Dive Brief:

• Lowe's Companies, Inc. plans to hire more than 53,000 full-time, part-time and seasonal workers this spring in its more than 1,700 U.S. stores, according to a Jan. 2 announcement.
• During the next three months, Lowe's will hold walk-in hiring events. The events, during which candidates may receive on-the-spot job offers, will begin as early as Jan. 8 in states that expect spring weather the soonest.
• According to the retailer, full- and part-time hires will have access to benefits, including Lowe's career advancement and development opportunities.

Dive Insight:

It appears Lowe's and other household names aren't letting the tight talent market thwart hiring plans, adopting different strategies to attract applicants.

Another retailer in the home improvement space, Home Depot, announced in early 2019 a plan to hire 80,000 workers for the spring season. Home Depot revealed that it was using new recruiting technology to speed up the job fulfillment process. In fact, in 2018, the retailer introduced another hiring tech tool called Candidate Self Service, which allows its store and supply-chain candidates to set up their own interviews. Home Depot claimed in its hiring announcement last year that 1 million candidates had used the self-service tool.

Amazon announced in September its plan to hire 30,000 full- and part-time workers with a range of skills, experiences and educational levels. In the company's hiring announcement, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos noted Amazon "has created more than 300,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the last decade." He pointed out, too, that the jobs offer competitive compensation, benefits and training opportunities in high-demand fields such as robotics and machine learning.

Although retail giants announce mass seasonal hiring at different times each year, they plan so far in advance that experts sometimes refer to their strategies as year-round recruiting. Sizing up these hiring challenges for retailers, Rebecca Henderson, Randstad Sourceright's CEO, previously told HR Dive that companies must be proactive in their seasonal hiring. "Employers want to attract the top talent before their competitors do, and seasonal workers offer employers the ability to test out new employees before hiring them as year-round, contingent or permanent hires," Henderson said.