Seasonal hiring prospects are looking good, at least for workers

If decorations are any indication, we are already well into the holiday shopping season. Which means businesses that hope you spend eagerly have been ramping up their seasonal hiring.

With holiday sales expected to increase between 2.5% and 3.5% this year, the National Retail Federation estimates stores will need to hire 400,000 to 500,000 seasonal workers.

“It looks like hiring is back to kind of the pre-pandemic level, but on a year-by-year basis, that is actually a lower hiring level than last year,” said Ben Meadows, a professor of economics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

But unemployment is pretty low too, which means retailers are struggling to fill all those jobs this season.

One of the strategies, said the NRF’s Edwin Egee, is to keep things flexible.

“Many of my members go out of their way to make sure that their employees are accommodated in providing opportunities for them to work at and when they deem appropriate,” he said. That could mean flexible shifts or app-based scheduling.

Another strategy: Be more accommodating to different kinds of workers. Maybe that means luring retirees who want to make some extra cash over the holidays.

Plus: “Certainly on the disability front, many of our members have been very aggressive in going out to disabled workers and trying to accommodate them in the workplace,” Egee said.

To get those goods to consumers, temp workers are needed for many types of jobs over the holidays. “Transportation, warehousing, retail, obviously — these are the biggest areas,” said James Atkinson with the Society for Human Resource Management.

“We have seen kind of a larger percentage of retail hires this year compared to some of the recent years, so a larger percentage of the overall seasonal hiring,” he added.

And more of those jobs are in e-commerce rather than brick-and-mortar shops. In other words, Santa’s elves may be as likely to pack a box at the warehouse as ring you up at the cash register.