Industry: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism

Hospitality & Travel Industry Recruitment is On the Road Again [Infographic]

Posted on by nfuqua

When the pandemic struck in 2020, the travel and hospitality industry saw some of the biggest impacts worldwide, and the reverberations and recovery are still shaping the industry years later.  

Now, people are traveling again, but while many industries have recovered the jobs lost in 2020, hospitality lags behind. The industry faces a new set of talent challenges, but employers have the opportunity to reshape their talent programs for the world of travel.   

Check out this infographic for insights on this transforming industry.

Through the job market volatility that has defined the hiring market for the past three years, the travel and hospitality industry saw some of the biggest impacts worldwide, and the reverberations and recovery are still shaping the industry years later. Now, people are traveling again, but while many industries have regained the jobs lost in 2020, hospitality lags behind. Travelers are finally ready to hit the skies, seas and roads for both personal and business travel. After several years of staying close to home, pent up demand has the travel industry booming. Global travel revenue is expected to triple 2020 levels by 2027. Full recovery of business travel to 2019 spend volumes appears likely by late 2024 or early 2025.i Travel is more meaningful than it used to be, leading to increased traveler expectations and more challenges for hospitality staff. 46% of people say travel is now more important to them than it was before the pandemic.ii 43% of people are upping their travel budget in 2023.iii 91% of hospitality workers said they have dealt with customers who believed they inherently deserved privileges or special treatment, and 70% have wanted to leave the industry as a result.iv However, hospitality staffing has not caught up to the renewed demand. In the U.S. alone, nearly 2 million hospitality jobs remain unfilled, even as hiring slows in other industries.v In September 2022, 87% of hoteliers reported staffing shortages.vi In the UK, hospitality job openings are still 74% higher than they were in January and February of 2020.vii One big reason for that? Millions of hospitality workers fled the industry during the pandemic and recovery. 15.6% of people left their hospitality jobs in March 2020.viii 8.3% of hospitality staff left the sector between August and September 2022.ix Do you need help hiring hospitality workers? Learn about how you can attract the next generation of workers, build more diverse teams and plan for the future in The Recruitment Handbook for Hospitality and Travel.   [Download your copy now!] 

For more hospitality insights, download our ebook, The Recruitment Handbook for Travel and Hospitality.

The Recruitment Handbook for Travel and Hospitality

Posted on by akessler

The Recruitment Handbook for Travel and Hospitality

5 Strategies for Recruiting the Best Travel and Hospitality Talent Now and into the Future

Through the job market volatility that has defined the hiring market for the past three years, the travel and hospitality industry saw some of the biggest impacts worldwide, and the reverberations and recovery are still shaping the industry years later.

While many industries have recovered the jobs lost in 2020, hospitality lags behind. While people are traveling again, the industry faces a new set of talent challenges, from a talent exodus to shifting traveler expectations. Now, employers have the opportunity to reshape their talent programs for the world of travel.

In this handbook, you’ll learn:

  • Global trends driving the need for travel and hospitality talent
  • Strategies for overcoming challenges in your travel and hospitality hiring programs
  • How partnering with an RPO provider can help

Targeted Recruitment Marketing Campaign Delivers Talent for Global Theme Park Brand

Posted on by akessler
Targeted Recruitment Marketing Campaign Delivers Talent for Global Theme Park Brand

Targeted Recruitment Marketing Campaign Delivers Talent for Global Theme Park Brand

This multinational chain of family theme parks required help hiring for critical roles including customer service, performers and lifeguards across two of its major U.S. theme parks. PeopleScout helped hire over 1,500 workers using recruitment marketing campaigns and our talent advisory expertise.

1,500 + hires made in just six months across two locations
reduced drop-off by streamlining the application process
reduced drop-off by streamlining the application process
30,000 clicks from recruitment marketing ads across social media and online display networks

Situation

This multinational chain of family theme parks required help hiring a variety of roles across its California and New York resorts including customer service roles, performers and lifeguards.

Solution

PeopleScout conducted in-depth market research to determine the biggest challenges the client faced when recruiting for their theme parks and resorts. We identified remote work, “candidate is king” and higher pay as the three main challenges facing the client. Here’s how we solved each:


Challenge #1 — Remote Work:

More people want flexibility. Front-line and hourly positions are less attractive to candidates with remote work readily available.

