Attracting Seasonal Help

During peak seasons, companies lure workers with creative perks such as outdoor recreation, beachfront housing and laundry services.

By Laurie Joan Aron

Every summer, JoAnne Dlott, vice president of human resources for the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in California, has to find 400 people to augment her year-round staff of 600. Free amusement park rides along with wages are just not enough to differentiate the facility from others that may be offering even cooler benefits. So the seaside amusement park has developed a program of enticements--from subsidized housing to organized beach volleyball games--to get people to choose Santa Cruz over a number of other terrific places to spend the summer.

With the competition for seasonal help fierce, employers are under pressure to get creative with enticements and benefits that will lure free-spirited prospective employees. Competitive recruiting efforts are starting to look a lot like those for full-time, year-round employees. Companies have hiring and completion bonuses, and even profit-sharing plans for returning employees.

"It's a tough market right now," says Jay Jamison, general manager of Pismo Coast Village RV Resort in California. The park adds 10 people to its regular 30 staffers for the three-month summer season.

Best Perks

Human resources and recruiting experts say the best benefits to attract seasonal workers are:


• Great location

• Free or subsidized housing

• Temporary health insurance

• Profit-sharing

• Hiring and completion bonuses

• Employee Assistance Programs providing counseling

• Organized and free recreation programs

• Internship credit

• Career-oriented jobs

• Coordinated benefits between opposite season employers

• Potential for "romance and adventure"

• Flexible hours

A Sprinkling of Standards

Traditional benefits packages with health insurance and a 401(k) are nearly non-existent, however. Health benefits are so expensive that most seasonal employers require 90 or even 120 days of employment before a health plan will kick in, effectively preventing seasonal workers from getting benefits. Retirement benefits usually start after an even longer period of continuous employment.

Bear Creek Corp., the Medford, Ore.-based catalog retailer best known for its Harry & David gift catalog, tries to get its seasonal staff to stick around for the health benefits. Someone consistently willing to put in time at Christmas and at various harvest seasons can become eligible for benefits in about six months. "We try to move people along a continuum from seasonal to year-round," says Becky Frederick, Bear Creek's employment center manager.

Telluride Ski & Golf Company in Telluride, Colo., offers seasonal employees some aspects of traditional benefits: access to an employee assistance program (EAP) offering counseling and various professional referrals, and limited health insurance coverage.

Work/life programs, already widespread in corporate America, also offer a potential boon to smaller, seasonal businesses trying to attract seasonal employees. These programs usually include an EAP as well as convenience services, such as dry cleaning. A company with a work/life program in place for year-round workers can usually make it accessible to seasonal workers at no additional cost, says Richard Federico, vice president and work/life practice leader at The Segal Company, a benefits consulting firm in New York.

"It's an opportunity to get something for nothing," he says. "In a tight market, offering a work/life program may even be a hook."

The Place to Be

Bill Berg's CoolWorks.com, the online seasonal employment service, tracks the places people want to work. Western states and Western national parks are at the top of the list.

California, Alaska, New York, Florida and Colorado attract the most seasonal staff while Glacier National Park in Montana, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona and Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado are the most popular national parks to work.

Using staffers from a temporary agency is one alternative for companies that are unable to offer traditional benefits to seasonal workers. Some retail chains and packaging/shipping companies stock up on seasonal employees but avoid the headaches of competing in the labor market and of offering concrete benefits by hiring through staffing companies--which screen appropriate candidates and may, in turn, provide health and retirement benefits to the workers.

For example, Illuminations, a retail chain based in Petaluma, Calif., will almost double its workforce this Christmas season--augmenting year-round employees with temporary staff-- according to Anne Jung, the company's office manager. That doesn't mean the company doesn't make an effort to be an attractive workplace. "Temp agencies call us and tell us people want to work here," says Jung. "The atmosphere is very laid-back and friendly."

Location, Location, Location

With the strong employee's market, and the ability to find jobs on the Web, many seasonal workers pick a location they'd really like to experience first and look for a job second. According to Bill Berg, president and founder of CoolWorks.com, a Gardiner, Mont.-based seasonal jobs site, the prime benefit any employer can offer is location. "It's do you want to work in Yellowstone or Mount Rushmore?" Berg says.

Awash in options, potential employees are asking, "Why should I work for you?" says Mel Kleiman, managing partner of Hire Tough Group, a recruiting strategies firm in Houston. "The only way to effectively recruit these folks is to offer what they want, and that's not just a paycheck."

