Not every startup can be lucrative all-year round. In fact, countless businesses deal with seasonal peaks and valleys in terms of market demand.
According to the American Staffing Association, around 3 million temporary and contract employees work for staffing firms in America during an average week. During the course of a year, it’s 17 million.
Because of fluctuating seasonal demand, the number of workers needed to support a business varies considerably as well. This makes recruiting and retaining staff a little harder than usual.
Reasons to hire seasonal workers
Is finding and bringing in temporary staff to your business worth the effort? To help you decide, let’s go over how seasonal workers can help your startup.
Reduces your personnel costs
While most companies run into stronger market demand during certain times of the year, others encounter stronger seasonal fluctuations, and may have to limit their operations to specific months.
If you’re a seasonal business, you can reduce your personnel expenses by hiring seasonal employees (as opposed to full-time workers). Why? A few reasons:
- You don’t have to engage seasonal employees during your lean months.
- Permanent employees are entitled to benefits. Seasonal employees aren’t.
- You can offer lower pay rates, provided that they meet minimum wage requirements.
- Seasonal workers are part-time employees and won’t work long enough to get overtime pay.
Lets you test workers without commitment
Taking on seasonal workers is a cost-effective way to recruit and evaluate them. If you like how an employee performed during your busy months, you can offer them a job during your slow months. Otherwise, you can let them go at the end of the season.
Working with a staffing agency is even easier: They’ll recruit, screen, test, and hire seasonal employees for you. If you’re unhappy with the worker’s performance, just contact the agency and they’ll get you another.
If your company closes during your off-peak months, you can use this opportunity to see who you’d want to rehire when business picks up again.
Enables you to adapt easily to peak and off seasons
Hiring seasonal employees – particularly through staffing agencies – is a quick and practical way to beef up your ranks when your company’s peak season comes around.
You don’t even have to be a seasonal business; hiring temporary workers can help any organisation when key personnel are away due to maternity or disability leave, vacation, illness, or sudden departure.
Can lead to a lasting partnership with a staffing agency
Hiring seasonal employees used to belong in the realm of lower-skilled roles. Today, however, more and more seasonal employees include highly skilled professionals with a diverse range of specialisations.
If you hired such a seasonal professional via a staffing agency which consistently gave you quality service and endorsements, consider working with them long-term. This would allow you to respond more quickly to your market’s changing demands.
Drawbacks of hiring seasonal workers
While hiring seasonal employees can help your startup, your eyes should be open to its drawbacks as well. Here are the most common ones:
You need to keep training them
Every new hire needs a certain amount of training to help them do their jobs properly. It’s not usually a concern for full-time employees, but it’s a problem when employing seasonal workers.
Why? Because every time you hire seasonal workers, you’ll have to assign someone from your existing staff to step away from their own tasks and train the newcomers – unless you’ve hired the same workers previously.
They may lack commitment
Since seasonal workers stay in your business only for a short while, they might not take their job as seriously as your regular employees. As a result, seasonal hires may be less reliable.
However, most seasonal hires are reliable and committed – just as there are full-time workers who fail to meet expectations. As a matter of fact, working long-term with a quality staffing firm will yield reliable seasonal hires.
Safety can be a concern
A couple of safety-related issues may come up when dealing with seasonal workers:
- According to studies (like this one), temporary workers experience more health and safety hazards than other workers. Hence, you need to ensure that their tasks are carried out safely, specifically if the work is dangerous.
- As it is, data safety is an ongoing cause for concern for any company, especially during a pandemic when many are working remotely. Because of the revolving door work arrangements in seasonal businesses, this issue can be easily aggravated.
Partner with us
If you’re in need of hiring remote seasonal employees, team up with Remote Workmate. Unlike freelancing marketplaces where you do everything yourself, we handle all the heavy lifting for you, including recruitment and payroll.
Finding the right seasonal hire has now become so much easier.
You can actually choose from our pool of top candidates right away. Simply click the button below to browse a wide range of profiles on our Hotlist page.
