How do you hire seasonal employees fast? For retail and warehouse roles, start recruiting six to eight weeks before your busy season. Post each job once to every major job board. Rank every applicant automatically with AI resume review, and screen the best ones by phone the same day, without scheduling calls. A person still makes every hiring decision. Then keep new hires in the loop until their first shift.
Speed matters because hourly candidates often take the first offer they get.
This guide shows how to hire seasonal employees for stores, warehouses, and distribution centers. It's written for teams that staff up for a busy season every year. Puck makes high-volume hiring software for teams like yours, so we're not neutral here. We'll tell you exactly where Puck fits, and where it doesn't, near the end.
Seasonal hiring is bringing on temporary workers for a predictable busy period. In retail, that's the holiday shopping season. In warehouses and logistics, it's peak season, when order volume spikes. In practice, it's high-volume recruiting on a deadline.
Even in a slow year, it's a big hiring wave. Retailers added 461,500 jobs in the last three months of 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas's 2026 holiday hiring outlook. That was the smallest seasonal gain since 2008. Transportation and warehousing added another 266,500 jobs over the same period. For the 2026 season, Challenger expects retailers to add about 450,000.
Seasonal hiring usually breaks in one of five places: timing, screening, speed, follow-up, or visibility. The pattern repeats every year. Postings go up late. Applications flood in. Nobody can call them all back. By the time someone does, the best people have already started somewhere else.
Find your weak spot before you look at any seasonal hiring software. Map your seasonal hiring process from posted to applied, screened, offered, and started. Then look for the stage where people drop off.
Then pick one metric you want to move:
Track it every week of the season, next to the other applicant screening metrics you already watch.
Start recruiting seasonal employees about six to eight weeks before your busy season, and earlier is better. For holiday retail and warehouse work, that usually means September. That's when the big employers start announcing their seasonal hiring.
Michaels announced more than 10,000 seasonal jobs across the U.S. and Canada on September 10, 2026. Amazon announced 250,000 full-time, part-time, and seasonal jobs for the 2025 holidays.
Competition for seasonal workers is growing, too. Indeed Hiring Lab found that seasonal job postings were 11% above 2024 levels by mid-November 2025. Seasonal driving postings more than doubled, rising 153%.
If your postings go up after the rush starts, you're hiring from whoever's left.
In 2026, the best seasonal hiring software posts jobs everywhere in one step, ranks every applicant with AI resume review, and screens the strongest with an AI phone screen the same day. Then a person makes every hiring decision. Look for these five things.
Posting board by board eats up weeks you don't have. Post each role once to LinkedIn, Indeed, and other job boards, and get every applicant in one place.
Two hundred applicants for one stocker role shouldn't be read in the order they arrived. The software should score each applicant against your criteria, like distance from the site, and show why each person scored the way they did. The better AI resume screening tools explain every score.
Phone tag loses seasonal applicants, and most of them apply from a phone anyway. Appcast's 2026 Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report found that mobile devices drove about 81% of warehouse and logistics applications. Retail wasn't far behind, at 76%.
So send your best applicants an initial AI phone screen the same day they apply, one they can take on their phone, on their own time.
Don't let an accepted offer go quiet before the first shift. Every stage should send the right message, including a clear, kind no for people who didn't get the job. Steady candidate engagement is what turns accepted offers into people who show up.
Next year's easiest hires are this year's workers. Everyone who applied or worked for you should stay easy to search, so you can reach them before next season's postings go live.
If your software is missing any of these, your team ends up doing that work by hand, right in your busiest weeks.
Three questions separate the tools built for seasonal volume from the rest:
A good answer sounds like this: "Here's the link. Try it and see exactly how it feels. Here's what extra volume costs, and a person makes every hiring decision."
A weak answer sounds like this: "We'll need to move you to a bigger plan before peak season."
The best hourly hiring software replaces your slowest step without replacing everything else. If you already have an applicant tracking system (ATS), make sure it has AI resume ranking and can add AI phone screens. If you don't have an ATS, pick one tool that does both.
Here are three options.
Details from each vendor's website as of October 2026.
Puck is built for teams that get more seasonal applicants than they can call. Puck's AI Recruiter texts or emails the applicants you choose a link to a short, structured, audio-only phone screen. There's no camera, no app, and no scheduling. Most teams decide who to invite with the resume review already built into their ATS. Teams without an ATS can use Puck's Lightweight ATS, which includes it. Puck never rejects anyone automatically, and a person makes every hiring decision.
