• Insight

10 Steps to Optimise Your Holiday Hiring with AI

The days leading up to Christmas, Boxing Day, and New Year’s create an overwhelming demand for additional staff, particularly in industries like retail, logistics, and customer service. With increased foot traffic, online orders, and customer inquiries, businesses must ramp up their recruitment efforts quickly and efficiently to stay competitive. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes into play. By leveraging AI-driven tools, programmatic job advertising, and recruitment marketing platforms like Reach and Vision, companies can reduce costs, save time, and secure top Gen Z talent and early career talents during this critical seasonal surge.

Here are 10 simple steps to optimise your holiday hiring using AI.

1. How Can AI Improve Candidate Targeting?

AI-powered recruitment tools can help businesses target the right candidates, especially when hiring for Gen Z recruitment. AI analyses behavioural data and identifies where the most promising candidates are spending their time online. This allows you to place job ads in front of the right eyes, reducing the chances of wasted spend and speeding up hiring of the right candidate to fill available roles.

For example, Reach, our programmatic advertising platform can automate job ad placements across multiple platforms, ensuring your roles are seen by high-quality early career candidates, increasing efficiency, and cutting down on unqualified applicants. We work with major job boards like Indeed and Glassdoor as well as more niche platforms that target flexible workers like students and temporary staff - perfect for holiday hiring.

2. How Can AI Make Job Ad Placement More Efficient?

During the holiday season, it’s vital to get job ads in front of potential hires as quickly as possible. Traditional methods of manually posting ads on job boards can take time and may not always be effective. AI-powered tools allow you to use programmatic advertising to automate the process.

Reach, our programmatic advertising platform optimises ad placements by using algorithms to place job ads across a variety of platforms and continually adjusts based on performance. This ensures your recruitment budget is used wisely and that ads are reaching the right candidates at the right time. For more information on how AI can elevate your hiring strategy, book a demo with our experts and start attracting top early careers now.

3. How Can You Tailor Your Messaging to Attract Gen Z?

Gen Z values transparency, flexibility, and personalisation. When crafting job descriptions or recruitment messages, it’s essential to speak their language and appeal to what matters most to them. Personalised messaging that highlights opportunities for growth, work-life balance, and corporate values can greatly enhance your recruitment success. For more of an in-depth look at how you can attract Gen Z talent, join our online webinar on the 11th October where we will be discussing how you can attract Gen Z talent with your employer brand.

With Vision, you can create targeted recruitment campaigns that speak directly to Gen Z candidates by highlighting what matters most to them, such as growth opportunities, company culture, and work-life balance. This level of personalisation helps your company stand out in the competitive holiday hiring landscape.

4. How Does AI Streamline Candidate Screening?

Candidate screening can be time-consuming, especially during the holiday surge when you're handling hundreds of applications. AI can streamline this process by automatically filtering applications based on specific job criteria like skills, experience, and qualifications, ensuring only the most relevant candidates are shortlisted.

Vision automates candidate screening by filtering out applicants who don’t meet the set criteria. This saves your HR team time, allowing them to focus on interviewing top-tier candidates rather than sorting through unqualified applications.

5. Can AI Help You Reach Passive Candidates?

Not all candidates actively search for jobs, but that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in new opportunities—especially Gen Z talent. AI can help you reach passive candidates by using programmatic advertising to place job ads where these individuals spend their time online, such as on social media or specialised forums.

With Reach, you can target passive candidates who may not be actively job-hunting but are open to hearing about new roles. This expands your talent pool beyond just active job seekers and can help you fill seasonal positions with quality hires more efficiently. AI is shaping the recruitment world so don’t miss out! Book a demo with us and start hiring now.

6. How Can AI Automate Candidate Engagement?

Engaging candidates throughout the recruitment process is crucial, especially when competing for Gen Z talent acquisition during the holiday rush. AI chatbots and automated communication tools can be used to keep candidates informed, answer their questions, and help them through each stage of the application process.

Vision can automate follow-up emails, interview scheduling, and provide real-time updates, ensuring candidates feel valued and engaged throughout the recruitment journey. This kind of automated interaction is particularly useful for larger organisations managing high volumes of applicants during peak hiring seasons.

7. How Can AI Help You Optimise Job Descriptions?

AI can provide insights into which job descriptions perform best, allowing you to tweak your listings for optimal performance. For example, AI might reveal that certain keywords attract more early career talent, or that shorter job descriptions perform better for Gen Z recruitment.

Using Vision, you can analyse the effectiveness of your job descriptions and make data-driven adjustments that improve candidate engagement. By refining your job listings, you can attract higher-quality candidates more quickly, especially during the fast-paced holiday hiring season.

8. Can AI Help Reduce Recruitment Costs?

AI helps reduce recruitment costs by automating processes that would otherwise require manual effort. From job ad placements to candidate screenings, AI reduces the time and resources needed to manage the holiday hiring surge.

With Reach, you can ensure that your recruitment advertising budget is used efficiently. By automating and optimising ad placements, Reach prevents overspending on ineffective job boards and ensures your budget goes towards reaching the most relevant candidates. This not only cuts costs but also increases the ROI of your recruitment efforts.

9. How Can AI Improve Diversity in Hiring?

Diversity is a priority for many companies, and AI can help improve diversity in early career recruitment. AI-driven recruitment tools are designed to reduce human biases by focusing purely on the candidate’s qualifications, skills, and experience. This ensures that your hiring decisions are based on merit, not unconscious biases.

Using Vision, you can set filters that remove identifiers like names or photos to prevent bias in the screening process. This helps create a more inclusive recruitment process, especially important when hiring a diverse workforce for the holiday season.

10. How Can Data from AI Help You Make Informed Hiring Decisions?

One of the biggest advantages of using AI in recruitment is the ability to collect and analyse data. AI tools track everything from candidate engagement to ad performance, providing valuable insights that help optimise your recruitment strategy.

Vision provides advanced analytics that allows you to see which job ads are working, where your top candidates are coming from, and how quickly you're filling roles. This data-driven approach enables you to adjust your strategy in real-time, ensuring your recruitment process remains agile during the holiday rush.

Is AI the Key to Successful Holiday Hiring?

The holiday season brings a unique set of recruitment challenges, but AI-driven tools can help streamline the process and make it more efficient. From reaching the right candidates at the right time to reducing costs and improving candidate engagement, AI allows you to optimise your holiday hiring strategy for success. Our programmatic job advertising platform, Reach, and Vision provides the AI-powered solutions you need to recruit top Gen Z talent and early career hires efficiently, even during the busiest time of the year.

Ready to optimise your holiday hiring strategy with AI? Book a demo today to see how our Reach and Vision can help you streamline your recruitment efforts, reduce costs, and attract top talent.