While the average person is fed up with continuous reports and assessments regarding the economy, the average business owner cannot get enough. The state of the economy doesn’t just affect your job security, but the overall future of your business and all those that work for you. Economic trends and estimated consumer activity drives organizational decisions including hiring. When companies hire, it is not done lightly, even when hiring temporary or seasonal help.

Market changes affect the way organizations employ workers. In the current economy, when hiring and developing seasonal help, what should you be focusing on? Simply put, no matter what type of business or which industry, concentration should be centered around customer service.

Why Customer Service ?

Customer service is imperative, now more than ever. It’s a war zone out there, with businesses fighting for their fair share of consumer spending. Overall spending has decreased due to a variety of factors, most importantly being that unemployment is still high and consumer confidence is low. Studies show that almost half of all consumers have altered their previous loyalties to certain brands in favor of cheaper, more cost-effective competitors. What studies also show is that brand loyalty increases when companies take steps towards becoming tech-savvy. This can be in products and services that are offered, digital options such as innovative websites or apps, behind-the-scenes business tools, as well as with knowledgeable and customer service-oriented employees.

Hiring for Customer Service

Consumers not only want to know they are getting a good price, they want to be sure they are getting a good product for their money. When hiring new staff, the ability to show up on time is no longer Criteria #1. In today’s workplace, hiring managers should be focusing on intelligence and attitude: Are they smart enough to learn the business and do they have the temperament that will allow them to make the customers happy? Advertise, interview, and use these two questions as candidate disqualifiers.

How Does this Apply to Seasonal Help?

Holiday and temporary workers are notorious for being inexperienced and uninformed. For a majority of these workers, it’s not their career and it’s probably not even in their field of experience (or interest). Seasonal jobs also do not come with the pay, incentives, and benefits of a permanent position. These issues can combine to create a ticking time bomb for eventual consumer dissatisfaction. There is no shortage of customer horror stories, especially during the holiday season.

What Can You Do?

Hire right and train relentlessly – it doesn’t get more straightforward than that. Select employees, staying as stringent to the intelligence and attitude traits as you possibly can, and train them to be as helpful to consumers as they possibly can be. The probability that customers will be satisfied with the service these workers provide, and therefore remain loyal, will be directly proportional to the amount of effort hiring managers put into attaining and developing additional staff.

Retention

Recruitment and training both have substantial associated costs. Retaining permanent employees, as well as part-time and holiday season workers, is the obvious solution to cut these expenses. Estimate the overall price tag related to the hiring and selection process for your organization. The cost of turnover will probably surprise you. Consider applying some of that expense towards incentives for quality seasonal employees. Why waste time on recruitment when a bonus or perk could keep your best temporary employees returning each year?

Focusing on customer service, whether internal or external, is important to every business, especially in today’s market. Online and in-person, customers want to know they are getting the most bang for their buck – not just in product quality, but in the service they receive. Technology has created the ability to communicate at lightening speed. If one ill-trained worker causes a bad experience for a consumer, it’s not just the one customer that your business stands to lose. You may also lose the hundreds or thousands of potential customers that get online and read the bad review or the comments and blog posts that were written against you. Online shopping has not eliminated the need for customer service. If anything, technology’s affect on the way we communicate has produced a need for increased customer service skills when meeting consumers face-to-face. Increase your organization’s level of customer service by hiring your seasonal help to mirror your permanent staff.

For assistance with hiring, see How to Hire for the Holiday: 3 Ways to Get it Right.

Use the TimeForge products – Scheduling, Attendance, Human Resources, and Daily Log, to easily manage your staffing needs during the holidays.  With TimeForge’s innovative online software, business owners and management are always at the top of their game. TimeForge makes quick work of painful tasks, like onboarding new employees – saving business owners valuable time and effort.  Try TimeForge today!

It’s not just restaurants and retailers that consider October to January to be the “busy season”. Various reports show that between 30 and 45 percent of all businesses have a spike in activity during the holidays, enough to necessitate adding temporary staff. This is especially true with restaurant businesses and retailers. Be cautious, because a temporary increase in business doesn’t guarantee that you’ll need to add to your current workforce. Crunch the numbers, including evaluating anticipated performance levels, and allow yourself enough time to plan accordingly.

Crunch the Numbers

Depending on the size of your organization and your area of responsibility, determining whether or not to hire extra help for the holiday season may be relatively easy. If you’ve been established for a while, you should have production and/or sales data from previous years. Taking into consideration positive or negative year-over-year trends, calculate the increased percentage of the holiday season in comparison to the rest of year. Use this number to forecast the estimated workforce necessary by considering the employees most affected by the increased activity.

