There’s a difference between having the headcount your store needs and having employees who are available at the right time, with the right skills. This difference becomes even more stark during peak season, when one wrongly assigned shift can set off a chain of staffing problems. 

Many retailers bring in temporary seasonal workers during peak season, but you have a limited window to find the right people, get them ready, and put them on the correct shifts. Start too late, and new hires may still be learning when your busiest weeks arrive. Start without understanding your actual staffing gaps, and you can end up with too many workers in some areas and not enough in others. 

This guide presents a 12-week seasonal retail staffing plan that breaks down what to do each week, from identifying your needs to hiring, onboarding, training, and scheduling seasonal workers. 

Your hiring deadline comes before your peak period starts

Joel Goldstein, President of Mr. Checkout Distributors, shares that many managers aim to hire by the time peak period arrives, but the seasonal workforce needs to be ready weeks before that. 

“Labor is consumed by handling product, not by ringing it up, so inbound replenishment volume is the better predictor. We regularly see independents whose sales peak arrives well after their labor peak, because the shipments landed first and someone had to receive, break down and shelve all of it.”

To understand your hiring and onboarding timeline and deadline, work backwards from your peak period.

Start by collecting company data for the last two years on sales, foot traffic, punch data, and workload records. Analyze the data to understand when workload actually starts to increase.

Let’s say you find that in the last two years, your business saw the highest footfall in February. You’ll need to order and organize stock before this peak, and before that, you’ll need a workforce that knows how to do that.

So you’ll need to have your seasonal workers ready by the time January begins. 

To get seasonal staff trained and deployed by then, begin your 12-week plan in the first week of October. 

Your 12-week seasonal retail staffing plan

Hiring lead times will vary based on the roles, local labor market, candidate requirements, and recruitment route. Use this 12-week plan as a starting point and adjust the timing to suit your business.

Weeks	Phase	Goal
1–2	Research	Determine when your peak period starts, how much additional staff you need, and what skills and availability you need to cover it.
3–6	Hiring	Find and select enough seasonal employees with the right skills to meet your staffing needs.
7–8	Onboarding	Get seasonal employees set up with the systems, information, and policies they need to start working effectively.
9–10	Training	Build the skills seasonal staff need to work independently during the peak.
11–12	Scheduling	Create schedules that match staffing levels to expected demand.

Weeks 1–2: Research 

Complete this stage between October 1 and 14.

Evaluate your existing employees’ skillsets 

The goal is to identify what your existing workforce can already do and what skill gaps you need to fill. 

For this, build a skills matrix. List every employee down the first column and the skills they have across their row. Include both customer-facing roles and less visible work like online fulfillment, returns, deliveries, replenishment, and merchandising.

Use this template: 

Employee	Checkout	Customer service	Online fulfilment	Returns
Employee 1	✔️		✔️
Employee 2	✔️	✔️
Employee 3	✔️	✔️		✔️
Employee 4		✔️	✔️
Employee 5	✔️	✔️		✔️

Compare your skills matrix with peak demand 

Compare the skills you identified above to what the historical peak period actually demanded. For each skill, ask:

• How many employees with a particular skill did you need per shift?
• How many did you actually have available? 
• Which skills created bottlenecks when demand increased?

Account for employee availability 

Check your permanent workers’ availability during the peak period and account for planned PTO, employees who can work only certain days or shifts, and employees who can’t work overtime.

For example, if you’ve two workers trained as floor managers, but if one’s taking PTO during your busiest week, you may need temporary management coverage even though your overall headcount looks adequate. 

Calculate the staffing gap

Now bring the calculations above into one place to identify:

• Available hours and skills
• Hour and skill demand during the peak period
• Additional hours and skills needed (hour/skill demand during peak period minus available hours/skills)

Decide how to close the gap

You’ve identified your hour and skill needs during peak season, not a target headcount. Before deciding to hire new workers, assess other ways you can meet these gaps.