Our Solution: We leveraged the client’s “play” branding to emphasize the fun and rewarding aspects of working on-site at one of the theme parks. This was fed through into recruitment marketing creative and copy. 


Challenge #2 — “Candidate is King”:

Candidates are more informed than ever and are holding employers to a higher standard.

Our Solution: By testing alternative job titles, improving job copy, and reaching out on different channels, we were able to widen our reach and pool of candidates. We strategically targeted candidates most likely to apply for the roles, such as those looking for seasonal or part-time jobs.

Challenge #3 — Higher Pay:

When faced with increased living costs, candidates are demanding higher pay.

Our Solution: The client was not in a position to raise wages for these roles. So, we got creative by restructuring job copy to better position the client’s competitive benefits. By quantifying these benefits and putting them front and center on job postings and recruitment marketing materials, we were able to generate interest without raising wages.

Results

  • In the first six months, we were able to fulfill our goal of 1,336 hires in California & 190 in New York.
  • The client’s previous application had up to 22 sections where the candidate had to input information. PeopleScout optimized and shortened this candidate journey by employing a variety of channels including Indeed One-Click, Indeed Hiring Events and Talent.com. This reduced the application abandonment rate.
  • PeopleScout restructured job descriptions to create job advertisements. In other words, we rewrote the copy to focus on the value the client and the role have to offer their employees rather than what the client wanted from candidates.  
  • PeopleScout performed A/B tests to determine which job titles would help reach a wider pool of candidates. For example, we found that “Waterpark Attendant” received almost 300 applications in the first week, while “Lifeguard” received only 15.
  • Social outreach using Facebook, Instagram and Google Display Network resulted in 4.1 million impressions and 30,000 clicks across the California and New York audiences.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Multinational chain of family theme parks
  • INDUSTRY
    Travel & Tourism
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Talent Advisory
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    1,500+
  • LOCATIONS
    Over 10 theme parks around the world
Let’s Connect

Labor Market Trends Impacting Customer Service Hiring 

Posted on by akessler

In today’s tumultuous labor market, where some industries are slowing down, customer service hiring is still challenging across financial services, utilities, hospitality and retail. Organizations in these sectors often find themselves competing on customer experience, which is being impacted by the lack of staff.  

A consumer survey from PwC shows that the four most important factors for an exceptional customer experience are speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service. The key to excelling in these factors is happy, engaged employees. Organizations with highly engaged workforces are 21% more productive, outperform competitors by 147% and have customer loyalty rates 233% higher than companies without engaged employees. 

How can companies achieve this kind of success when they are struggling to fill their customer-facing vacancies? Talent acquisition leaders are getting creative to recruit and retain customer service and call center talent. Here are three trends in how companies are adjusting their approach to hiring and engaging a customer-focused workforce.  

Trend 1: Hiring for Potential 

As customer expectations have changed, so have the skills needed for top customer service talent. We recently conducted a poll in which talent leaders indicated that soft skills related to emotional intelligence are highly sought after. 

The most desired skills for customer service recruiting are communication, empathy and relationship building.

We’ve worked with several of our clients to implement a culture-centric approach for attracting talent. Instead of assessing candidates based on previous work experience, we advise evaluating based on whether they possess the right skills, values and behaviors to be successful in the role. We’re reimagining interviews and assessments to be more focused on soft skills and purpose as we help talent leaders and hiring managers embrace candidates coming from outside of their industry.  

Trend 2: Expanding Talent Pools  

With job openings outnumbering job seekers, organizations across sectors find themselves getting creative as they try to expand their talent pool. For some, this means looking into new talent audiences, like underrepresented group or military veterans, and putting programs in place such as apprenticeships to future-proof their talent pipeline.  

For many companies, the growth of remote work means that they’re looking outside of their physical call center locations to candidates across the country and even expanding to new countries. This requires an adjustment to your talent acquisition strategy to ensure your employer brand and recruitment processes are ready to handle dispersed talent.  

