Many employers in logistics, retail and tourism face seasonal pressures. During peak periods, a lot of staff are suddenly needed, for instance to process and deliver all the orders after Black Friday or for St Nicholas Eve. But tourism, catering and agriculture also have distinct seasonal influences.
A talent pool is a smart way to anticipate this and efficiently recruit enough seasonal workers to get the job done. In this blog, we share 3 tips that you can immediately apply to handle seasonal work in your organisation.
Consistent employer branding plus temporary conversion campaigns
Running a vacancy campaign a few weeks before the peak period to recruit dozens of seasonal workers often doesn't work enough. There is still a large supply of vacancies and candidates have the jobs to choose from. After seeing one social media ad, they will not take immediate action. In fact, you generally need 10 to 20 touchpoints with your target audience before considering applying.
A touchpoint is a moment when someone comes into contact with your organisation, for example by seeing a vacancy on a job board, watching a video on social media, receiving an InMail or visiting your work-at-home site.
Make sure you are consistently visible as an employer with employer branding content. In this way, you create touchpoints with your future candidates and arouse their interest during the quiet period. Once the peak recruitment period arrives, these candidates are already warmed up for a job with your organisation. If you then encourage them to apply with a conversion-focused campaign, the conversion rate of this campaign will be high. Much higher than when you appear on their screens out of nowhere.
So even though it may not feel urgent to work on your visibility as an employer during the quiet period, it will undoubtedly get you better results during your job campaign. And that in turn ensures less stress, right before the busiest time of the year.
Work with a pre-apply talent pool
If you need to be able to respond quickly to changing demand, you actually want to have candidates continuously 'on the bench' that you can quickly deploy when a big order suddenly arrives or a new collaboration is started. You can organise this by working with a pre-application option in your future vacancies. You put vacancies that are not yet vacant (but most likely will be soon) online and let people express their interest with a pre-apply button.
A pre-apply button is a button on your website that allows candidates to express their interest in a vacancy. They do not immediately start the regular application process, because the vacancy will only become available in the future, but they do leave their details. That way, you can keep in touch with them and respond quickly when the vacancy actually becomes available.
These candidates will end up in your pre-apply talent pool. It is then essential to keep in touch with these people, otherwise they will soon forget about you. With lead nurturing tooling you fix this, without a lot of manual work. With this kind of smart technology, you can, for instance, schedule Whatsapp messages to keep people involved and enthusiastic. Think of a 'behind the scenes' video or a peek into a colleague's working day. You can also regularly ask whether they are still available and, if so, how many hours a week they would like to work. This way, you build up your own talent pool with up-to-date information about their wishes and possibilities.
As soon as you suddenly need extra employees or just before the peak period starts, you start the regular application process with the candidates from your pre-apply talent pool. Because you have been in contact with these candidates for a while and already know a thing or two about them, the application process is often completed quickly and you have your temporary vacancies filled in no time!
Efficient selection of your talent pool with automated screening questions
At peak periods, we are usually talking about dozens or even hundreds of extra employees that need to be recruited and selected. With software, you can make part of the qualification of applicants happen automatically. This works especially well for checking hard selection criteria, such as language proficiency or having a driving licence.
You can also use lead generation and nurturing tooling very well to have candidates answer automated questions about these requirements, for example via Whatsapp. You can automate the questions and answers in such a way that you immediately reject candidates who do not meet the hard requirements. This way, you make the most efficient use of recruiters' time, as they only have to pick up the relevant responses.
Make the most of your talent pool with recruitment marketing automation
Because seasonal work involves periods of enormous busyness as well as periods of calm, chances are you don't have a huge recruitment (marketing) team on standby. Indeed, they would then be short of work for much of the year. During busy recruitment periods, you therefore want to organise your recruitment marketing and selection process as efficiently as possible, so that you can suffice with your regular recruitment team. For this, you can use recruitment marketing automation.
With recruitment marketing automation, you let technology do some of the work. With this kind of tooling you can, for instance, plan employer branding campaigns up to a year in advance, so you don't have to worry about it. You can set up and monitor all your job campaigns quickly and easily via a single platform. And you can easily get in touch with candidates and keep them involved with messages you send automatically via lead generation and nurturing tools. Or you use the technology to pre-select candidates based on automated questions.
"From request from the recruiter to live campaign, we only need half an hour. Without the recruitment marketing tooling, this would be more like a couple of hours per campaign I think."
Esmée Maton, Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketer at Royal HaskoningDHV
This will save your recruiters a lot of manual work and make recruiting those dozens or maybe hundreds of temporary employees suddenly quite feasible. Even with a small recruitment team! Curious about how you can use recruitment marketing software to optimally anticipate seasonal pressure in your recruitment? Schedule a demo and we will go through it together!
