Planning a seasonal peak intake: a practical timeline
Most peak staffing problems are planning problems that surface six weeks too late. Here is a working timeline for a large seasonal intake.
Recruiting eighty people is not recruiting one person eighty times. The constraint is rarely the candidate market — it is usually your own onboarding and training capacity, and the number of compliance checks that can realistically be completed in a week.
Eight weeks out: agree the shape
- Map your volume forecast week by week, not as a single total.
- Establish how many new starters your site can genuinely induct per week.
- Agree the roles, shift patterns and rates before sourcing begins.
- Decide what attrition you are planning for — assuming everyone who accepts will start is the single most common planning error.
Six weeks out: begin sourcing
A dedicated attraction campaign beats working the standing candidate base alone for anything above about thirty people. This is also the point to run group screening sessions if volumes justify them, because consistency across a large intake matters more than individual assessment depth.
Four weeks out: compliance in waves
Compliance should run in parallel waves aligned to your intake schedule. Processing everyone at once creates a bottleneck; processing only the first wave leaves the third wave exposed. The aim is a rolling pipeline where each week's starters are cleared a week before they start.
Two weeks out: confirm and brief
- Confirm start dates directly with each worker, not through a list.
- Brief honestly on what the role involves — poor briefing is the largest single cause of first-week drop-off.
- Issue site details, parking, transport and dress requirements in writing.
- Re-confirm attendance the day before the first shift.
During peak: measure what matters
Fill rate against plan, first-day attendance, and week-one retention. Those three numbers tell you whether the programme is working while you can still do something about it. A report at the end of peak is a post-mortem, not management information.
Shorter lead times are workable. The trade-off is a smaller candidate pool and more attrition — and that trade-off should be stated openly, not discovered in week three.
