With a strengthening economy, increasing consumer spending and declining unemployment, experts predict this year’s holiday sales season will be a strong one. In preparation, retailers are expecting to add more than 800,000 workers for the holiday season, the highest hiring volume since 1999. While retailers stand to make as much as 40 percent of their annual sales in the next three months, businesses across industries are also looking to get the most return on their seasonal staff investments by making better hiring decisions up front. Here are four hiring practices to optimize your workforce for the busy holiday season:
1. Streamline screening with assessments: Whether you plan to hire in volume or not, assessments can accelerate your hiring process. For those managing hundreds or thousands of holiday hires, technology and data-driven tools like workforce assessments are easily administered to candidates pre-hire through an HRIS or other automated system. Even for smaller hiring volumes, the ability to standardize the hiring process with assessment data allows for more consistent screening. The insights and data help hiring managers make better decisions about job fit and optimize onboarding activities.
2. Assess your existing talent pool: Use data from your current team to define behaviors that drive a successful new hire by assessing the behavioral aspects of your top performers. Leverage this data to create statistical job models that replicate hiring successes.  
3. Build a solid job description: Use a job analytic to evaluate the skill and behavioral requirements for success to ensure the subsequent job description is comprehensive by capturing the necessary Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Other attributes for success; competitive by incentivizing your target candidate; and current, based on recent updates and validated data associated with your most successful employees in that role.
4. Dedicate resources for onboarding: According to PI Worldwide research, building a new hire’s skills quickly enough to be proficient at the job is the #1 challenge of seasonal hiring. Fortunately, organizations can leverage the same data collected at the pre-hire phase to ensure training is targeted to the individual’s behavioral drives and learning styles. This will help employees ramp up more quickly for holiday hiring success.

Our holiday hiring guide.

Article courtesy of PI Worldwide.