For example, suppose ABC Restaurant has 10 production cooks, four waiters and five other employees. Overall sales and production volume increases an average of 15% from October to January. If allowing overtime isn’t an option, ABC Restaurant will need to bring on two to three FTE workers to supplement the business, assuming the workload of all employees is affected during these months. If only production workers were affected, one to two additional workers would be needed.

FTE stands for full-time equivalent, so this would mean any number of workers whose hours equal that of one full-time employee. ABC Restaurant could hire four to six part-time employees to meet their needs. However, if overtime is an option for your staff members, ABC may not need to hire any staff at all. As few as five extra hours per week for each employee may cover the busy time. For your business, it may be a matter of walking the labor scheduling tightrope. Without the expenditures of recruiting, hiring and training, the cost of overtime pay for these employees may be negligible.  And, even better, the existing employees may love the additional hours!

Obviously there are a number of other factors that would need to be assessed, especially when dealing with much larger companies. If customer service is key to the success of your organization, be sure to over estimate labor needs, rather than under estimating customer service requirements.

Plan Accordingly

Once you’ve decided upon the number of temporary employees you’ll need to hire, (if any) allow yourself the opportunity to adequately prepare for the onboarding process. Begin the process a minimum of five weeks before the anticipated start date for new hires. Keep costs down by advertising only where necessary. Ask current employees for referrals and interview all potential candidates. Be prepared for an arduous process as staffing seasonal help can be difficult, and the new hires may not all show up on day one.

For further assistance in the hiring process, see How to Hire for the Holidays: 3 Ways to Get it Right

Use the TimeForge products – Scheduling, Attendance, Human Resources, and Daily Log, to easily manage your staffing needs during the holidays.  With TimeForge’s innovative online software, business owners and management are always at the top of their game. TimeForge makes quick work of painful tasks, like onboarding new employees – saving business owners valuable time and effort.  Try TimeForge today!

As a software company, TimeForge stays up to date on the latest and greatest, so I often write about the monetary advantages that technology can offer business owners. One area that I haven’t paid enough attention to is efaxing. Don’t worry, I won’t be listing any particular companies you should “check out”. This isn’t a sales pitch, it’s an offer of information made with the intention of saving your business money and saving you time. If you want to know my opinion on any efax companies, just email me (audrey@timeforge.com), and I’ll share what I know.

As businesses convert to paperless (or reduced-paper) systems, and owners and managers do more of their work remotely, an electronic fax system is becoming a must-have. Traditional fax machines require you to be physically near them to receive (or send) a fax, but electronic faxes can be sent and received by email or through an internet connection. You can send or receive faxes on your home computer, laptop, smart phone, or fax machine. TimeForge users will definitely understand the advantages of remote access!

There are many efax services available for business owners. ChooseWhat is a great review/comparison site for small business owners. Here’s their page about online fax services.

By sending and receiving faxes electronically, you can reduce the amount of paper and ink (money) you waste, and you’ll have instant electronic records of purchase orders, contracts, employee notes, disciplinary action forms, etc. Perhaps the most budget-friendly aspect of efaxing is the ability to use the system as an ideal (and cheap) scanner/copier. (TimeForge HR users can understand the human resource ease-of-use implications here!)

What’s your name?
My name is Daniel Jorge Fernández Terrazas.

What do you do at TimeForge?
I do mostly programming. I’m involved of several core parts of the timeforge system, which includes development in several languages and technologies. I also participate in the design and specifications of the stuff that Timeforge requires.

How long have you been working with TimeForge?
I’m working like 5 years, until now.

What’s your favorite part of working at TimeForge?
Well, the best part of working at Timeforge is learning new stuff. Almost every day I learn at least one new thing. I’m proud to say that I have participated and did at least some part of any of the TimeForge features, and I have learned several tricks and practices. I have worked with several smart people and tried to get the best of everything and everybody.

How do you make the lives of TimeForge customers better?
My goal is to have something that will be useful for the user. In these several years, I have seen and modified a bunch of functionality to have the user happy. We have redone and revamped several of the core functionalities of Timeforge, but sometimes is really difficult because something may be good or cool for a user, but not necessarily for another one, thats some of the risks when working with different kind of users and industries, however, I think we are doing this quite good, we are getting more and more clients using timeforge through these years. I really hate when a problem or bug appears in the system, because its a problem for the user and we are here to help the user
not to produce more problems in their lifes.