Trend 3: Adapting to Remote Work 

Remote work is impacting more than just where talent comes from, it also affects how organizations onboard and engage their staff. As some countries are experiencing a cost-of-living crisis, customer service representatives are fielding queries from vulnerable customers which can be especially draining. Talent leaders are getting creative in how they connect with staff to ensure a sense of belonging and wellness—regardless of where the employee is working.  

Some contact centers have even adjusted their operational structure to work in “pods” which ensures agents—both in the office and remote—get the support they need to solve customer queries efficiently. Before, managers and team leads could walk around the call center floor and see when agents looked stressed. Remote working has made it harder to monitor employee wellbeing. Customer-focused leaders are investing in employee wellbeing, from training managers to catch the signs of burnout to offering wellbeing support programs.  

These are just a few of the labor market trends that are impacting how companies hire and engage talent. Clearly, organizations are finding creative and bold ways to invest in their employees to maintain a resilient and customer-focused workforce.  

9 STRATEGIES FOR SOLVING HIGH-VOLUME HIRING CHALLENGES

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Strategies for Overcoming High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on by akessler

High-volume recruitment is one of the most demanding disciplines in talent acquisition. Whether you’re staffing a contact center, scaling a logistics network, preparing for a seasonal retail surge or maintaining a large healthcare workforce, the challenge is the same: hire large numbers of the right people, quickly, without letting quality slip or burning out your team. 

The organizations that do this well aren’t just working harder—they’re working differently. This guide explores the most common high-volume hiring challenges and the strategies that leading talent acquisition teams are using to overcome them. 

👉 Get our ebook: 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges 

What is High-Volume Recruitment?

High-volume recruitment involves sourcing, screening, interviewing and hiring large numbers of candidates for similar openings or job types, often within compressed timeframes. It’s common across sectors including retail, hospitality, logistics, healthcare, contact centers, travel and government—and it requires a fundamentally different approach to talent acquisition than professional or specialist hiring.

The core tension in high-volume recruitment is speed versus quality. Move too slowly and candidates drop out or accept offers elsewhere. Move too fast without the right processes and you compromise on hire quality, driving up attrition and starting the cycle again. Getting this balance right—consistently, at scale—is what separates high-performing high-volume programs from those that are perpetually in firefighting mode.

The Biggest High-Volume Hiring Challenges—and How to Solve Them

Challenge 1: Candidate Drop-Off and Ghosting

Candidate drop-off—where applicants disengage partway through the process—and ghosting—where candidates simply stop responding or fail to show up—are among the most costly and frustrating problems in high-volume recruitment. When you’re processing hundreds or thousands of applications, even a modest drop-off rate translates into significant wasted effort and extended time-to-fill. 

The root cause is almost always the same: a process that moves too slowly, communicates too infrequently, or asks too much of candidates. Today’s high-volume candidates—many of whom are applying to multiple employers simultaneously—have limited tolerance for lengthy applications, long gaps between process stages or radio silence from recruiters. If a competitor makes an offer first, or the application simply feels like too much effort, they’ll move on. 

How to address it: 

Audit your application process ruthlessly. Every question that isn’t genuinely necessary to advance a candidate is a potential drop-off point. Streamline the process to capture only what’s needed at each stage, and reserve more detailed information gathering for later in the funnel when candidates are more committed. 

Look at where processes can be automated so that at every touchpoint—application confirmation, status updates, interview scheduling, offer—communication happens quickly and consistently. Candidates should never be left wondering where they stand. SMS and messaging tools are particularly effective in high-volume contexts, where candidates may not regularly check email. 

Reduce the time between process stages wherever possible. Speed is itself a candidate experience differentiator in high-volume markets. The organizations that move fastest tend to secure the best candidates. 

An RPO partner is particularly well-placed to address drop-off and ghosting. With dedicated volume recruiting expertise and access to the latest talent technology—AI-enabled CRM, automated scheduling, pipeline analytics—a high-volume RPO solution keeps candidates moving through your funnel efficiently while freeing your internal team from the administrative burden of managing large applicant volumes manually. 

Challenge 2: Maintaining Quality of Hire at Scale

Speed pressure in high-volume recruitment creates a persistent temptation to cut corners on assessment, like skipping interview stages, loosening criteria or defaulting to “warm body” hiring when vacancies feel urgent. The short-term relief this provides is almost always offset by higher attrition, lower performance and the cost of rehiring. 

