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.
So make sure you maintain a consistent presence as an employer through employer branding content. This way, you can establish those touchpoints with your future candidates during the quieter periods and spark their interest. As soon as the recruitment period for the peak season begins, these candidates will already be keen on a job with your organisation. If you then encourage them to apply through a conversion-focused campaign, the conversion rate for this campaign will be high. Much higher than if you were to appear on their screens out of the blue.
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 end up in your pre-apply talent pool. It’s then essential to stay in touch with these people, otherwise they’ll forget all about you in no time. Lead nurturing tools sort this out without requiring much manual effort. With this sort of smart technology, you can, for example, schedule WhatsApp messages to keep people engaged and enthusiastic. Think of a ‘behind the scenes’ video or a glimpse into a colleague’s working day. You can also regularly ask if they’re still available and, if so, how many hours a week they’d like to work. This way, you build up your own talent pool with up-to-date information about their preferences and availability.
As soon as you suddenly need extra staff, or just before the peak period begins, you can start the standard recruitment process with candidates from your pre-apply talent pool. Because you’ve been in contact with these candidates for a while and already know a thing or two about them, the recruitment process is often completed quickly and you’ll have filled your temporary vacancies 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
As seasonal work involves periods of intense activity as well as quieter periods, it’s likely that you won’t have a large recruitment (marketing) team on standby. Such a team would, after all, have too little work for much of the year. During the busy recruitment periods, you therefore want to organise your recruitment marketing and selection process as efficiently as possible, so that your regular recruitment team can cope. You can use recruitment marketing automation to achieve this.
With recruitment marketing automation, you let technology do some of the work for you. Using this sort of tool, you can, for example, plan employer branding campaigns up to a year in advance, so you no longer have to worry about them. You can set up and monitor all your recruitment campaigns quickly and easily via a single platform. You can also easily connect with candidates and keep them engaged through messages sent automatically via lead generation and nurturing tools. Alternatively, you can use the technology to pre-screen candidates using 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 saves your recruiters a lot of manual work and suddenly makes recruiting those dozens – or perhaps even hundreds – of temporary staff a very real possibility. Even with a small recruitment team! Curious to find out how you can use recruitment marketing software to make the most of seasonal peaks in your recruitment? Book a demo and we’ll walk you through it together!