What was your first hourly job (what did you do, what company)?
Well I started working on Piramide Informatik, I used to do most of the time research about new technologies or tools, once we got something we used to test it in depth and see if it really works.

What was your first restaurant or retail job (what did you do, what company)?
I started helping my grandmother and mom, in a store we still have. I used to attend it and manage the base part of products, like ordering/selling.

What’s your favorite hobby?
Well, I guess that my favorite hobby is to travel. I had several health problems which took me to know new places….and guess what, there is a whole world out of there that needs to be visited. I have changed several of my ideas, so I now like to travel and know new places.

What’s your favorite sports team?
My favorite team is Aurora, which is a soccer team from Cochabamba-Bolivia, where I’m from. All my family likes this team, and some of my uncles have played there at the very beginning, so since no one is playing there any more, we just like it….

Any pets?  What kind, and what are their names?
Yes, we had 2 dogs, The mother’s name is Winnie, and her daughter is Lola…..However, in the last few days, Lola had 5 puppies, but we are getting new families for them, we have enough with just 2 dogs, lol.

Consumer spending during the holiday season accounts for an estimated 25 to 40 percent of retailers’ annual revenues. Though a lesser portion for other industries, businesses such as restaurants, gas stations and automobile sellers also see a spike in sales during these final few months of the year. Even in the day and age of online shopping, extra employees are still a business necessity for surviving the holidays.

If you are searching for a few easy, helpful hints that will aid you in your quest for seasonal labor, look no further:

1. Don’t focus on the fact that these workers are temporary.

Yes, you are hiring employees that are not intended to remain on staff long after January 1st; however, there are good arguments for methodically running through the hiring and selection process as if it was for a permanent role.

For starters, a lot of those looking for work may be doing so to earn money for the holidays or to qualify for a store discount towards their purchases. If this is the case, you may be able to count on them every holiday season.  How wonderful would it be to have a few “regular” callbacks that you could rely on from October to January?

Second, turnover is unpredictable. Let’s pretend that Anne cannot find a job, so she looks for seasonal work in order to have some sort of income. You hire her and she turns out to be an excellent employee. Derek, one of your best full-time employees, gives his two-week notice halfway through December. Because you took your time in selecting Anne for the position, you now have an easy backfill for Derek’s spot. You have not only ensured a good hire, but you’ve saved thousands, of recruiting dollars in the process.

Third, every hiring manager should know that the number one source of successful hires is through referrals. Great employees typically refer great candidates as people tend to surround themselves with those having similar values and interests. By treating the hiring of temporary help as if they are long-term (i.e. being very selective with who you hire), you may eventually benefit by hiring others through these new workers.

2. Start your hiring and selection process early.

Hopefully, as many retail and service industry businesses do, you have a list of “bench” candidates or part-time workers to choose from. This will provide you with some security before the time comes to advertise for help. Part-time workers are especially convenient as they already know your company and the position you need them to fill.

Depending on the type of company or industry, customers can also be extremely advantageous candidates. Those that know your products because they use them, or understand your business because they frequent it, could make smooth transitions into your workforce. Be sure to process these applicants as you would any other! Not only will this help you avoid potential legal issues for preferential treatment and hiring of your customers, but also, being a great customer does not automatically translate to being a great employee. You may find out during the hiring phase that it wasn’t meant to be. These cases need to be handled delicately as you do not want to lose the candidate as a customer if at all possible.

If you don’t have a list of potentials to draw from, recruitment should start at least a two months before you anticipate a need. It can take one to two weeks to place an ad and screen resumes, another several weeks to interview and a final week to finalize the process, including running a background check and/or drug screening. Assuming the candidate can start immediately upon acceptance, it is still a three to five week process at a minimum.

3. Plan where to advertise and make the job description specific.

It doesn’t have to cost as much to hire temporary employees as it does for permanent hires. As mentioned above, current customers and employee referrals would be a good place to start looking if you do not have a bench or backup list to begin with. Place “Help Wanted” signs in store windows and in any circulars you run. Let current employees know how to handle customers that inquire about open positions.

When placing ads online or in the newspaper, make sure to be as detailed as possible. Take time before posting the advertisement to nail down exactly what you are looking for in a candidate. Make sure this wish list is relayed in the ad so that you have the best chance for applicants that meet the description. However, don’t shoot for the stars so much so that you end up with no candidates – set your expectations at a realistic level.

