The holiday season is a time when many companies start bolstering their staffing levels to accommodate for a sudden influx of customers during the latter part of the year. This creates an ideal situation for temporary workers on the hunt for employment opportunities. The positions themselves may not last long, but many contractors take these kinds of positions knowing that there is a chance that it can be converted into a more permanent opportunity.
A recent report from CBS News revealed that big-box retail outlet Walmart announced plans to hire more than 60,000 people to help with the holiday rush. This increase is 10 percent higher than the number of contract workers the company brought on last year.
"We monitor traffic patterns, and we want to make sure we have adequate staffing," Kayla Whiting, a Walmart spokesperson told CBS. The company joins the likes of Kohl's, UPS and FedEx as companies looking to hire staff on a temporary basis in preparation for the holiday shopping season.
The contract workforce has steadily grown in size since the Great Recession. As companies put a hold on making permanent hires, but still needed essential job duties conducted, they began to rely heavily on temporary workers. Conversely, many of these supplemental staffers enjoyed the freedoms that came with working in positions that were not permanent.
So much so that a recent article from People Management, an HR magazine based in the U.K., predicted that 20 percent of the global workforce, within a span of eight years would either be remote employees or temporary.
"We predict that many organizations will embrace these changes in employee working preferences and use them to their own advantage," Jon Andrews, HR consulting leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the U.K., told the magazine. "We could easily see the rise of organizations that have a core team that embodies the philosophy and values of the company, but the rest of the workforce is not fixed and come in and out on a project-by-project basis."