7 Ways to Make This Summer Your Best Hiring Season Yet

While some people look forward to summer as a time to relax, go on vacation, and maybe hit the beaches, for many others, it’s the time to look for work. Restaurants and retailers, meanwhile, need to think about hiring some great staff. You may lose some employees over the summer. At the same time, you’re ready to gear up for what will hopefully be a busy season. How do you maximize your hiring efforts? Let’s look at 7 ways to make this summer your best hiring season yet!

1. Emphasize Job Perks

Don’t forget to mention as many benefits as possible, even if they’re not formal benefits. Flexible hours, casual dress codes, and free meals are all perks that make your job listings more appealing. This is also a chance to engage in some brand building, boasting about why it’s great to work in your store, restaurant, hotel, or other establishment.

2. Make Your Job Postings Mobile-Friendly

Keep in mind that most of your job applicants are millennials who tend to access the internet via smartphone and other mobile devices. This means that it’s crucial to make your listings and the application process as mobile-friendly as possible. People scrolling through jobs on their phones are unlikely to spend much time dealing with clunky applications made for desktops. Test your listings on mobile phones and tweak them until they’re simple for mobile users to fill out.

Or, use a job listing service like, Sirvo, that does all of that for you! Signing up and posting a job is easy, SEO and mobile-friendly.

3. Make the Application Process as Painless as Possible

Along with making your application mobile-friendly, keep it short and simple. Many employers use outdated job applications that ask lots of irrelevant questions. For example, do you really need to know the address of someone’s elementary school? Longer applications discourage applicants. You can always ask more questions at job interviews. For the application itself, focus on essentials.

4. Be Clear About Who You Need

Your hiring process will proceed more smoothly if you don’t waste time interviewing people who aren’t qualified. Make sure you specify the qualifications in your postings. For example, if you need someone with at least a year of customer service experience, mention this in your ad. If the job requires people to work weekends and holidays, don’t forget to post this.

5. Look For Strong People Skills

Soft skills, also known as people skills or emotional intelligence, are primary in the hospitality industry. These are difficult to gauge on job applications. During interviews, however, the ability to spot these skills is crucial. When you or your hiring managers interview applicants, don’t simply ask informational questions. Ask them how they’ve handled challenging situations or conflicts with customers at past jobs. The way applicants answer such questions is just as important as their actual answers. Do they respond to such inquiries with confidence and openness or are they nervous or defensive? The better you are at identifying people skills, the more success your hiring process will be.

6. Advertise for Seasonal Help

Many of the people you’re looking to hire over the summer are only looking for temporary, seasonal jobs. While this is obvious, it actually helps to specifically advertise for summer or seasonal jobs and to use these keywords in your listings. Otherwise, potential applicants might assume that you’re only looking for long-term hires. If some hires end up turning into full-time, so much the better. However, you’ll get a better response to your ads and listings if you appeal to students looking for summer jobs.

7. Recruit on Social Media

If you want to get the best possible response from your job postings, it makes sense to go where your audience is. More and more people, especially millennials, are spending large portions of their time on social media sites. You have many options, whether you list jobs on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or elsewhere. If you want to amp up your recruiting efforts, you can use paid advertising. Aside from inviting people to visit your website, you can promote job fairs. With social media, you can also recruit among your customer base. People who like your Facebook page or subscribe to your Twitter feed are excellent potential recruits.

If you don’t want to do all the heavy lifting, use an online job board that puts social front-and-center. Sirvo makes it easy for you to share your job with your network by providing share buttons on your job listing that you or your staff can easily click and share to various social networks. Or share by simply copy and pasting the job listing URL. Once pasted, the job listing will display the job title, company photo and job introduction, all of which are SEO compatible. Hooray!

Follow these tips and trick and we’re sure you’ll make this Summer hiring season the best yet! 

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