Seasonal hiring is back in full drive, but something seems different this year

With Halloween now gone, and Thanksgiving around the corner, the nation’s largest employers are right in the thick of their usual holiday hiring surge. But there’s a twist to their search for seasonal workers this year.?

Last year, Amazon made headlines for offering a $1,000 sign-on bonus to some seasonal workers. This year, the e-commerce giant is offering up to $3,000, as part of what seems to be a larger trend of businesses increasing incentives for workers amid a labor shortage, Business Insider notes .?

Major employers appear to be offering more opportunities for full-time work this time around as well. Among the 561,000-plus job openings that Amazon, Macy’s and Walmart have announced, at least 37% are “explicitly permanent,” according to an analysis by Money.com .?

Meanwhile, expediting the hiring process seems to be top of mind for many employers as well. In a survey of 120 retail executives who work at companies achieving at least $1 billion annually in revenue, 48% said they had altered their hiring practices to onboard new workers faster. The survey was conducted by Accenture in October, and probed executives at the level of vice president or higher.

“The difference is that this year, seasonal workers are in short supply, especially for frontline service industries like retail,” Daniel Zhao, a senior economist for Glassdoor, the employer review site, wrote on LinkedIn . “Employers are scrambling to find hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers and that gives an unusual amount of leverage to job seekers.”

To be clear, the idea of seasonal workers transitioning to full-time positions isn’t exactly a novelty. For example, nearly a third of its employees at UPS started out as seasonal workers, the company’s chief human resources officer noted last week in an interview with LinkedIn News .

However, this year, a year in which there have been record-breaking levels of both job vacancies and quitting, it does seem like employers are more eager than ever to attract workers, and that fact seems likely to lead to better opportunities for new employees.

“Job seekers this year have more power to ask for higher wages,” Zhao wrote. “The key to a successful negotiation is to know your worth and to be willing to walk away. Use online resources or your network to understand how much money you can ask for. And use the fact there are currently over 1.3 million job openings in retail to your advantage to compare options.”

Are you a job seeker who is looking for seasonal work? Have you noticed a difference in the levels of pay and benefits currently offered by employers, compared to previous years? Share your thoughts in the comments section of this article.

Wages are growing, but is it enough?

In an economy that’s still heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, there have still been some good trends emerging.

In October, CNBC reported hourly wages nationwide had increased by 4.6 percent compared to a year earlier. Meanwhile, federal data suggests that wage bumps have been especially reaped by those who’ve been changing jobs.?

By the end of September, "job switchers" saw their average hourly wages over the previous three months increase by 5.4% compared to the same three-month period a year earlier, while “job stayers” saw an increase of 3.5% according to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta .??

The rise in wages seems to have a good chance of continuing as well. More than half of business leaders surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics say they have increased pay at their companies over the past few months, and a similar share said they plan to continue increasing wages in the coming months.

Any optimism about wage growth has to be balanced against concerns about inflation however. Practically everywhere you look, the prices of critical goods, from petrol to poultry, have dramatically increased. Meanwhile, the pace of those increases have not been seen in more than a decade, and major companies have announced plans to continue increasing prices of household items.

“Shortages of workers, fuel, cargo ships, semiconductors and building materials as the global economy bounces back after pandemic lockdowns have companies from electric car makers to chocolatiers scrambling to keep a lid on costs,” Lauren Young, an editor at Reuters, explained on LinkedIn . And one classic way in which businesses keep a lid on costs is by passing them off to consumers.

So, even as workers' pay continues to increase, it's worth questioning exactly how much of that progress is worth celebrating, if the prices of the goods they're buying are increasing faster.

Have you been more impacted by wage growth, or the increasing prices of goods? Share your thoughts in a comment on this article below.

A welcome change

It was only a few years ago that you’d be able to find news headlines about how Thanksgiving shopping, and the 365-day-a-year nature of retail work, was “here to stay .”

Now, however, major retailers appear to be making a habit out of reversing that trend. This past summer, Walmart announced it would remain closed on Thanksgiving day for the second year in a row.?

“Closing our stores on Thanksgiving Day is one way we’re saying ‘thank you’ to our teams for their dedication and hard work this year,” Dacona Smith, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Walmart U.S., said. “We hope everyone will take the opportunity to be with their loved ones during what’s always a special time.”

A host of major brands, including Target, Best Buy, Footlocker and Macy’s, have followed suit in a new trend that is likely to be welcomed and thought of as long overdue.?

“Stores should never have been open on Thanksgiving,” Francine Figliolo , a Florida-based store manager, wrote on LinkedIn. “Workers always needed a break to be with family and to mentally prepare for the onslaught that is the ‘holiday’ season. Frontline retail workers, especially those in lower-end stores are treated very badly. Underpaid, no benefits. I’m surprised any part time retail staff EVER showed up on Thanksgiving.”

Has your place of work adjusted its holiday hours? Let me know in the comments below, and for more conversations about retail and customer service work, check out The Break Room private forum on LinkedIn .