3 Best Ways to Lock in Returning Seasonal Workers in 2022

Introduction

Approach One—Personal: Make direct contact with previous workers (by phone and email) and record yourself

Approach Two—Forms: Email job seekers links to provide information via “forms”

Approach Three—Campaign: Track and capture responses automatically using an email “campaign”

Conclusion

Are you seeing peak seasonal hiring time rolling around again and feeling the uncertainty of whether you’ll have enough workers?

We’ve seen growers lock in their returning workers up to five months in advance. This gives certainty to the workers and certainty to you. Some growers have been able to secure up to 60% of their workforce from returning workers alone. And they say that these are the workers who turn up when they say they will and they stay for the season.

The first step to get this underway is to get in touch and check their interest to come back for another season. It doesn’t just have to be workers from last year. Some workers will skip a season (or two) and still return to the same company.

Once you know they are interested, locking them in is as easy as sending them a link from PICMI. Make sure you collect three key pieces of data from them to enable you to forecast and secure them with a contract through PICMI.

But let’s go back to the beginning and step through the three ways you can contact returning workers to lock them in for your coming 2022-2023 season.

This is the default method by most employers. Get out your list of workers from last year and start working through it contacting people. We all have different ways of knowing who to contact because there are some people you know you don’t want to contact. For now, we are focusing on the majority of people that you do want to return.

When contacting people, we need to record the information. Both the original list and the ongoing information is stored either paper-based, on our computer or in the cloud. It’s best these days that it is stored digitally because we can contact people digitally and that means we don’t have to enter information repetitively. For example, if we send out an email having all the email addresses in a digital list means we can copy-and-paste the addresses into the emailer and avoid errors and save time.

We use various spreadsheet systems (e.g. Google Sheets, Excel, Airtable) to record information. That means whether people email you responses or talk to you, you still have to get that information into your spreadsheet.

Looking for alternatives to Google Sheets or Excel, try this google search (https://www.google.com/search?q=free+alternatives+to+Google+Sheets+or+Excel)

The second way focuses on getting the workers to enter the data rather than you. The main difference is that you set up an online form that captures all the information into a spreadsheet. The workers use the form to enter data and you store the data separately in the spreadsheet (so that it remains private). This approach still requires you to have your email list ready but instead of calling everyone to talk to them, your goal is to send them a link to the spreadsheet.

There are three main tasks:

Looking for alternatives to Google Forms, try this google search (https://www.google.com/search?q=Alternatives+to+Google+Forms+free)

The last and best way we have found is to use an email campaign system that sends out a series of emails as reminders and follow ups. Usually we design four emails in total. The first three all prompt the worker to enter the information we require. Between each email is a delay (we can set these to days or weeks) that reminds the worker to respond. At any point, they can also decline or unsubscribe. All of this is recorded and you can see reports at any time. A final email is when there is no response at all from the worker. This is recorded too. At the end of this campaign, you have a full set of data knowing their positive, negative or lack of response against each worker.

Looking for Email Campaign systems, try this google search (https://www.google.com/search?q=MailerLite+alternatives)

See our MailerLite video tutorials for doing an Email Direct Marketing (EDM) designed for securing returning workers. The campaign has a series of four emails that capture responses for the upcoming season.

Returning seasonal workers can be a great asset to your business, but it's important to make sure you're recruiting and retaining them in the most cost-effective way possible. We've outlined some of the pros and cons of different methods for doing so, and we hope you find one that works best for you.

PICMI perfectly fits with locking in these workers. First, it enables you to export details on your previous workers into an email campaign or direct campaign (eg. phone calls). Once you have contacted your workers, PICMI enables you to send a large volume of email invites to sign up returning workers. Finally, it allows you to track who has accepted and how many vacancies are remaining.

Good luck, and let us know if we can help!