The challenge is that traditional assessment approaches—often designed for professional or specialist hiring—don’t translate well to volume contexts. They’re too slow, too resource-intensive and often measure the wrong things. 

How to address it: 

Start by challenging the assumptions underpinning your current criteria. The skills and background that seem like obvious requirements for a role aren’t always the ones that predict success. At PeopleScout, when working with a high-volume RPO client struggling to hire for customer service roles, we interviewed their most successful customer-facing employees and found that prior customer service experience was not a predictor of performance, but problem-solving aptitude was. That insight expanded their talent pool significantly while improving quality of hire and reducing attrition. 

Redesign your candidate assessment to evaluate both hard and soft skills efficiently. For high-volume roles, soft skills, like attitude, adaptability, work ethic and communication style, are often the stronger predictors of success and retention. PeopleScout’s 1XP assessment model is built specifically for high-volume contexts, helping organizations evaluate what actually matters without adding time to the process. 

Structured, consistent assessments also reduce bias and support diversity hiring goals—an important consideration for high-volume programs that are often the largest source of diverse talent entry points into an organization. 

Challenge 3: Recruiter and Hiring Manager Burnout

High-volume hiring puts enormous pressure on internal teams. When recruitment processes are inefficient, hiring managers are pulled into administrative tasks they’re not equipped or resourced for—screening resumes and CVs, chasing candidates, coordinating interviews—on top of their day jobs. Recruiters managing large requisition loads without adequate technology quickly reach a point where quality suffers simply because there aren’t enough hours. 

This is a structural problem, not a motivation problem. Asking people to work harder within a broken process doesn’t fix it. 

How to address it: 

Identify which parts of your recruitment process are consuming the most recruiter and hiring manager time and ask whether they can be streamlined. Scheduling, application screening, reference verification and background checks are all areas where automation or RPO support can dramatically reduce the administrative burden on your team—without compromising candidate experience. 

Modular RPO solutions can also help you augment your internal team. By selectively outsourcing specific components of your hiring process, you allow an RPO partner to absorb the volume-intensive elements so your recruiters and hiring managers can focus on the decisions and interactions that genuinely require time and attention. This isn’t just about capacity—it’s about directing your internal resources toward the highest-value parts of the hiring process.

Challenge 4: Scaling Up and Down for Seasonal Demand

Many high-volume hiring programs aren’t steady-state—they spike. Retail ramps up for peak trading periods. Hospitality and travel scale dramatically for summer or holiday seasons. Tax and financial services see surges at predictable points in the year. Building and then dismantling a large internal recruitment team to match these peaks is expensive, inefficient and disruptive. 

How to address it: 

Build scalability into your recruitment model rather than treating it as an emergency response. This means establishing talent pipelines and candidate communities year-round—not just when the hiring surge hits—so you’re converting warm candidates rather than starting from scratch each season. 

RPO partnerships are particularly well-suited to seasonal high-volume programs because the engagement model is designed to flex. A high-volume RPO partner can scale delivery resources up or down in line with your hiring calendar, providing a consistent, experienced recruiting team without the overhead of permanent headcount. 

Why RPO is the Right Solution for High-Volume Hiring 

Most high-volume hiring challenges share a common root: a recruitment model built for normal hiring volumes, stretched beyond what it can reliably deliver. Bolt-on fixes—an extra job board, a temporary agency, an additional internal recruiter—rarely address the underlying process and technology gaps that are driving the problem. 

Recruitment process outsourcing is designed specifically to address this. A high-volume RPO partner brings: 

  • Purpose-built processes for high-volume contexts, designed around candidate behavior, dropout patterns and assessment approaches that work at scale 
  • Talent technology that organizations often can’t justify building or buying independently including AI-powered sourcing, automated candidate engagement, predictive analytics and pipeline reporting 
  • Dedicated recruiting expertise that your internal team can draw on without having to build and maintain the capability in-house 
  • Scalable delivery that flexes with your hiring calendar rather than forcing you to over- or under-resource for predictable peaks 
  • Talent advisory capabilities like employer branding, recruitment marketing and assessment design, that address the upstream factors affecting your ability to attract and convert candidates at scale 

PeopleScout’s high-volume RPO solution is purpose-built for organizations managing large-scale, fast-paced hiring programs across retail, hospitality, logistics, healthcare and beyond. 

