Holiday hiring is always a rush for retailers, but the 2017 season is eliciting different reactions from the industry’s biggest names. While Amazon is hiring as many as 120,000 seasonal workers for the second straight year, Target is increasing its holiday workforce by 43% to as high as 100,000. In contrast, Macy’s is slightly scaling back its seasonal employees by 4%, to 80,000.
As retailers rethink how they go about the hiring process and resource allocation, they must ensure that these roles are filled effectively. The RTP team shares ideas and suggestions for retailers to get the most out of seasonal employees, and identifies areas where retailers should exercise caution with these hires.
Debbie Hauss, Editor-in-Chief: Retailers will serve themselves well if they take advantage of the seasonal hiring opportunity to snag potential long-term employees. This is a win-win for everyone — the retailer, the employee and consumers. So often retailers just hire “bodies” to fill space during the holidays, with no expectations that the employee will be valuable one second after the season is concluded. Especially during a time when the store experience is defining the future of brick-and-mortar retail, companies need to rethink this approach. Bon-Ton Stores, for one, retains approximately 40% of its seasonal workers (up to 13,000) as full-time employees. According to Denise Domian, SVP of HR, “Even if you’re not going to be here for more than six to 10 weeks, you’re still part of our team.”
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Adam Blair, Executive Editor: My personal experience as a seasonal retail worker has been limited — a few weeks at Christmastime back in the early 1980s working at the Hickory Farms store in the Roosevelt Field Mall. I don’t remember much about it, except for the strong suspicion that they wanted to keep me someplace where I would have the least potential to mess something up, whether that was a product being sold or a relationship with a customer. I hope things have changed today, to the extent that retailers are carefully scanning their annual “crop” of seasonal workers for potential full-time workers. (Amazon claims that thousands of its temporary hires become permanent members of its workforce.) It’s probably tough to keep this in mind during the holiday frenzy, but retailers should make it clear to everyone — from the C-suite down to the store aisle or warehouse floor — that retail doesn’t have to be just a job, it can be a career.
Marie Griffin, Managing Editor: The seasonal hiring practices of retailers in 2017 are a clear reflection of the industry’s bifurcation: Retailers are staffing up to provide better service and experiences in stores while delivering e-Commerce purchases more quickly and reliably than ever. What I find most interesting on the in-store side is the new seasonal job at Toys ‘R’ Us: Expert of Play. “Yesterday, we just sold toys. Today, we are champions of play,” boasts the job description. Workers will “play, learn and engage” with kids while demonstrating their “ability to translate product knowledge into sales through demonstration.” These new hires might be a risky investment for a company that just filed for bankruptcy, but 2017 is the make-it-or-break it holiday season for Toys ‘R’ Us. At Retail TouchPoints we always talk about how improving the in-store experience is the key to the future of brick-and-mortar, and I would love to see Toys ‘R’ Us prove us right.
Klaudia Tirico, Features Editor: Seasonal hiring is basically like hosting a recruitment camp. All retailers should get on board. I worked as a sales associate at Bloomingdale’s for most of my college years, and I started as a holiday season employee. I was hired right after the season because I proved to be a valuable addition to the team. It didn’t feel at all as if I was “just” a seasonal worker either. The retailer made me feel like I was completely part of the team — and the discount during the gift-giving season was simply the cherry on top. Retailers can benefit from seasonal workers, as it’s a great way to have your business covered during the craziness of the holidays — and weed out the underperforming applicants while keeping the exceptional ones around to continue to provide great customer service to shoppers.
Glenn Taylor, Senior Editor: Like their hopes of reeling in a long-term customer from a holiday sale, retailers must treat the employee hiring and training process the same way. Obviously, there are only a select number of spots that need to be filled after the holiday season, but retailers really need to incentivize associates, as well as back end or warehouse employees, if they want to make a serious impact on the hiring process overall. It’s not just about bonuses; it’s about team building and strong communications. You have to create value for the consumer during the holiday season more than at any other time of the year, so it makes sense to make these employees feel like they can provide that value in the first place. If retailers don’t have an immediate spot for their best seasonal employees, then maybe they should build out a list that keeps them on deck to come back the next holiday season, or even sooner if other employees leave.