Following these simple rules should make life a little easier, not only when winter preparations begin, but also when hiring temporary help at any time during the year. In order to determine if you even need to employ seasonal workers, stay tuned for our next post!

Use the TimeForge products – Scheduling, Attendance, Human Resources, and Daily Log, to easily manage your staffing needs during the holidays.  With TimeForge’s innovative online software, business owners and management are always at the top of their game. TimeForge makes quick work of painful tasks, like onboarding new employees – saving business owners valuable time and effort.  Try TimeForge today!

What’s your name?
Matthew Phelps. I go by “Phelps” at work.

What do you do at TimeForge?
I design embedded systems, write software, test software, and occasionally handle customer support.

How long have you been working with TimeForge?
Since March of 2009.

What’s your favorite part of working at TimeForge?
I like working for a company where I feel like what I do matters. Also, the management is very lenient with my schedule since I’m also a student. Mostly, I just love working with computers, software and electronics.

How do you make the lives of TimeForge customers better?
I design software to help meet the needs of our customers everywhere. The bottom line of what we do is help our customers save money on labor, make the process of managing time easy and efficient, and allow our customers to easily and seamlessly access their labor and sales data. Anything I can do as a developer to make this process easier on the customer, either by designing software to meet their needs, or constantly updating our software to make it more and more user friendly, I do in order to build a better relationship with our customers and help them meet their labor and schedule management needs easy and hassle free.

What was your first hourly job?
My first hourly job was at Sam Houston Race Park in Houston Texas. I was a paramutuel teller. My job was to take bets and pay out winnings on horse races.

What was your first restaurant or retail job?
The first restaurant I really worked in, aside from a short job at Luigi’s in Houston as a host when I was 14, was at Spanky’s in Lubbock Texas. I was a shift manager for 2 years and a kitchen manager for 2 and a half years. I ran the kitchen.

What’s your favorite hobby?
My favorite hobby is playing basketball. I play basketball 4-5 days a week and I play in local leagues every season I can.

What’s your favorite sports team?
the Houston Astros

Do you have any pets?
I currently have no pets.

What’s your name?
Chris Butler

What do you do at TimeForge?
Customer Support

How long have you been working with TimeForge?
Since the 12th of September, 2011

What’s your favorite part of working at TimeForge?
Helping customers learn how to get the most out of TimeForge

How do you make the lives of TimeForge customers better?
By showing them just how easy employee scheduling really can be using TimeForge’s AutoScheduler™.

What was your first hourly job?
When I was about 14 I worked at a bank, shredding old reports.

What was your first restaurant or retail job?
I worked at a family owned fast food restaurant. I did a little bit of everything but mostly worked as a cook in the kitchen. I did occasionally get to try and create schedules. I wish I had had TimeForge then.

What’s your favorite hobby?
Watching Riley, my nephew, play sports.

What’s your favorite sports team?
The Dallas Mavericks

Do you have any pets?
Nope, no pets right now.

What’s your name?
Anthony Presley

What do you do at TimeForge?
I work daily with the brains (the customers!) behind the best labor management software on the planet.  My primary role is to ensure that the software that TimeForge produces does exactly what customers need, and that usually means dragging the HR departments of our customers kicking and screaming into the world of iPhones and Blackberrys, Facebook and Twitter.  It ain’t easy.

How long have you been working with TimeForge?
Erik and I introduced TimeForge to the world in February of 2007. That makes us almost 5 years old!

What’s your favorite part of working at TimeForge?
I love working daily with customers from all over the globe to solve their labor problems. I work with managers who just opened (or bought) their first Subway franchise, and groups who have hotels and resorts around the globe with thousands of employees. The problems are varied, but TimeForge still manages to solve them all.

How do you make the lives of TimeForge customers better?
Prior to TimeForge, I managed a variety of software projects for customers to keep their businesses humming along.  The one unifying factor for these customers?  Staffing problems, turnover, over-time, and labor issues plague each and every one.  It didn’t take long for the light bulb to click on, and TimeForge has been at the forefront of ensuring that employees of all generations get along just fine with the management (of all generations!).

What was your first hourly job?
Long ago, and far away, I worked for Rockwell International (before they were sold to Boeing) in a summer internship to bring the web to a VAX system. I wrote low-level C code to process web requests (before there was Spring, .NET, or Ruby on Rails).

