Recruit Holiday Employees with SMS and Ramp Up Your Seasonal Hiring
Do you have a mobile strategy to recruit holiday employees this holiday season?
Time to ramp up your seasonal hiring and use SMS, or text messaging to recruit and train retail employees this year. According to outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, holiday retail jobs are expected to remain in line with last year. Recruitment in other sectors like transportation and warehousing, however, will increase.
Target already announced plans to hire 70,000 retail employees, and an additional 7,500 in its distribution and fulfillment centers. In the past, Target has used text messaging to promote seasonal opportunities in-store and drive new applications. UPS also projects its holiday hiring to be in line with last year, expecting to hire 95,000 through various channels including social and mobile recruitment campaigns.
With just a small window of time to attract, hire and train seasonal workers, HR recruiters need a fast and effective way to reach people where they already are – on their mobile phones.
Here’s how SMS can help you recruit holiday employees fast:
Drive Potential Employees To Your Job Listings
A simple text-for-info campaign can help bring more people to your career site or online application form. Give people the option of going direct to your website or texting a memorable keyword like “ACMEJOBS” to a short code and getting an autoreply with link. It’s an effective call-to-action to promote, engages prospective employees by mobile phone and positions your brand as tech-savvy.
Provide Application Status
Set up a text campaign that allows applicants to text in and receive back the status of their application. Using a SMS API, companies can easily set up a way for users to text in their unique identifier and get a response with the right record information.
Send Interview Reminders
Schedule text message reminders to be sent in advance, reminding applicants of interview dates and times. Or, set up a text group for your interview team to remind them of candidates they are going to interview that day.
Train New Employees
Once hired, use SMS to send out links to training videos or updates on upcoming training sessions. Use text to motivate and engage your seasonal workers and you will find a more productive workforce that you can reach out to over multiple holiday seasons.
Build A Database Of Seasonal Staff
By having prospective employees opt-in to receive future texts messages from your company, you can start building a database of candidates that you can tap into during any busy season. Include those that you have already hired and those who are interested but you didn’t get a chance to hire for the season, and you will always be ready to call on your network by sending out one mass text message.
Interested in learning more about how to recruit holiday employees with text messaging? Call us at 800-696-1393 or email us at tmsales@textmarks.