👉 Explore PeopleScout’s high-volume RPO solution  

👉 Get our ebook: 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges 

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Posted on by akessler

9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

Competition for hourly talent is steep, with high demand from call centers, hospitality, retail, security, travel, logistics, healthcare and even government entities. In fact, 65% of companies have high-volume recruitment needs.

Talent acquisition leaders are facing the most tumultuous job market in recent memory with an impossible combination of soaring job openings and a labor shortage.

  • So, how do they compete for hourly talent when the competition is so fierce?
  • And how can they prepare for seasonal peaks?
  • More importantly, how can they increase speed without sacrificing on quality-of-hire?

Download our ebook to learn 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges. It’s a must-read for any talent acquisition team focused on solving critical problems in their high-volume hiring programs.

[On-Demand] How to Build a Customer-Focused Workforce

Posted on by akessler

[On-Demand] How to Build a Customer-Focused Workforce

Is your business finding that customer behavior or expectations are changing? And does this mean you need staff with different skills or behaviors?

This Personnel Today webinar, in association with PeopleScout, looks at how many employers are re-engineering how they engage their customers.

Statistics from customer service platform provide Zendesk show that 60% of customers will choose an alternative supplier after just one bad experience. And research from Bain Capital found that organizations that excel at customer experience drive revenues up to 8% higher than others in their market.

To meet changing consumer expectations, customer facing teams need different skills and employers are having to adapt the competencies they look for in the hiring process.

Join Rob Moss, editor of Personnel Today, as he chairs a panel of industry experts to discuss the talent changes they’re making and anticipate for 2023. Panellists include: Sam Westwood, head of people for The White Company; Chris Jackson, group head of colleague experience at Centrica; Patsy Legender, head of operations at Newcastle Strategic Solutions; and Debbie Hayes, HR director at Renewco Power.

Despite the growth of digital channels, excellent customer service is still a must-have. Watch this webinar to learn:

  • Customer queries have become are more intricate and high-value
  • Employees need the skills to liaise with customers through chats, emails and social media
  • Customer service representatives need soft skills like listening and empathy
  • Problem solving abilities have become key to resolving more complex queries.

Merivale: High-Volume Recruitment for a Winning Hospitality Brand

Posted on by akessler
Merivale: High-Volume Recruitment for a Winning Hospitality Brand

Merivale: High-Volume Recruitment for a Winning Hospitality Brand

Merivale, Australia’s most innovative hospitality brand, turned to PeopleScout for a high-volume recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) solution, powered by Affinix®, our talent acquisition suite.

800 hospitality roles filled in just six weeks
3,000 total hires made leveraging a data-driven approach
3.36 days time-to-offer achieved on average

Situation

In late 2021, Merivale was formally awarded the contract to manage the hospitality venues in the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) and the Sydney Football Stadium (SFS). This opportunity represented a new approach to dining at Sydney’s major sporting venues, moving away from the traditional fast food stadium experience toward more refined dining that will enhance the stadium experience.

However, the Sydney hospitality market was facing a crisis. After two years of border closures, the hospitality workforce was decimated. Plus, the uncertainty around the lifting of lockdown restrictions meant that Merivale received confirmation of their appointment to the stadium contract with only six weeks to prepare before the Ashes test would be held at the SCG.

Merivale came to PeopleScout with a challenge—to source over 800 roles in one of the tightest talent markets in a generation.

Challenge accepted!

Solution

PeopleScout needed to act fast. We quickly mobilised Affinix®, our proprietary talent acquisition suite, to capture expressions of interest from potential applicants. We built an online application form and campaign page that would educate applicants on the opportunities at Merivale, and through the dynamic application form, automatically categorized candidates into Merivale’s role streams of:

  • Bar staff
  • Wait staff
  • Cashiers

PeopleScout knew that speed was essential due both to our short timeframe and the highly mobile nature of hospitality candidates—we had to act fast! PeopleScout implemented a tech-powered talent acquisition solution through which eligible applicants were immediately invited to complete a video interview following their application. If applicants had not completed the video interview within 24 hours of submitting their application, our Center of Excellence team followed up to conduct a live phone interview. The PeopleScout Center of Excellence vetted all video interviews and phone screens, and successful candidates were handed over to Merivale for offer and onboarding.

