Those with, without work to compete for seasonal jobs

By Laura Petrecca, USA TODAY

Seasonal job interviewees, it's time to play up your best guest-greeting and gift-wrapping skills: The battle for holiday employment is brutal.

With the national unemployment rate above 10%, and employed folks looking to bolster budgets by taking second jobs, the competition for retail, movie theater, package-delivery and other holiday posts is fierce.

"There are a lot more people looking for jobs this year," says Jennifer Grasz, a spokeswoman for online job site CareerBuilder.com. For instance, laid-off employees are competing with those who want to pad income after being hit with furloughs and pay cuts, she says.

About 1-in-8 employed workers plan to take on a seasonal job, according to a CareerBuilder.com survey. (CareerBuilder is jointly owned by Tribune, McClatchy, Microsoft and USA TODAY and KSDK parent Gannett.)

More than half of employers expect to get more applications than last year, according to a separate seasonal hiring survey by SnagAJob.com. At the same time, those managers expect to hire 16% fewer hourly workers.

CareerBuilder.com is more optimistic in its hiring outlook. It expects it to be on par with last year. However, 2008's hiring levels were dramatically lower than the previous five years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Yet, many big firms are cutting back. For instance, retail behemoth Target hopes to glean some savings by reducing its number of untrained new hires in favor of asking existing employees to work more shifts.

Video-game retailer GameStop, which has filled about 15,000 positions, received "significantly more applications than in past years," spokesman Charles Hodges says.

Toys R Us, which expects to hire 35,000 seasonal employees nationwide, has a pool "that's greater in numbers than in years past," spokeswoman Jennifer Albano says.

And for the unemployed who do secure a holiday position, the job could pay for years: One-third of companies are likely to hire a seasonal worker for a full-time position, according to the CareerBuilder survey. 

UPS, which reduced its seasonal hires to about 50,000 workers this year from about 60,000 two years ago, has a history of turning seasonal workers into permanent part-time or full-time staffers, spokeswoman Karen Cole says. CFO Kurt Kuehn started off as a holiday employee.

Some folks may not realize the longer-term potential that comes with working holiday shifts, Cole says, "but it might turn into something good."