The hour and skill gaps you identify after these calculations is what you actually need to fill with seasonal workers.

At this point, determine: 

• The roles you need: Do you need checkout staff, replenishment workers, supervisors, or a mix?
• Contract length: Do you need workers for the entire peak period or only for specific days/weeks?
• Employee flexibility: Do you need people who can work evenings, weekends, short-notice shifts, or different locations?

The research phase ends when you know exactly how many seasonal workers you need, with which skills, and when they need to be available. 

Weeks 3-6: Hiring

This stage starts on October 15 and ends by November 15.

Draft a job description

In the job description, explain:

• What shifts you need employees to work and when
• What skills you need
• How long the contract is for
• Any opportunity for additional hours 

Giving these details will help you filter for people who are available at the times you need. 

Communicate the vacancies

Use a mix of channels based on how many people you need, how quickly you need them, and whether you’re looking for experienced workers. 

• Job boards: Prefer these when you need to reach a larger pool of candidates.
• Employee referrals: Reach out to your current workers directly for recommendations if you’ve less time to recruit.
• Social media: Post vacancies online when you want to reach local candidates quickly and have access to a strong community.
• Staffing agencies: Partner with an agency when you have a large number of roles to fill, struggle to find qualified candidates, or don’t have capacity to manage the recruitment process internally.

Build a roster of qualified candidates 

As you select candidates to interview for this year’s seasonal peak, Himanshu Agarwal, Co-founder of Zenius, recommends building “a warm reserve of candidates” that you can reach out to if selected candidates drop off from the recruitment process:

“These are people who are suitable for the roles and have been through initial screenings. This ensures that the retailer doesn’t need to restart sourcing from nil in case candidates drop out mid-way.”

When creating this list, Manny Soto, Director of Operations at Burning Daily, advises keeping “those who didn’t make the cut but still met our basic criteria.” 

Account for paperwork and background checks

Andrew Brown, Owner and Founder of Immediate Movers and Storage, says new business owners are often surprised by the time needed to complete paperwork before a new hire can be onboarded. 

The offer can go out only once you’ve completed the relevant paperwork. Give candidates at least 24 hours to accept an offer. 

The hiring phase ends when you’ve made offers to enough seasonal workers to fill your gaps, with qualified backup candidates in reserve. 

Weeks 7–8: Onboarding

Begin the onboarding phase on November 16 and complete it by November 30. 

Introduce your company policies

Onboarding ensures that new hires understand your business and its guardrails. Don’t assume new staff will pick up policies as they go. Give them the information they need before their shift. 

Your seasonal worker onboarding guide should explain:

• Attendance and scheduling: Clock-in and clock-out rules, absences, and shift swaps
• Workplace rules: Dress codes, phone use, breaks, and safety requirements 
• Role expectations: Key responsibilities, performance standards, and customer service expectations 

Add new hires to company tools and systems 

Ensure all new hires have access to the right tools from day one. 

Designate a main point of contact per tool who remains accountable for managing new colleagues in that tool and removing them once their contract ends. Have a backup in case the person responsible is unavailable when someone’s access needs to be modified.

Educate new hires on how to use your tools. Give them a quick walkthrough of the functions they’d need to use, such as checking schedules and clocking in and out.

By letting users handle all these functions in one place, Buddy Punch simplifies the process for seasonal workers who need to get up to speed quickly.

Show them around the facilities

Before day one, show new hires the stores, warehouses, or any other location where they’ll be working. They should know where to find:

• Entrances and exits
• Break rooms and restrooms
• Emergency exists and first aid supplies 
• Clock-in locations
• Equipment they’ll use

If they’ll work across locations, make sure they know how to record their hours against the right location. On Buddy Punch, you can assign location codes to different jobs, so hours remain tied to the correct store and task.

Introduce them to key personnel

Introduce new workers to managers, supervisors, and teammates and explain whom they should contact for different questions. 

