If your organization depends on seasonal workers, it can be a scramble to find the team required to meet your needs. With so many organizations and companies opening up their workforce over the summer months (although many also experience employee demand in the winter) the competition to recruit top talent can be fierce. Some organizations are lucky and keep a roster of summer students on board, but these students still have to be reactivated into payroll and time tracking systems.
As your HR team faces the challenges of hiring, training, seasonal onboarding, and rehiring, it can be difficult to stay organized. However, it is possible to alleviate seasonal hiring difficulties with the right HR software and imports.
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Software such as Paypro WorkforceONE offers a single solution for all your seasonal hiring challenges. First, it addresses your HR management needs so you can streamline processes and manage your seasonal hiring from one easy program. As a result, you can complete the aspects of seasonal hiring from start to finish because you have a system that is intuitive and adapts to your seasonal needs.
Second, with a diverse workforce, you need to simplify the hiring and payroll process while also being able to eliminate errors. Using a cost-effective, self-serve onboarding process that practically manages itself improves compliance and reduces errors. Last but not least, UKG ready solutions reduce administrative hours required for onboarding, payroll, time tracking and reconciling errors.
Although this employee scenario tends to be most common in agriculture, day laborers generally are hired to work within a special time period to meet the needs of increased workload. While they can work weekly, monthly, or quarterly, you might face instances where they work for just a single week. In these cases, demand for a detailed employee profile isn’t as high, and this actually works well with HR software solutions. They can process payroll with minimal information because the software allows you to include shorter pay periods.
As a result, you also don’t have the worries of issues such as audits or verifying info on a new-hire checklist as day laborers need never log into the system. That’s why the import template works well for day laborers as the template can reflect the bare minimum in this situation. All you need to do is enter the name and the Social Security number, upload the import file to the system, and you’re ready to go.
In the case where you face mass hiring situations, you need to recruit larger numbers of people for various positions as quickly as possible. A good example would be opening a new branch office, retail location, or franchise. This gets complicated as not only do you need to deal with recruitment, but you then have to onboard them with full benefits, tax set-ups and of course payroll. You’ll also have to contend with collecting full information for your import.
Your HR team has to collect employees’ names and Social Security numbers, enter them, import them, and then upload them. However, from here new hires do the rest of the work, using a DIY interface to complete the required information such as emergency contacts, I-9s, and choosing benefit options. Let’s not forget the system can also be used to provide DIY training options that allow for self-directed learning. Staff can train from anywhere and at any time based on your set deadline.
Seasonal hiring is common in the summer, but you might also require seasonal increases to manage holiday demand for retailers, the hospitality industry and even healthcare scenarios such as cold and flu season. Whether it’s opening an outdoor pool, a flu vaccine clinic, hiring camp counsellors or summer roofers for your contracting business, seasonal hiring includes many different roles with varying numbers.
Many companies set up a rehiring policy where past seasonal workers are offered the first right of refusal. This works in your favor as you know the employees are good workers, and they are also fully trained. However, most companies will still need to find new hires. For example, you will lose students as they graduate.
Either way, seasonal hiring tends to be the most involved scenario as you’ll need to undergo separate processes reactivating rehires and processing new hires. Rehires are manually activated for many organizations, which is time-consuming. However, using an HR software system allows you to implement the same process as mass hirings. You track and capture the basic info for both new and rehired team members and then they fill in the rest.