Seasonal work: Six tips for snagging that temporary job

When it comes to quickly adding hundreds of thousands of workers to payrolls, nothing does the trick quite like the holidays. Retailers hire hundreds of thousands of employees in the final three months of the year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement firm. How does one take advantage of this coming hike in opportunities? Experts offer this advice:

1. Apply early for that temporary job

Octavio Jones/The Tampa Bay Times/AP/File
Claudia Pereira, left, and Shelby Kenngott, both of Spring Hill, Fla., fill out job applications in early October at a local job fair. The event was held to fill seasonal retail jobs for the upcoming holiday season seeking.

If you think you can wait until November to get a seasonal temporary job, you're going to be missing out on a lot of opportunities," says Courtney Moyer, public relations manager at employment website Snagajob, in a telephone interview. More than half of hiring managers expect to fill their holiday positions by the end of October or sooner.

In 2012, some 63 percent of hiring managers said they planned to bring on additional help this year, according to a holiday hiring forecast from Snagajob. That's up from 51 percent in 2011.

Toys R Us announced in late September that it plans to hire 45,000 seasonal employees this year – 5,000 more than in 2011 – in positions ranging from managerial roles to sales associates to inventory workers.

Macy's Inc. expected to bring on 80,000 temporary sales associates, a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of sales associates it has on a year-round basis.

1 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.