The Guide to Temporary Warehouse Staff for BFCM

The Reality - Black Friday Cyber Monday Order Avalanche

Despite its name, the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) event is not just a single weekend. Merchants often plan months in advance, launch promotions weeks ahead, and deal with a large backlog for their warehouse and fulfillment teams during the holiday season.

BFCM strives to give consumers an exceptional experience, but an overwhelming number of orders can hinder this. This extreme volume of orders in a short period of time – with the same team and resources – inevitably results in delayed fulfillment times, more support emails, and team burnout as everyone tries to keep up.

The Challenge - Effectively Onboarding Temporary Staff

To combat this, many merchants will consider hiring temporary warehouse staff to help dig out from underneath the operational backlog. Since temporary employees are often only needed for a few weeks, it can be challenging to onboard them effectively.

As your full-time team devotes time and resources to training seasonal staff, it becomes crucial to ensure this process runs smoothly. Otherwise, you will face longer fulfillment times, higher shipping costs, and lower profitability as a result.

3 Things to Consider when Hiring Temporary Warehouse Staff

To make sure your temporary staff can hit the ground running, here are some core concepts to consider:

1. Staffing Agencies vs In-House Hiring

Both staffing agencies and hiring directly can be effective strategies for finding seasonal help depending on your location and labor market.

LSKD's warehouse team grew by over 240 temporary workers during the 2021 BFCM season, all of whom were hired directly. Despite using group interviews to streamline this process, onboarding still took a significant lift from the LSKD team—but ultimately resulted in a group of dedicated employees who align with their brand and culture.

In other geographies, staffing agencies can also be an effective tool to use to supplement your team. They can quickly and efficiently source large numbers of pre-vetted candidates based on your requirements. Note that while you can provide criteria to a staffing agency, it can be difficult to filter candidates as effectively as doing in house hiring yourself.

In either case, look for candidates who show a genuine interest in the product, industry, and brand that your company is building, and approach each hire with a long-term mindset - there’s nothing better than finding an exceptional seasonal worker that you want to hire long term.

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Click here to access and make a copy of our BFCM Staffing Planner!

2. Create Standard Operating Procedures

Merchants should prepare Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for any tasks that temporary employees will be performing. The SOP should outline the exact step-by-step workflows they will need to follow.

Using a bundle picking example, illustrate the difference between picking a pre-kitted bundle and on-the-fly bundles. A new team member might confuse these two without a document explicitly defining the difference, and explaining how to differentiate them. One requires a single stop on the picking route, while the other requires walking to multiple locations.

With Fulfil, our WMS intelligently routes pickers to the right locations in real time, and prompts users when a scan is required, making this process even easier to explain and document.

You can learn more about what SOPs to create in a future post (subscribe so it hits your inbox)!

3. Leverage Technology to Automate Workflows

It is important that your WMS is configured so new employees can hit the ground running, ship orders quickly, and ultimately make your customers happy! With a product like Fulfil, you can consider using:

Automation Rule Builder

• Merchants use the Automation Rule Builder to automate a wide variety of workflows that are otherwise extremely manual. To eliminate human decision-making, for example, an Automation Rule can be configured for automatic carrier rate and selection.
• In an upcoming post, we’ll share more information about Automation Rules.

Batching Templates

• Batching Templates are used to group together customer shipments according to a specific set of criteria. To illustrate this idea, a jewelry merchant could create a Batching Template that groups shipments containing higher value items together. The Mejuri team has leveraged Fulfil for this exact use-case, to ensure these high-value shipment batches can be handled by a more experienced team member.
• Keep an eye out for an upcoming article which outlines the Top 4 Batching Templates for BFCM 2022.

What’s Next?

By following the above recommendations, you can provide a faster, more efficient onboarding process for your temporary BFCM employees. This means less time and resources spent in training, and a shorter period before they hit the ground running.

Don’t forget to access and make a copy of the BFCM Staffing Planner, and subscribe to keep an eye out for more posts coming soon about SOPs, Batching Templates, and Automation Opportunities.

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