As the holidays approach, Bart Lautenbach shares three tips for greater seasonal hiring success

The holidays are coming, which means many retailers are gearing up for an influx of shoppers, seasonal specials, and new employees. In the 2024-2025 holiday season, retailers in the US hired nearly 500,000 more seasonal employees to help prepare for increased staffing needs in the last three months of the year. While many of those positions are truly seasonal, some retailers hold on to those employees through the end of the year, such as the almost 30,000 new employees who stayed on after the 2024-2025 holiday season, or rehire them the following season.

When hiring for seasonal positions, retailers may look to move candidates through the application and interview process as quickly as possible. However, verifying a candidate’s previous employment and experience can be an advantage for seasonal hiring. Temporary roles often have regular touchpoints with customers, inventory, and sensitive systems, yet usually offer little margin for onboarding error. Skipping or rushing the screening process can expose organizations to potential financial, operational, and reputational risks, and can cause retailers to miss out on candidates who have the potential to contribute beyond their initial tenure.

To help improve the quality of their seasonal hires, retailers can use three principles to hire not simply for speed, but to fill open roles with employees they might want to retain past the holidays.

1) Reconsider the false dilemma of speed versus quality

In a high-volume hiring environment, filling roles as quickly as possible may be the top priority. Retailers may consider skipping pre-hire verifications of a candidate’s previous employment and education because they believe they do not have time. However, while skipping these verifications may seem efficient, it can increase the risk of misrepresented candidate experience. A 2026 Equifax survey found that three in four HR professionals report challenges with fabricated and misleading candidate information, suggesting that it is often essential for hiring managers to back up their decisions with reliable information about a candidate’s previous employment.

Additionally, hiring quickly does not have to require compromising on candidate quality. With automated employment and education verifications, retailers do not have to sacrifice speed in their efforts to help ensure the person they are hiring has the experience they claim to have. 

2) Hire for longer-term tenure and returning talent

While traditionally viewed as a temporary fix, many retailers today view holiday hiring as a pipeline for returning seasonal staff and permanent roles. With 88 percent of organizations concerned about retention, re-engaging dependable alumni and selecting candidates with a track record of more reliability can help reduce training friction, lower onboarding costs, and better secure workforce coverage during peak volume. This approach can also help free up the time that store managers spend recruiting, allowing them to focus more on driving sales and supporting their current team members. 

Pre-hire verifications can play an important role in this strategy. Focusing on indicators like past employment tenure helps better ensure that retailers are investing in employees that are more likely to remain throughout the holiday season, and helps managers build a talent bench for the new year with employees who have essentially completed an extended, real-world interview.

3) Balance digital skills with retail fundamentals

Today’s retail associates are expected to be tech savvy enough to pick up new tools in the first days of their new roles, from mobile point-of-sale devices to inventory visibility software. Still, digital literacy is not always enough to ensure success in a customer-facing retail position. Seasonal staff are often the primary touchpoint for customers during peak volume periods, and one poor interaction with a customer can directly harm brand loyalty or reputation when traffic is typically at its highest. The most successful new hires must combine hard skills with strong customer service and reliability. Evaluating candidates for both soft skills and technical agility can help build teams that are more capable of successful, better streamlined retail operations while also helping drive customer loyalty during peak volume.

Better hiring for your seasonal surge

When navigating holiday hiring, retailers do not need to sacrifice the quality or retention of their workforce for the sake of hiring quickly. By leveraging automated verifications of employment and education, retailers can often hire at higher volumes and quality while better protecting their store operations and building a talent pipeline for future holidays seasons. Balancing efficiency with retail and digital skills enables retailers to build a more resilient workforce, with less of the high-stress hiring crunch.

Bart Lautenbach
www.workforce.equifax.com
Bart Lautenbach is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Talent Solutions at Equifax Workforce Solutions. The company is dedicated to helping lenders, employers, and government agencies confidently verify income, employment, and education, while also offering comprehensive risk and criminal justice intelligence solutions. Through its HR management services, Equifax Workforce Solutions assists customers with regulatory compliance, freeing up their teams to focus on more value-added initiatives.