As businesses approach their peak season, the pressure to scale operations and meet increased demand intensifies. Preparation is the cornerstone of successfully navigating this busy period. The phrase “better sooner rather than later” should be your motto. Early planning means more time for strategy but also provides a buffer to address challenges that arise in fast-paced times.
Leveraging the right technology, particularly a Vendor Management System (VMS), can truly be a game-changer. The right VMS will streamline the process of managing staff plus offer insights and tools to optimize workforce deployment. By starting your preparations early and integrating a comprehensive VMS into your strategy, you are setting your business up for a smooth peak season, ensuring you can meet and exceed your goals.
Strategies for Peak Season Preparation:
- Focus on Quality Over Quantity: By prioritizing quality, you ensure you bring in the best workforce possible for your client’s peak season needs. Focusing on quantity can ultimately cost you and your client more time and money as the talent brought in might be less adaptable to training, time management, etc.
- Do Not Re-Use Job Details: You can recommend this to your clients to stand out from the crowd. Adjusting job requirements, descriptions, and expectations to suit the role will help it be viewed by more candidates.
- Refine Your Process: Providing a seamless experience is the best way to keep candidates engaged and returning. Retaining candidates will boost your reputation as a vendor and help streamline the hiring process for peak season. Returning candidates do not require the same training or onboarding and already know the job responsibilities.
- Start Early and Set Checkpoints: We also recommend working with your clients to bring workers in earlier than you feel you may need them. The goal with hiring early is to hire your peak workforce with enough time to complete their onboarding & training before peak season labor begins. This also gives you and your client time to reevaluate your peak season strategy if needed.
- Consolidate and Forecast: If you have easy access to your data, you can utilize it to identify seasonal and peak patterns, allowing you to further prepare for your client needs.
- Expand Your Reach: If you’re struggling to find people, expand your reach to find employees through other means. Try job boards and career fairs, identify different demographics than you’ve previously looked at, expand your search radius, etc.
How can a VMS like SimpleVMS help you?
- One need that SimpleVMS streamlines for your peak-season contingent workforce is onboarding. Simplifying onboarding can save you time where it matters.
- SimpleVMS also boasts a robust compliance program, ensuring that no worker requirements, credentials, documentation, etc., will fall through the cracks even during your busiest moments.
- Communicate frequently with your clients and candidates to ensure peak season preparation is going as planned. SimpleVMS offers a common portal for vendor/client communication and staffing requests.
- Supplier integration is another fantastic time saver for peak season and can provide additional functional insight into your workforce program. SimpleVMS boasts a long list of existing integrations and offers custom integrations at no additional cost.
- Our team offers exceptional support for the lifetime of the relationship, whether it’s customized reporting, dashboards, or system questions.
- Through SimpleVMS’ candidate performance tracking, you can identify gaps and problem areas to remedy before peak season, ensuring a seamless season.
- Reduce time-to-hire through the centralized system and fill positions with newfound speed.
Our most relevant and vital tip of all is this – know the value of support. To be a strategic partner to your clients this peak season, think about any gaps from previous peak seasons that might be able to be remedied through additional support this year. You might be busy with peak season, but you will only be busier without the proper support. Our team is here to answer questions, problem solve, customize, and make sure your contingent labor program is one thing above all else… Simple.