Give them a written list of points of contact for different issues. For workers moving between locations, make it clear who their manager is at each store and who can change their assignments.

The onboarding phase ends when every seasonal worker is fully set up, understands the workplace rules and logistics, and knows whom to contact for help.

Weeks 9–10: Training

Plan to complete training of your new workers between December 1 and 15, because “once volume rises, there’s far less room to learn judgment calls in the moment,” says Michelle Winnett, SVP of Operations at Liveops.

What to train workers on 

According to Joel Goldstein: 

“A seasonal hire is ready when they can do one narrow job unsupervised, not when they have been shown everything.”

Use your skills matrix from earlier to identify what skills you don’t have enough of and train the new hires on those skills. 

Goldstein recommends training seasonal workers well on two specific tasks: “typically stocking and one register function.”

For you, this combination may be different. The ideal approach is to train them on:

• Their main task: For example, processing checkout transactions, picking online orders, or processing returns
• One supporting task: For example, someone trained to replenish shelves can also be trained to receive deliveries
• Peak-specific processes: Handling higher returns volumes, preparing click-and-collect orders, or restocking fast-moving products 
• Common problems: What to do when an item is missing, a price is incorrect, or a customer can’t complete a transaction 

Goldstein categorically warns against training seasonal employees in multiple skills:

“Trying to cross-train someone who will be gone in six weeks produces an employee who’s slow at everything.”

How to train them

Multiple experts recommended active shadowing sessions for seasonal workers before they’re deployed so they get an idea of the kind of pace and volume they can realistically expect during the year’s busiest period.

Andrew Brown recommends two full shifts of shadowing. “This is without exception.”

Peak period also brings an increased risk of:

• Customer service failure. Cody C. Boulware, General Sales Manager at Hall Chevrolet, handles this by giving new hires hands-on practice at customer communication: “They practice explaining financing options and GM parts availability from day one so customers see the full picture.”
• Safety incidents. Brown explains how a workplace incident forced the team to change how they defined employee readiness. 

“Two years ago, I hired a person who was fast… But after a week, he rushed to get a delicate item onto the truck without putting enough padding on it, which caused it to break, and I ended up having to file a claim for $400…A worker should be considered ready to work if they can utilize their ability to read body language and know when to slow down from a quick pace of load placement.”

Before scheduling new hires for real shifts, assign them to days where they focus only on training.

The training phase ends when each seasonal worker can perform their assigned tasks independently and knows when to escalate problems to a supervisor. 

Weeks 11–12: Scheduling 

The final two weeks, from December 16 to 31, are to complete the last steps before your new hires start working.

Reconfirm availability 

You screened candidates based on their availability; now’s the time to reconfirm that.

Contact each new hire and ask if there’s been any changes to their availability. If you’re using Buddy Punch, record the updated information in the tool so it creates future schedules based only on the latest verified information.

Once you’ve the updated availability information:

• Identify which shifts are now uncovered.
• If someone’s availability and shift preferences have changed, ask if they can work other days or shifts.
• Re-assess if you’re adequately staffed for peak period. If not, go back to your list of reserve candidates to see if anyone needs to be brought in urgently to meet peak demand. 

Create the schedule 

Build your peak period schedule around the specific coverage gaps for which you hired these new workers. 

• Give new hires enough shifts before the busy period hits. Your peak season begins in February, so from December 31 until then, you’ve four weeks to assign your new workers to normal shifts so they can become comfortable with the role before demand peaks.
• Schedule seasonal workers when demand is highest. Add more seasonal staff to your busiest days and shifts rather than spreading their hours evenly across the week. 
• Remember to check their end date. Make sure they’re scheduled only until their contract lasts and that the next period’s schedule is planned around your permanent workforce.

Prepare for no-shows and last-minute forecast changes 

Build peak period schedules that can hold up when things change at the last minute. 

