment platforms help organizations manage the business surge, customer footfall, ad campaigns, and whatnot.
For starters, automation and technology reduce manual load and therefore divert a lot of resources for productive tasks besides introducing significant enhancements in the hiring domain.
READ: 10 Ways to use Hiring Automation in Talent Sourcing.
Through vast amount of data reflecting on a potential applicant’s activities and behavioral patterns, AI enhances the quality of seasonal hiring process from sourcing to on boarding. Let’s see how it is done:
?Sourcing Candidates: AI-based tools source candidates who are actively looking for seasonal or gig jobs. For example, ATS or Application Tracking System can rank each candidate for seasonal hiring in real-time through analytic mechanisms. This is done through compliance with the company’s mandates and regulations.
?Bulk Hiring: High-volume hiring is always a challenge in seasonal jobs. The tedious manual process is taking taken care by AI. Through usage of time-tested hiring strategies like ‘quality first’, talent curation, predictive analytics, and talent vetting, large-scale seasonal hiring can be easily accomplished by recruitment automation tools.
?Quick Hiring: Unlike their human counterparts, AI speeds up the hiring process through fast-tracking thousands of resumes and shortlisting the accurate profiles within a few minutes. In other words, you can quick hiring decisions about the right skilled candidate.
?Quality Talent: The ‘War for Talent’ is real and seasonal hiring is not an exception. In this regard, AI based recruitment tools assess a candidate’s talent and ethics through phone screen interviews, NLPs, assessments, and simulations. For example, Glider’s AI-proctoring reduces candidate fraud by 90% through live proctoring mechanisms like face detection, plagiarism check etc.
?Reduced Cost-to-Hire: By reduced cost-to-hire, we mean resources beyond money like time, energy, productivity, and other overheads. Companies can quickly attain economies of scale in hiring (permanent and seasonal) through AI tools. Many studies have reported that companies have reduced their cost by over 30 percent through recruitment automation.
?Customized Job Postings: Unlike FTE or permanent hiring, seasonal hiring needs to have a customized job postings prioritizing role or gig, duration, wage, and other specifications. By this, candidates can have clear expectations about their role and needs. On top of that, AI based recruitment tools assist in accurate talent hiring through sourcing candidates from right sources.
?Bias-free Hiring: Holiday hiring is the best opportunity for businesses to demonstrate diversity and inclusiveness in the workforce through aggregating data-points from candidate profiles and powerful talent analytics, AI tools can eliminate conscious and unconscious hiring bias and help match right candidates against the right jobs and nothing else can come in between.
Seasonal Hiring with Glider AI
Talent intelligence companies like Glider AI are among the most popular AI-based recruitment platforms when it comes to addressing the hiring needs of a company. Putting talent quality on autopilot, Glider’s AI tools ensure that the client’s hiring needs are well taken care of.
Products like phone screens, interactive assessments, virtual interviews, proctoring, and smart integrations not only simplify the hiring process but also enhance candidate experience like never before.
Apart from catering to different types of hiring needs and roles like full-time or seasonal/contingent, tech or non-tech, Glider’s AI-based platform serves different industries from tech to functional and sales roles as well. Little surprise that Glider is a trusted partner for acclaimed enterprises, MSPs and staffing agencies.
Give Glider AI a try today!
