Happily hiring for the holidays
Retailers offering turkey dinners, discounts to lure seasonal help
WASHINGTON — It’s only been fall for a couple of weeks, but the holiday hiring frenzy is in full swing.
For proof, just walk through the mall: “We’re hiring and we’d love to meet you,” signs outside Pottery Barn and Pottery Barn Kids said on a recent weekday at Tysons Corner Center, a sprawling northern Virginia shopping mall just outside Washington,.
“Make our house your home,” offered White House Black Market. “Join our team of outsiders,” urged L.L. Bean. The clothing chain Express was looking for “fashion lovers,” while the Lego store wanted “energetic, enthusiastic” employees.
Macy’s played up “bonus potential” for holiday hires, while McDonald’s promised perks such as free meals, $50 worth of monthly transit cards and “team celebrations.”
In other words: Retailers need help — and they’re desperate.
A historically low unemployment rate, coupled with projections for recordbreaking holiday sales, means retailers, from major chains to small businesses, are being forced to offer higher pay and catchier perks to woo temporary holiday workers.
At stake is what is expected to be the strongest holiday season in years, as retailers look to cash in on a surge in consumer confidence. The unemployment rate is at historic lows, the stock market is at record highs and wages are inching higher, helping to boost sales at a number of bigname chains, including Walmart, Nordstrom and Home Depot. Holiday sales are expected to rise as much as 5.6 percent to a record $1.1 trillion, according to estimates from Deloitte.
“There is a definite war for talent,” said Andrew Challenger, a vice president at job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.”Just as we have this huge spike in consumer demand, retailers are dealing with tightest labor market in 45 years. Whether or not retailers can hire enough people this holiday season could have a real impact on their sales.”
In all, retailers are expected to hire 700,000 workers this holiday season, up 5 percent from last year, according to Challenger’s firm.
Nationally, retailers say they plan to pay as much as 54 percent more than they did a year ago, according to a survey of 1,000 hourly employers by Snag, an Arlington-based online staffing platform for hourly work.
They are increasingly offering a chance at other perks, too: $500 gift cards at Target, all-expenses-paid vacations to Miami and New York, as well as $5,000 “prize packages” at JCPenney. Beauty chain Ulta is giving holiday hires half-off haircuts, while Gap and Old Navy are advertising employee discounts of 50 percent, as well as backup child care and free flu shots. Williams Sonoma declared September “national hiring month,” promising on-thespot store interviews to anybody who wanted one.
Kohl’s, which began hiring seasonal employees in July, is providing Thanksgiving Day workers with a turkey dinner and doling out gift cards for perfect attendance during the holidays. Also new this year: a designated shopping day when employees will get 35 percent off all purchases, including brands such as KitchenAid and UnderArmour. (The retailer’s usual employee discount is 15 percent.)
“The No. 1 thing on our mind is that it’s competitive out there,” said Ryan Festerling, Kohl’s executive vice president of human resources. “The holiday season literally starts and ends with, how do we make sure we have the right amount of associates?”
Festerling added that the company has already hired “many, many thousands” of workers and will continue to do so through early November. The retailer plans to hire 90,000 workers this year, up from 69,000 two years ago.
Retailers around the U.S. have announced plans for record numbers of seasonal hires. Target plans to employ 120,000 holiday workers, a 70 percent increase from five years ago, while Macy’s has announced plans to hire 80,000.
UPS, meanwhile, says it will hire 100,000 workers this holiday season, up from 95,000 last year.
The country’s largest retailers — Walmart and Amazon — have yet to announce their holiday hiring plans, although Bloomberg reported last week that Walmart was surveying employees on which perks, including pet care and gym memberships, would be most likely to attract new hires.
Amazon, which in recent weeks had begun offering small hourly raises, starting at 25 cents per hour, to its warehouse workers, announced on Tuesday that it will raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all the companies U.S. employees beginning in November. (Jeffrey Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)
While retailers are advertising more seasonal jobs than before, other industries are scaling back on temporary positions, according to an analysis of job postings by the site Indeed.com.
“What we’ve seen is surprising: Seasonal job postings in areas such as trucking and warehouse work are slower than they were last year,” said Andrew Flowers, an economist for Indeed.
It is likely, he said, that those industries are using the holidays as an opportunity to attract full-time, permanent workers, not just temporary employees who might move on after a month or two.
“In this job market, it’s not that appealing to say, ‘Hey, come work with us for a few months,’ ” he said. “Today’s workers expect more.”