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Seasonal work: Six tips for snagging that temporary job

When it comes to quickly adding hundreds of thousands of workers to payrolls, nothing does the trick quite like the holidays. Companies will add hundreds of thousands of workers in the run-up to Christmas. Here are six tips to help you get one of those temporary jobs:

2. Smile!

Ben Margot/AP/File
In this 2010 photo, a Target store advertises for employment in Daly City, Calif. Retailers including Toys R Us and Macy's plan to hire more temporary holiday workers this season than last year.

  • By David Unger Correspondent

The ability to put your best foot forward in the face of hordes of desperate shoppers is no small task, but it's a quality employers look for in an applicant. "One of hiring managers' top pet peeves is a lack of enthusiasm," Jennifer Grasz, spokeswoman for CareerBuilder.com, an online job site, said in a phone interview. If you can't muster a show of energy for the interview, how will you do so when fielding calls from irate customers?

There is reason to smile in 2012. 

Holiday retail sales were expected to increase 4.1 percent to $586.1 billion, according to the National Retail Federation's 2012 projection. That's the best total since the Great Recession.

Retailers are expected to hire 700,000 employees in the final three months of the year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement firm. That's better than the 660,000 hired last year and the highest since the Great Recession, but not quite the 722,000 average in the 2004-07 period.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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