Evolution

The PeopleScout team worked tirelessly in the lead-up to the New Year’s Ashes test, and we were able to fill the 800 roles for the Merivale stadium launch—in just six weeks.

Following the success of the first phase of the hospitality launch, Merivale engaged PeopleScout to source the talent they required to support the hospitality venues across both the SCG and SFS for the remainder of the year. Merivale needed a total talent pool of 3,000 skilled hospitality workers including those with fine dining experience, like chefs and front of house staff and retail personnel.

Following the Ashes pilot, Merivale had a better understanding of the candidate profiles they needed, so PeopleScout worked closely with the Merivale team to profile nine job categories across three job families. Candidate responses were screened using AI-powered tools in Affinix to dynamically filter them into qualified roles.

PeopleScout leveraged Affinix to build real-time analytics dashboards which helped us build the insight gained through the first round of recruiting into the decision-making process. In Affinix, we tracked candidate sources and engagement levels and fed this insight back to the Merivale marketing team so they could direct their activities to the channel which yielded the greatest results. Leveraging the CRM tool in Affinix, we also encouraged referrals from current Merivale staff and alumni.

PeopleScout maintained the same high-touch approach and fast turnaround for video and phone screening. We collaborated closely with the Merivale team to assess our results completing, spot audits throughout the process to ensure the team maintains high-quality hires and achieves the best possible outcome.

Results

PeopleScout was able to generate so much trust from Merivale that they gave our team permission to make direct offers to candidates without validation from the Merivale team.

In an extremely challenging talent market, PeopleScout achieved a time-to-offer of just 3.36 days and a time to fill of 5.5 days. PeopleScout is on track to source the volume of candidates Merivale needs, and with the SFS launching in late 2022, this requirement continues to grow.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Merivale
  • INDUSTRY
    Hospitality
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Affinix
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    3,000+
  • ABOUT MERIVALE
    Merivale is a pioneer within the Australian hospitality industry. With over 70 brands and venues, it is synonymous with delivering unique and memorable experiences.
Let’s Connect

Seasonal Hiring: How RPO can Help You Better Source and Hire Seasonal Workers 

Posted on by edyson

Hiring seasonal workers is essential for employers in need of extra talent during the holiday season. If your organization depends on seasonal hiring to augment your workforce, it is vital to efficiently source, recruit, and onboard your seasonal hires to ensure you are staffed during the holidays.

Without a well-designed seasonal hiring program in place, employers risk going understaffed for the holidays, or for other times of the year when a business reaches a peak. In this article, we will walk through how an RPO provider can help you hire talent for the holidays and equip you with tips on building a seasonal hiring pipeline.

What is a Seasonal Worker?

hiring seasonal workers

A seasonal worker or employee is a worker who works for a short period to meet seasonal peaks in demand for an employer. This might coincide with weather seasons or with holiday seasons.

Employers that use seasonal hires typically need assistance at the same time each year, for example as lifeguards or lawn care workers in the summer or ski instructors or snowplow drivers in the winter. When hiring seasonal workers, you can hire them on a part-time or full-time basis depending on your needs.

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9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges

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What are the Benefits of Hiring Seasonal Workers?

If your organization experiences seasonal peaks in demand, hiring seasonal workers can be a good solution for staffing issues. Here are some of the benefits:

Extra Hands When You Need Them: When a business reaches its peak season, seasonal workers provide you that extra help fast when you need it, without the expense and time of hiring full-time staff.

Assist Full-Time Staff: Your seasonal employees can help alleviate the load carried by your full-time employees. This can improve morale for your permanent workforce because they have the support they need during peak times.

Low Risk: When you hire a permanent employee, you don’t always know if they’ll be a good fit for the job. Seasonal employees are only hired for a short period. If they aren’t a good fit, you have only made a minimal investment.

