The holidays bring packed dining rooms, long checkout lines, and more shifts than usual. Extra foot traffic is great for business, but it also means filling open roles fast. For restaurants and retailers, success often comes down to standing out in a crowded job market and staffing up quickly without overloading managers.
Why Holiday Hiring Is Different
Seasonal roles are harder to fill because:
- High competition for talent: Everyone is hiring at the same time.
- Short timelines: You need people trained and on the floor quickly.
- Candidate expectations: Many seasonal workers are younger or part-time and expect a quick, mobile-friendly application and fast responses.
Strategies to Speed Up Hiring
If your hiring process feels clunky, candidates will drop off and head to your competitor.
- Keep applications simple: Short, mobile-friendly applications (two minutes or less) reduce drop-off.
- Post jobs everywhere at once: Expand reach with multiple job boards and refresh ads often.
- Write ads that sell the role: Highlight what matters most to seasonal hires: quick start dates, flexible shifts, staff discounts, or weekly pay.
- Streamline scheduling: Use self-scheduling links or one-way video interviews to cut delays and reduce ghosting.
- Send offers fast: Don’t wait. Mobile offer letters and digital onboarding keep momentum and boost show-up rates.
These strategies can shave days off your hiring cycle and help you secure great people before peak season hits.
Set Yourself Up for Success
With the right approach, you can:
- Attract more applicants
- Keep them engaged through mobile-friendly tools
- Eliminate bottlenecks with faster scheduling
- Get new hires working quickly with digital onboarding
How Coastal Payroll Can Help
At Coastal Payroll, we’ve helped restaurants and retailers streamline holiday hiring by pairing our service with the isolved platform. With one-click job postings, AI-written job ads, candidate scoring, mobile-first applications, and easy interview scheduling, we make it simple to move from “open role” to “ready-to-work” in days, not weeks.
If you want to cut your time-to-hire before the holiday rush hits, let’s talk.
