Holiday hiring presents a familiar challenge for small business owners: finding dependable employees quickly enough to handle the seasonal rush. But this year, a softer labor market and an influx of AI-generated résumés are changing how employers identify qualified candidates.
To learn how small businesses can make smarter seasonal hiring decisions, I spoke to Christie Brodbeck, vice president of customer science, and Dina Taylor, chief evangelist, at Hirevue, a hiring technology company. They explain why skills matter more than polished résumés, how to evaluate candidates efficiently, and what businesses can do to build a reliable holiday workforce.
The Holiday Hiring Outlook
Rieva Lesonsky: Recent jobs reports have pointed to a weakening labor market. How do you expect that to affect holiday hiring this year? Are you expecting businesses to hire fewer seasonal employees this year?
Christie Brodbeck: More broadly, the hiring outlook in the U.S. reflects a shift from the expansion seen in recent years toward a more cautious and uneven global market. Employers are forecasting small gains or declines depending on the sector, but largely converging around “steady but subdued” growth. According to a recent report from Hirevue, a plurality (45%) characterize the market as “fair”, echoing 2021 conditions when projections were similarly flat.
These changes signal a recalibration following the stronger conditions of recent years, with organizations now balancing budgetary caution and long-term talent needs in an environment shaped increasingly by economic uncertainty, the changing nature of work, and high applicant volumes.
The holiday season brings a surge in demand as companies prepare to move, store, and deliver goods ahead of peak holiday shopping. Companies are still ramping up their seasonal holiday hiring this year to meet this demand, despite a flat/slowing hiring market more broadly. Consumer spending has remained stable despite prolonged inflation, and businesses are anticipating holiday spending to align with that trend. Companies must ensure they have the workforce and operational capacity to keep goods moving efficiently through the busiest time of year.
Finding the Right Candidates in a Crowded Applicant Pool
Lesonsky: If more people are competing for seasonal jobs, employers may receive more applications than they’re accustomed to. How can small businesses efficiently identify qualified candidates without spending hours reviewing résumés and conducting interviews?
Dina Taylor: AI-generated resumes and one-click applications have flooded hiring funnels, making candidates appear more similar on paper while obscuring the skills, behaviors, and potential that actually predict success on the job. Look-alike applications are making it harder than ever for recruiters to find the candidates who actually stand out.
At the same time, hiring teams are being asked to do more with less and face mounting pressure to fill roles quickly for the holiday season. The result is a growing tension between speed and quality: Companies need to move quickly to secure talent, but they can’t afford the cost of poor hiring decisions.
As a result, there is a growing shift towards skills-based hiring as employers aim to uncover what candidates can actually do, not just how well they’ve been coached to look (or how AI helps them look) on paper.
AI is helping companies move beyond resumes and manual screening to identify job-relevant skills earlier in the hiring process. Ahead of the holiday season, companies can use AI to automate routine steps, engage candidates around the clock and deliver structured, consistent interviews at scale. This allows every applicant to demonstrate qualities that matter, including communication, reliability, and customer focus, while helping hiring teams quickly surface qualified candidates before they accept another offer.
The future of high-volume hiring isn’t simply about moving faster. It’s about moving from inference to evidence. The businesses that succeed will be those that can identify quality talent earlier, predict retention and performance more accurately, and create hiring processes that scale efficiently without sacrificing candidate experience. This is the new challenge facing businesses today — and why a science-backed approach to hiring has never been more important.
Lesonsky: Which skills and qualities should employers prioritize when hiring for customer-facing, fulfillment, and other holiday positions?
Taylor: The most in-demand skills today are:
- Soft Skills: Communication, teamwork, and critical thinking.
- Technical Skills: Digital/IT capabilities.
Building a Reliable Seasonal Workforce
Lesonsky: What are the most important things a small business owner can do to build a reliable seasonal workforce this year? And how can they identify seasonal employees who might be good candidates for permanent positions after the holidays? How can they assess key skills/qualities (above) before making an offer? You mentioned skills validation and job tryouts. What do those approaches actually look like?
Brodbeck: Speed is a non-negotiable with seasonal hiring, but hiring the right people with the right skills to ensure a successful holiday season is still critical. Here are a few key ways to accomplish both this season:
- Make it easy: When seasonal candidates visit your careers site, help them find a role that fits before they get lost in a long list of openings. Job matching tools can start that conversation right on your site, learning about each candidate’s skills, experience, and interests and then recommending relevant jobs. Candidates can ask questions about the role or hiring process, then move into the right application path.
- Make it convenient: A mobile-friendly experience that is available 24/7 allows someone looking for work to get answers and apply while their interest is high. For recruiters, that means more candidates arriving at the right roles with useful information gathered from the start.
- Create a faster path to interview: As seasonal applications surge, manual phone screens will quickly become a bottleneck. AI-powered hiring tools give candidates the opportunity to complete a structured, two-way voice interview 24/7, without waiting for a recruiter’s calendar to open up. The interview adapts to candidates’ responses and focuses on the skills needed for the role. Recruiters receive science-backed scores, explanations, and shortlists to help them review candidates and decide who moves forward. Candidates get a chance to demonstrate more than a resume can show, while recruiters spend less time on repetitive screening and more time connecting with the people they may actually hire.
- Validate skills: A polished application doesn’t tell you how someone will handle a customer question or a fast-moving shift. Science-backed assessments can help teams evaluate the skills and behaviors that matter for the role. A virtual job tryout can also give candidates a clearer picture of the work while helping employers see how they might approach it — so they have clearer expectations of what to expect on day one. When hiring at volume, a consistent way to evaluate job-relevant skills helps teams make decisions with more confidence.
- Build a process for effective hiring beyond peak season: The best time to fix a seasonal hiring bottleneck is before applications spike. Look at where candidates wait the longest, where recruiters spend the most manual effort, and where you need better evidence of fit. Improving those steps now can help your team handle the rush — and leave you with a stronger hiring process for the rest of the year.
My Take
When you’re hiring seasonal employees, speed matters, but hiring the wrong people can create even bigger problems during your busiest weeks. Don’t assume a polished résumé means someone is ready for the job. Focus on the skills your business actually needs, ask candidates how they’d handle realistic situations, and make the application process as simple as possible.
And remember that seasonal hiring can be an opportunity to find future permanent employees. Pay attention to the people who show up reliably, learn quickly, and work well with customers and coworkers. They may be worth keeping long after the holidays.
Rieva Lesonsky is the founder of Small Business Currents, a content company focusing on small businesses and entrepreneurship. You can find her on Twitter @Rieva, Bluesky @Rieva.bsky.social, and LinkedIn. Or email her at Rieva@SmallBusinessCurrents.com.
Photo courtesy Getty Images for Unsplash+
