Ramping Up Your Staff for Summer

Ramping Up Your Staff for Summer

If you work in an industry that sees more customers in the summer, you’ll probably need to beef up your staff to accommodate. More employees mean better customer service and shorter lines to make a purchase. But don’t wait until Memorial Day to start your employee hiring plan!

Consider Your Needs

Your best indicator of how many employees you need to hire comes from your data on last summer. Did you have a good balance of additional employees to handle the surge in business, or could you have used a few extra pairs of hands?

Also keep in mind many employees will want to take vacation time over the summer, so find out from your current staff when they want off so you can factor that into your hiring needs.

Start Looking Now

Even if the busy season doesn’t start for a few weeks, you still need time to recruit, hire, and train quality staff. Having a process can make this simpler. For example, if you know you need to hire five more people, hire them at the same time and train them together to create efficiencies. They’ll bond during this period and learn how to work together as a team.

Where to Look

If there’s a university or community college in your town, this is an excellent place to start your hunt. Connect with the careers department and ask to put up a job notice. If you’re looking for specific skills — for example, if you have a child care center — consider reaching out to a specific college department; in this case, Early Education would help you find college students interested in growing their childcare experience.

Know What You Want

The more precise your job description, the better the applicants you’ll get. And think big picture: if you hire the best people, even for a temporary summer position, you get the opportunity to train them for longer-term work. Ideally, you’ll come out of the summer with a few permanent employees you can rely on.

But you might not even need employees. Consider also hiring interns. Interns tend to work best in situations where you can provide them real-world experience they can apply to their fields of study. The benefit to you is you get free or cheap labor and an intern eager to learn.

Start thinking now about your summer hiring needs and develop a strategy to find the best candidates for your business.