As a retail business, you understand the significance of a busy season. Whether your company gets hit hard during the back-to-school season or you expect an uptick right around the holidays, when the customers pour in, you want to have the staff available to minimize wait times for customers and ensure that everyone is happy with your company and gets the service they need.
Preparing for these significant shifts in demand requires planning and foresight, and many businesses will bring in seasonal staff to manage the influx. However, bringing in these temporary employees calls for establishing effective hiring and payroll procedures to prevent confusion. Let’s explore what you want to consider for seasonal hiring in retail and how to manage them at your company.
Understanding Seasonal Hiring Trends in Retail
Retail businesses often experience significant variations in their sales rates. Depending on factors such as your specific type of products, your target market, and even your location you will see these influxes occur at different times during the year. For some businesses, for example, summer tourism results in an increase. Others see a big jump for the holidays.
When bringing in new staff to handle the increase, businesses may face problems such as bringing people on board fast enough to help during the peak weeks, setting up paperwork properly to account for the temporary nature of the employment, and understanding how benefits work for temporary employees.
We will look at how companies like yours can mitigate these problems.
Seasonal Workforce Best Practices
To better manage the increase in employees, there are a few best practices you should incorporate.
Planning Ahead
Note trends in sales from the past few years so you know ahead of time when you want to hire the staff and how soon to hire them so they are in place for the increase.
In addition to knowing when you want to hire additional staff, use your preparation time to set budgets so you know what you can offer and how many to bring on board to balance quality service with cost.
Management software and AI can help you determine the optimal schedules as sales start to pick up and then drop off, so you can adjust your employees accordingly.
Applicant Tracking Systems
As resumes arrive in response to your job listing, keeping everyone organized and tracking the applicants through the hiring process can help you optimize the process and find the best candidates. Tracking software helps organize each person’s qualifications and where they are in the hiring process. When onboarding your selected workers, you will have their background information ready for HR.
ASAP Payroll offers businesses application tracking as well as helpful services like background checks, which makes it easy for businesses to track their potential hires through the application process and keep all their information in one place. These features can help businesses quickly onboard new employees to help with seasonal influxes so the company can keep operating effectively and growing.
Efficient Seasonal Employee Onboarding Processes
When you make a hire to help with a particular busy season, you do not have much time to complete the application process so the person can get to work. Therefore, you need to move people through the onboarding process quickly.
- Start the application process ahead of the expected busy season. Use data from past years to note when you expect an uptick in sales.
- Have a predetermined onboarding process to train the employees in what they need to do. Focus on the most critical tasks the person will manage first.
- Have a system in place for managing the legal considerations of temporary employees, including running background checks, managing paperwork, and ensuring you remain fully compliant with all workforce laws. A provider like ASAP Payroll can make this process easier.
- Monitor your processes and solicit feedback from your permanent employees and your temporary hires. Learn what they thought went well and what needed to be improved. Use this insight to keep improving your process for the next busy season.
Retail Payroll Management and Compliance Considerations for Seasonal Employees
As you bring in new employees for a busy season, you will quickly note that payroll and compliance can start to get complicated. For example, you need to:
- Sift through part-time, full-time, and contractor designations
- Ensure you understand the benefits that temporary employees should receive
- Review minimum wage laws for seasonal employees
- Make sure you remain compliant with any ACA and overtime regulations
- Shift your payroll to handle several more employees suddenly.
With all of these changes, it helps to prepare ahead of time. Review the regulations surrounding seasonal employees in your state and in federal law. Working with a payroll provider with experience with fluctuating payrolls can help answer your questions and prepare your team for the changes. ASAP Payroll has experience helping countless businesses navigate these changes successfully.
Automation as the Key to Success
As you prepare for your upcoming busy season, we recommend you also consider the value that automation can bring to your business. In addition to all the chaos that can arise with hiring several more staff members, you do not want to bring in additional confusion related to manually tracking and administering all the payroll components.
Fortunately, working with ASAP Payroll brings businesses access to automation systems that increase accuracy and compliance, so you have one less thing to worry about.
Conclusion
Seasonal hiring in retail can help your business manage the influxes that come with certain busy times of the year. However, this can lead to additional stress related to preparation and compliance. Fortunately, technology and partners like ASAP Payroll can help businesses like yours manage these temporary employees successfully and ensure that payroll and labor management remain compliant.
Contact ASAP Payroll to learn how our hiring and payroll solutions can make your next busy season the smoothest one yet.