Vivrelle used the AI Recruiter on roles that included warehouse and logistics associates, and cut phone screen time by 88%. AI Recruiter pricing is published on our pricing page.
Fountain is a hiring platform for frontline employers with many locations, in industries like retail, logistics, hospitality, and healthcare. It's built to run frontline hiring from the job post through onboarding, and it includes AI screening by voice.
Worth knowing: Fountain says it replaces your frontline ATS, so plan for a full switch, not an integration. That's a big change to make right before your busy season, so start it well ahead of time.
Paradox makes conversational hiring software for frontline and hourly roles. Its AI assistant, Olivia, talks with candidates over text and chat, answers their questions, and asks screening questions. You can buy Paradox as your ATS or add it on top of the one you already have. Workday completed its acquisition of Paradox in October 2025.
Worth knowing: candidates type their answers instead of talking them through. And neither Fountain nor Paradox publishes pricing, so expect a sales call.
If your problem is too many applicants and not enough hours to call them, start with ranking and same-day AI phone screens.
Keep them in a talent pool, and reach out before your postings go live. The best seasonal hire is often someone who already did the job. They know the store or the floor, they've been trained, and you know they show up. The same goes for silver medalists, the finalists you had no spot for.
It takes two steps:
It depends on how much control you need over who you hire.
A staffing agency finds and employs the workers for you. You get speed and flexibility. You also pay a markup on every hour worked, and you rarely choose who shows up.
Hiring directly usually costs less per worker. You pick every person, and they stay in your talent pool for next season. But you need a way to handle the volume yourself.
That's why many warehouses do both: an agency for surge coverage, and direct hiring for the people they want to keep.
It is if you're drowning in applicants and your team can't call them all back. Puck is strongest at two things: speed to a first conversation, and candidate experience.
Candidates take AI Recruiter screens from their phone, on their own time, in over 33 languages, with no app and no camera. In the Vivrelle case study, the team reviewed each screen in about three minutes instead of a 30-minute call. That saved about 140 hours of recruiter time.
When candidates are weighing several offers at once, hearing from people who already work there can tip the decision your way. On Puck's Pro plan and up, Puck produces short audio clips of your employees talking about their real experience, for your job pages and outreach. SKIMS used them, and hires from inbound applicants rose 83% within 90 days. Candidate quality improved 28%. And Puck's Talent CRM keeps past applicants searchable for next season.
Where Puck isn't the fit: Puck isn't a staffing agency, so we don't supply workers. Puck doesn't do shift scheduling, onboarding paperwork, or payroll. And Puck won't replace an enterprise ATS like Greenhouse, Lever, Pinpoint, or Ashby. It plugs into the one you already run.
You can try it yourself. Take Puck's AI Recruiter as a candidate at careerpuck.com/ai-recruiter-demo. It calls your phone (U.S. numbers only), so you hear what the screen sounds like to a candidate.
Want to see same-day phone screens on your seasonal roles? Book a demo.
Start recruiting six to eight weeks before your busy season, and post each role once to every major job board. Rank every applicant against your criteria, then screen the strongest by phone the same day instead of scheduling calls. Keep new hires updated until their first shift, since hourly candidates often take the first offer they get.
Start about six to eight weeks before your busy season. For holiday retail and warehouse work, that usually means September, when large employers announce their seasonal hiring. Teams that post after the rush starts end up competing for whoever is still looking.
A seasonal employee is a temporary worker hired for a predictable busy period. Examples include the holiday shopping season in retail and peak season in warehouses and logistics. The best seasonal employees are worth rehiring the next year, since they're already trained and you know they show up.
It depends on how much control you need. A staffing agency gives you speed and flexibility, but you pay a markup on every hour worked and rarely choose who shows up. Hiring directly usually costs less per worker and lets you pick every person. Many warehouses use an agency for surge coverage and hire directly for the people they want to keep.
Tag everyone you'd hire again in your applicant tracking system before they leave. Then, before next season's postings go live, send them a short email sequence with a direct link to the role, from an inbox someone reads. Finalists you couldn't hire last year are worth contacting too.
Cooper Leith is a Producer and Content Manager at Puck, where he leads content on recruiting technology, AI screening, and candidate experience. He also produces the audio stories Puck makes with customers' employees.
