The Best 3 Ways to Create Opportunities for Seasonal Employees
Hiring seasonal employees is a common practice for many businesses. This is especially true for the retail industry during holiday and back to school seasons. But what gets often overlooked is using seasonal hiring as an opportunity for recruiting people to your full time team.
Hiring is a risk. Regardless of how great of a recruiter or interviewer you may be, regardless of how effective your onboarding and training is, at the end of the day, you truly don’t know who you are hiring. Humans are great at masking problems, challenges, and other issues on the surface. For this reason, recruiting and hiring is really a game of mitigating as many risks as possible.
One of the most effective ways to mitigate risks is to witness people in their environments. This is why I teach lifestyle recruiting so passionately. It allows you to experience someone in an environment they feel comfortable and measure their ability, work ethic, and energy.
Seasonal hiring can serve as a great platform for measuring if someone could be on your team moving past specific seasons. But how do you measure if someone is ready? How can you test them during small windows of engagement?
Here are the 3 best ways to create opportunities for measuring if a seasonal hire is ready to move forward after the chaos of your busiest times.
1- Give them small responsibilities
Many leaders do not take the opportunity when working with seasonal employees to discover their ability beyond small tasks. Seasonal hires are often thought of as temporary because they often are. But temporary does not have to mean limited.
As a seasonal hire shows initiative or curiosity in learning and taking on more tasks, give them responsibilities that can be used as a barometer of their growth and ability. Here are a few ideas you could implement:
Place the seasonal hire in charge of gathering all of the trash from each department
Ask the seasonal hire to ensure that each teammate is prepared at the beginning of their shift
Put the seasonal hire in charge of ensuring certain products are organized, folded, placed properly, etc
Challenge the seasonal hire to tell each teammate thank you at the end of their shifts
The list of opportunities is long. Be creative and courageous in creating moments of growth. This is also a great opportunity for using a veteran teammate as a mentor for the seasonal hire. They can be your eyes and ears as to how this person is developing and what interests they are showing.
2- Work with them more often
It’s easy as a leader to be overcome by your schedule, the business of this time of year, or the uptick in traffic. But spending time with your seasonal employees is just as important as spending time with your full time teammates. Be sure to schedule time with each seasonal employee. Engage them. Ask them about their lives. Learn what motivates them. Connect with them in a way that shows you truly care.
3- Ask what they notice
A far too underutilized strategy for developing others is this simple question: ‘what did you notice today?’
This question is best served in the moment. But it can be used at any point in the day for reflection and for learning more about your team. Use this question to better develop every teammate but it’s an especially effective question to quickly measure what your seasonal employees are thinking and how present they are.
When you ask ‘what did you notice today’ you will receive many different responses. A few to take note of are:
Response- ‘What do you mean?’
If any teammate responds with this question, that is a red glad that you need to better clarify what they should be noticing, better understand how they learn, or better pay attention to how much/little they care.
Response- ‘I’m just working on my to do list.’
This response immediately shows you a few things including- this teammate isn’t aware of anything taking place around them, they are solely focused on their tasks and nothing else, they are so absorbed in their work they aren’t connected to anyone or anything else. This response is a huge red flag telling you a story of work that needs done for further development.
Response- ‘I noticed that Sarah has been busy with guest A, that one section is a mess, and that the customer over there is very frustrated.’
This is an example of a teammate that gets it. They are aware of what is taking place, aware of what other team members are doing, and aware of their environment. This is the type of response you would like to hear from every teammate. But when a seasonal employee responds in this manner, they are a strong candidate to add to your full time team.