• For each shift, identify one or two backup workers who can fill in urgently. 
• Order the backup workers in priority of whom the shift supervisor should call first.
• Set triggers for schedule adjustments as a shift progresses. For example, if expected foot traffic reaches 90% of the forecast before half the day is over, the supervisor reaches out to backup workers.  
• At the end of each shift, review expected and actual workload and adjust the next shifts as needed.

Record attendance information

Track every hour seasonal staff works so you can pay them accurately and keep their labor costs tied to your peak staffing budget.

Make clocking in and clocking out mandatory using the same time clock app your permanent workforce uses, but tag them using a different label or team so you can easily track their hours and costs. 

On Buddy Punch, you can assign PINs or QR codes to temporary workers. This helps you quickly set up these new staff to track their hours on the same system as your permanent workers.

Check for other time tracking issues every day. Seasonal workers may only be with you for a few days or weeks, so a missed punch can quickly become difficult to verify later. Review attendance records at the end of each shift and correct any errors while the employee and manager can be reached easily to confirm the hours worked. 

The scheduling phase ends when all seasonal workers have been assigned shifts during the peak period and are set up to record hours in your time tracking system.

Use worker performance data to simplify future peak staffing 

Each peak season gives you data and insights that can make the next busy period easier to plan and manage. 

Compare planned work versus actual data 

Once your peak ends, see what you had planned versus what actually happened. Review:

• Demand: Did sales, orders, foot traffic, and workload peak when you expected?
• Staffing: Did you have enough workers and the right skills in each shift?
• Attendance: Which workers consistently arrived late, missed shifts, or required schedule changes?
• Labor hours: How many hours did seasonal employees work compared to permanent employees?

Identify seasonal workers worth inviting back 

How you’d rate seasonal workers is different from how you’d assess permanent workers. For Joel Goldstein: “The useful question after the peak isn’t who performed best, it’s who showed up on the days that were hardest to fill. Reliability during the worst week of the season is the thing that actually predicts value next season.”

Andrew Brown prioritizes different criteria, including attendance and customer feedback: “I would prefer to have a dependable worker who takes their time compared to a fast worker who takes unnecessary shortcuts.”

When deciding whether to invite someone back, also consider: 

• Initiative: Could they handle their assigned tasks independently once trained?
• Flexibility: Were they willing and able to pick up extra shifts or move to different shifts at short notice?
• Teamwork: Did they work effectively with your permanent staff and other seasonal workers?
• Escalation: Did they know when to resolve an issue themselves versus when to escalate it to a supervisor?

Adapt your future seasonal staffing strategy 

Use your post-peak review to change the parts of your seasonal staffing plan that didn’t work. 

• Adjust your staffing timeline. If demand started earlier or lasted longer than expected, move your recruitment and onboarding timeline accordingly.
• Change your hiring mix. If you were short on a particular skill, recruit more workers with that skill or train permanent employees before the next peak. 
• Update your list of reserve workers. Remove staff who consistently missed shifts or couldn’t meet performance expectations, and add workers who exceeded expectations. If no-shows or last-minute changes cause coverage problems, consider adding more backup workers to this list.

Download our report, The End of Fixed Retail Teams, to see how you can manage an increasingly flexible retail workforce while upholding customer service quality and employee satisfaction. 

Prepare early for seasonal spikes

Seasonal retail staffing works only when you plan around your actual labor and skill needs. But you don’t need to run the entire strategy in this guide at once. 

As a first step, set a deadline to review your staffing plans and identify any gaps. Aim to have this information three to six months before peak period. This will give you enough time to decide what needs to change and adapt this 12-week plan to the needs of your business.

Contributors

• Andrew Brown, Owner and Founder, Immediate Movers and Storage 
• Cody C. Boulware, General Sales Manager, Hall Chevrolet
• Himanshu Agarwal, Co-founder, Zenius
• Joel Goldstein, President, Mr. Checkout Distributors
• Manny Soto, Director of Operations, Burning Daily
• Michelle Winnett, SVP of Operations, Liveops