Potential full-time employee: On the other hand, if you hire a seasonal employee who works out well, you might be able to offer them a permanent position when one becomes available. It’s a trial run that works as a recruiting method for permanent positions.

Better Seasonal Hiring Begins with Crafting Better Job Descriptions

seasonal hiring

Writing job descriptions for seasonal positions is different from temporary, full- and part-time roles. It is important that your job descriptions accurately reflect the nature of your open positions, so candidates know ahead of time if they should apply.

For example, many seasonal roles are in a warehouse and logistics setting and may require candidates to work in a more physically demanding environment. Major retailers and logistics companies are in serious need of seasonal logistics workers with Walmart looking to fill 20,000 logistics roles while UPS, Kohl’s and Target are in need of 100,000 seasonal warehouse hires each.

To better understand the nature of the seasonal jobs for which you are writing job descriptions consider spending time shadowing workers in the relevant seasonal positions. What’s more, COVID-19 has made many employers became more familiar with video interviewing, however, the idea of leveraging videos to enhance your employment marketing and employer branding is sometimes overlooked.  

Job descriptions can be bolstered with video. A seasonal job posting could include a short video of a hiring manager describing the job and what they are looking for in a seasonal hire. Your video can even include examples of workers performing the most common tasks required to give candidates an accurate idea of the work involved.

How RPO Can Help

RPO providers can help employers conceive of and create a talent attraction strategy that considers both the needs of employers and seasonal hires through a data-driven approach to talent advisory and recruitment marketing making you a seasonal employer of choice.

Sourcing Seasonal Hires

Recruiting seasonal employees begins with mining a verdant source of seasonal workers. Employers should look for candidates such as students and other demographic looking for short-term employment opportunities. For example, recruiting recent graduates who are taking time to figure out what they want to do long-term is one way of sourcing seasonal talent. Often, these candidates prefer the temporary nature of seasonal work compared to a longer-term commitment.

Moreover, hiring candidates with a seasonal work mindset can help you keep them around for the full season or even retain them for next year.

When sourcing seasonal workers, look to hire people who want seasonal work including

  • Retired workers
  • Workers looking for extra work during the holidays
  • Stay-at-home parents who want to work while their kids are in school
  • Students who are on holiday break

How RPO Can Help

Many RPO providers have talent pools and networks they can tap into to source the right candidates for seasonal positions. RPOs also have experience building talent pipelines from the ground up and can assist employers in creating a sustainable seasonal hiring program that delivers year-in-year-out.

RPO partners also offer technology expertise to help you track, measure and optimize your seasonal hiring campaign by showing which channels and recruitment marketing messages are yielding the best candidates. They can help you with recruitment analytics so you can see your recruitment funnel at all your sites in a centralize dashboard.

Managing High-Volume While Hiring Seasonal Workers

seasonal hires

Many employers in need of seasonal hires require a large volume of talent to keep up with peak demand. High-volume hiring at its heart is a problem of scale which requires optimizing your time and recruiting spend. Recruitment automation can help you reduce the manual workload on your recruiting team and hiring managers while keeping your visibility on all of the candidates progressing through different stages of the interview process. Automating certain steps, such as screening and triggering assessments, allows recruiters to focus their time on higher-value, strategic work.

How RPO Can Help

An HR outsourcing solution such as RPO provides employers the ability to scale up seamlessly as seasonal hiring demands shift. With an internal talent acquisition team, it may be difficult to scale up hiring quickly enough to handle a higher number of hires and then scale back down when hiring volumes shrink.  What’s more, recruitment technology platforms such as PeopleScout’s Affinix® can help you automate your recruitment program and create great high-volume hiring efficiency.

Never Neglect Your End of-Season Plans

How you end a relationship with seasonal hires can help with next season’s hiring. Here are a few things to keep in mind at the end of the season:

  • Availability: Ask outgoing seasonal employees if they would be interested in returning next season. Some workers design their needs and lifestyle around managing seasonal and temporary jobs, and they may be looking for another opportunity next year.
  • Exit interviews: To learn from successes and drawbacks, hold exit interviews with seasonal employees, regardless of how long they worked with you. Having informative feedback can help streamline next year’s efforts.
  • Permanent talent: Tempting as it may be, you likely won’t have the means or the resources to bring every seasonal employee on full-time. However, keep an eye on exceptional workers whose mix of soft skills and talent would be excellent fit as vacancies come open during other parts of the year.