What was your first restaurant or retail job?
I spent about a year and a half working as a front-desk sales person and retail specialist for an Internet Service Provider and computer retailer in Northern Virginia, that was later acquired by Earthlink. We sold custom-built computers to customers, and I worked the retail counter.

What’s your favorite hobby?
Spending time with my kids is usually pretty relaxing. With a teenager and an almost-teenager, I spend time running soccer practices, shuttling kids around, and showing up for chess competitions.

What’s your favorite sports team?
Does FC Lubbock count? Andromeda Lubbock? When we have a good football coach, I’m a fan of Texas Tech football. We also keep up with FC Dallas.

Do you have any pets?
Yes; two mutt dogs (Coca and Marble), and a blue and gold macaw named Dren. He’s basically a feathered toddler with sharp claws and a large beak, which he will swing at you to either playfully kiss your hand, or remove a large chunk of flesh – he decides which one as soon as he grabs your hand.

What’s your name?
Jose Luis.

What do you do at TimeForge?
I do programming, basically implement in Java or .net. I work sometimes with HTML and Javascript

How long have you been working with TimeForge?
Since around 2008

What’s your favorite part of working at TimeForge?
Improving my skills. I am involved in several interesting things that need smart solutions and usage of the technology.

How do you make the lives of TimeForge customers better?
I try to get them what they really need or ask, obviously having it working like it’s expected to.

What was your first hourly job (what did you do, what company)?
TimeForge is my first job.

What’s your favorite hobby?
My favorite hobby is to deal with hardware and fix computers. I like to search and find out why a computer is not working, then fix it and make the owner happy.

What’s your favorite sports team?
I don’t have a favorite team, but I like Wilstermann soccer team.

Any pets? What kind, and what are their names?
I don’t currently have any pets. I would like to have a dog, but I don’t have enough space for him.

What’s your name?
Erik van Gilder

What do you do at TimeForge?
I’m a jack-of-all-trades with a programming background so I tend to focus a little bit everywhere. I do spend time with both customers and potential customers so I’m always learning more.

How long have you been working with TimeForge?
I have been working with TimeForge since its inception several years ago.

What’s your favorite part of working at TimeForge?
My favorite aspect of TimeForge is the constant surprise of how our customers use TimeForge and the challenge of figuring out how to satisfy our customers’ needs. Never did I imagine that TimeForge would grow to include so many features for so many different customers.

How do you make the lives of TimeForge customers better?
Listening to our customers. Our customers tell us what we need to do so I’m always asking if we are listening to our customers and implementing solutions that they want and can use.

What was your first hourly job?
My first hourly job was as part-time computer operator for a payroll provider. I remember once printing out several millions dollars of checks to be mailed out, only to watch in horror as the very high-speed printer mangled and shredded the checks. The comptroller was none too happy to void a few thousand checks. I printed the second batch of checks at slow speed.

What was your first restaurant or retail job?
I worked a brief stint at McDonalds and a few years part-time at Pizza Hut where I learned several lessons. At McDonald’s, the manager shared with me the financial statistics of one of the French Fry machine operators whose care to detail resulted in hundreds of dollars of profit every month. I was surprised how such seemingly small numbers quickly multiplied into meaningful sums, and I have never forgotten that lesson. At Pizza Hut, I was involved in the first roll-out of a POS system. The POS system lasted less than two months before it was thrown out as an impediment to speed and efficiency. Sure, the accountant loved it, but us folk on the floor hated its cumbersome keyboard sequences. Ever since then, I’ve always remembered that ease-of-use and acceptance from the people on the floor is as important as buy-in from management and the accountants.

What’s your favorite hobby?
Military History. If it were not for my greater fascination with Information Technology, I’d probably be an historian. While in college, I once convinced a military software vendor to lend me some expensive simulation software so that I could simulate the logistic movements of a famous World War I battle. Programming the simulation was feasible, but the research would have taken me a decade. Maybe I’ll try again in retirement!

What’s your favorite sports team?
My favorite sports team was, in the far past, the Washington Redskins. But after having my hopes dashed so many times, I’ve been in recovery ever since. I’m sure that fans of other teams (and sports) will offer me some great alternatives when this answer is posted to the website.

Do you have any pets?
We’re owned by three dogs. Freddy, a Walker Hound, Sophie a Border Collie mix and, finally, Oliver, a Chocolate Labrador Retriever. Freddy doesn’t bark. He howls at everything and at any time of day or night. To our great surprise, our neighbors think Freddy’s howling is charming. We  occasionally foster baby Box Turtles until they are old enough to survive in the wild on their own.