4 Ways to Hire a Seasonal and Temporary Workforce Online

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Last week in my post, Seasonal and Holiday Workforce Hiring Guide, we discussed holiday staffing best practices to help you prepare and staff your location whether it be a store, restaurant, or hotel during the busy seasonal shopping season.  For many, that busy seasonal happens to be the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.  Retail companies like Macy’s are hiring 80,000 seasonal associates this year.  Appropriate planning and strategy can use a number of different sources to hire and staff quickly and easily including online.

Online hiring and recruiting is also commonly called e-recruiting with the ‘e’ standing for electronic.  As our online and mobile access increases in importance and more job seekers and consumers spend time online, e-recruiting is a great way to reach your candidate base allowing you to stand out from the competition. 

How to Recruit Online for Holiday Staffing

• ·      Go Where the Job Seekers Are.  Whether it’s on Facebook on an online job seeker forum for local job seekers, it’s important to go where the candidates are.  This has been an effective strategy for me since 2001 when I first started using chat rooms, forums, and dating websites to source and engage job seekers online. 

• ·      Build a Talent Network.  Consider creating an online community to target, recruit, and build relationships with your prospective holiday job seekers.  You can use an external social networking platform like Facebook or Twitter.  You can also build and cultivate your own using a customized talent network. 

• ·      Engage Your Network.  Much online conversation between employers and job seekers is one way.  Apply for this job or learn about us online.  Participate in online conversations like jobrelated Twitter chats, ask questions, and look for feedback to establish relationships.  Stand out from your job seeker competition by focusing on engagement with a subtle nudge towards your career opportunities and holiday hiring needs. 

• ·      Create Content.  Obviously, if you are reading this you are familiar with blogs.  They are a great way to build relationships with readers who may or may not be job seekers.  By focusing your target by topic and keyword, you can reach job seekers through search engine optimization and online search.  Provide them with answers to their job seeking or questions about your company.  Ask your own employees what questions they have to start building and targeting your blog content either through written or other mediums like video. 

E-recruiting Strategies for Seasonal Staffing and Beyond

Hiring online or e-recruiting is a great way to engage any type of job seeker audience especially your holiday workforce during this busy time of year.  By having online relationships you can tap into the power of your social and online networks also increasing your candidate referrals and online press and exposure increasing the number of quality candidates and interviews.  

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

 Photo Credit.