How RPO Can Help

An RPO provider can help organize your offboarding efforts at the end of the season by assisting in exit interviews, managing your seasonal worker database as well as hiring top performers to permanent positions. An RPO provider’s ability to scale down engagements quickly means the process can be seamlessly executed so that you can resume business as usual.

Are You in Need of a Seasonal Hiring Partner?

seasonal worker

When it comes to maintaining your seasonal operations and providing excellent customer service during your peak months, hiring seasonal employees can help keep your business moving.

Whether you are in need of seasonal recruiting or a permanent talent solution, employers in our new world of work face rising recruitment challenges. An outsourced recruitment solution like PeopleScout’s high-volume RPO and Total Workforce Solutions can help you stay connected with talent and provide hiring resources that will add immediate value to your talent programs.

High-Volume Global RPO Solution for International Hospitality Brand

Posted on by Kate
High-Volume Global RPO Solution for International Hospitality Brand

Global RPO

High-Volume Global RPO Solution for International Hospitality Brand

An international hospitality brand—and longstanding PeopleScout client—was experiencing growing pains after an acquisition. The client needed to source, screen and hire an additional 20,000 staff for both corporate and on-site positions at hotel properties across multiple continents—bringing the annual headcount to 65,000 new hires. PeopleScout’s global RPO solution proved agile enough to seamlessly scale up to absorb the increased hiring volume, while hitting target service levels across regions.

90 % Customer Satisfaction Scores Among Hiring Managers
84 % Time-to-Fill Targets Achieved for In-Market Roles
100 % Time-to-Fill Targets Achieved for Corporate Roles

Situation

PeopleScout facilitates more than 65,000 hires annually for the hospitality brand, delivering RPO through a 350-member team across continents. Roles include management and hourly hiring needs in both corporate and in-market environments, including sales, accounting, technology, e-commerce, infrastructure, risk management, engineering, architecture, property management, customer service, housekeeping, culinary and more.

In addition to corporate hiring in the U.S. and Canada, we’ve recruited for their operations centers in the UK and India and hospitality properties spanning North America, Latin America, EMEA and APAC.

Solution

Starting with a small pilot in 2007, our relationship has developed into a strategic partnership over 15 years. At the start, the client had disjointed hiring processes across regions. PeopleScout’s RPO team streamlined their recruitment processes and developed robust, standardized compliance practices across the entire recruiting program.

Following an acquisition in 2017, the client gained nearly 1,300 properties across over 100 countries. PeopleScout scaled our global talent acquisition program to ensure the established standardized processes and compliance practices were applied to the newly acquired properties, while keeping costs down.

PeopleScout seamlessly absorbed a 20,000-position increase and easily increased resources to meet a 50% increase in the scope of services. This included scaling our RPO solution to cover the end-to-end recruitment process for management positions for all hotel locations and the U.S. and Canadian headquarters. This allowed the in-house HR team to focus on training, workforce planning and employer branding.

PeopleScout also supported the client through three talent technology transitions over the course of the partnership, creating new levels of efficiency through automation. Plus, our in-house creative agency TMP assisted the client with their recruitment marketing efforts, creating attraction content in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Results

In just two months, PeopleScout was able to achieve the same level of performance at the newly acquired locations as they had at the legacy locations.

  • Created standardized recruitment processes and robust compliance practices across all in-market locations resulting in significant cost savings through efficiency
  • 84% time-to-fill targets achieved for in-market hires
  • Nearly 100% time-to-fill targets achieved for corporate hires
  • 90%+ customer satisfaction scores hit for both in-market and management hires
  • Achieved nearly 100% consistency in SLAs thanks to standardized operations across PeopleScout’s global delivery centers.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    International hospitality brand
  • INDUSTRY
    Hospitality, Travel & Tourism
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    65,000
  • LOCATIONS
    Hospitality properties, corporate offices and operational centers across North America, Latin America, Europe and APAC
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