Dlott's answer is a housing program that lets summer help live in a refurbished, beachfront hotel for $60 per week. "Living on the beach is highly attractive," she notes. But the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk goes on to offer an employee recreational program led by a full-time recreation director who organizes parties, games and raffles; discounts on food, movies and merchandise; free passes to the amusement park and free bus passes enabling workers to travel all over the area.

Josh Daiss, operations manager at the Palmer Gulch Lodge/Mount Rushmore KOA resort in Hill City, S.D., has a different approach to enticing seasonal employees. As in many campgrounds, seasonal employees are retired couples traveling the country and looking for a free, comfortable place to stay while they enjoy the surrounding area. Daiss gives them exactly what they're looking for. He reserves 10 deluxe RV sites with hook-ups for telephone and cable for these "workampers," who enjoy the privilege in exchange for a season's work. "They'll stay and work for a site just to get exposure to different parts of the country," says Daiss, whose maximum workforce of 100 is 20% seasonal.

Kleiman says Daiss and Dlott are using the right tactic: Employers need to tailor benefits to the type of people they're trying to attract and promote the positions appropriately. Whether you're offering money, a lot of fun or something in-between, the message should be clear.

Resources

Employee Benefits, 5th ed., by Burton T. Beam Jr. and John J. McFadden. 1998.

Long Island Horticultural News, www.cce.cornell.edu/Suffolk/horticulturenews/
march1998.html "Season and Temporary Workers: Special Considerations," by Kay Embrey, March 1998, discusses seasonal worker hiring, housing, employee-employer relations and cultural differences.

Pork Report, www.nppc.org/PorkReport/BackIssues/
emplmgmt3-97.html "Managing for the Future: Success with Seasonal Employees," by Bernie Erven, March 1997, outlines hiring, training, communication and daily supervision of seasonal farm workers.

Books are available at www.fatbrain.com

Learning While Playing

Nearly everyone, Kleiman argues, wants to have a learning experience. Many members of the Dude Ranchers' Association in LaPorte, Colo., offer seasonal hires a chance to combine a great job experience with professional development, says the association's co-executive director Jim Futterer. For example, the San Juan Guest Ranch in Ridgway, Colo., recruits agriculture and tourism students, packaging the summer ranch hand and hospitality positions as official internships. And the Dude Ranchers' Association offers a scholarship program for seasonal employees.

Even retail companies offer professional development. Bear Creek offers leadership and communications classes as a benefit to seasonal workers through its Bear Creek Academy.

These learning opportunities let prospective employees know that when the season is over, they'll be packing valuable job experience to take to their next career step. The multicultural nature of the seasonal workforce, often heavy on international exchange students, is in itself a valuable experience. Dlott notes that she recruits internationally partly for the purpose of offering a multicultural experience to each employee.

"What we hear from everybody is that their seasonal job was a great line on their résumé, that they got business experience and customer experience, that they met people from all over the world," Berg says. "They say it was a good gig."

Keep Them Coming Back

To counter seasonal employees' tendency to leave early--whether to get back to college or because they have an itch to move on--completion bonuses are becoming common. Up to $1 per hour worked is paid as a lump-sum bonus to people completing their contracted time. These kinds of baited hooks act to keep people from letting their restlessness or homesickness spur an early departure. With many resorts working past their normal peak seasons to accommodate older travelers with more free time, seasonal benefits get even more creative, with housing and meals suddenly becoming free.

For employees looking for endless vacation, summer and winter resorts are pairing up to offer coordinated benefits. They actively cross-recruit with their seasonal opposites to keep a good employee moving between the beach and the ski slopes for a few years.

At Mt. Bachelor ski resort in Bend, Ore., Pat Gerhart, the director of human resources, hires 650 seasonal employees for the ski season--lasting from December through April--out of a total of 850 employees. Gerhart says that young employees have become "wiser" and now want health benefits. She's experimenting to team up with neighboring summer resorts to offer a full-time job with traditional health benefits shared between two facilities with opposite peak seasons.

At the moment, however, she's primarily relying on free ski passes and lessons, deep discounts on food and ski equipment, and the "slower-paced" atmosphere of Bend that many prefer to competing Aspen and Vail--where the cost of living is also much higher. Because of this variety of benefits, Gerhart says, "we get a lot of people who come for one season and stay for six or seven."

With their low wages and basic room and board, dude ranches and national parks have learned to promote the possibilities for romance, adventure and simple camaraderie. "It's the romanticism of the wild, wild West," Berg says.

Laurie Joan Aron, a New York-based freelancer, writes regularly about business topics for Crain's New York Business, Fortune Small Business Online, Global Supply Chain Technology News and other publications. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Daily News and HR Briefing.

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