Holiday job postings are a little more plentiful this year, but that’s hardly a respite for job seekers as competition for those positions is expected to be tough with unemployment still elevated, a new report shows. Indeed Canada’s holiday hiring trends report released Wednesday finds seasonal postings so far this winter are up 12% from last year, though still weak relative to earlier years.
“After two down years, we’ve seen the seasonal hiring appetite actually come in a bit stronger than last year,” said Indeed Canada’s senior economist Brendon Bernard, who also authored the report.
Bernard said demand for seasonal workers generally mimics the broader state of the economy. The last two holidays were overshadowed by high interest rates and inflation, which tempered businesses’ hiring appetite as households reined in spending. This year, however, consumer spending seems to be stabilizing as many retailers report “a fairly solid year,” Bernard said.
Sandra Lavoy, metro market director with Robert Half, agrees that the holiday job market is looking a bit healthier this year. Lavoy said this comes after several industries—such as service and retail—have been running their businesses with lean staffing. But with the holiday season around the corner, it’s harder to maintain those levels. “When you look at seasonal work, it’s about two months, maybe, three months,” she said. “You have no choice because the business does increase significantly.”
Temporary holiday work in high demand
But landing a holiday job is not as easy as it was a few years ago. The report shows more Canadians are searching for work. The October labour market report from Statistics Canada shows the unemployment rate remains elevated at 6.9%, despite a couple months of surprising job gains.
Indeed Canada tracks holiday-related job postings on its website, parsing through listings for mentions of words such as Christmas, Xmas, Santa, holiday, and other related terms. It also tracks job seeker searches for these terms. The report says the share of job seeker searches on Indeed containing seasonal job-related terms has increased. In early November, about three out of every 1,000 Canadian job searches included a holiday-related term, up slightly from a year earlier, and meaningfully higher from November 2023 and 2022, at 2.5 and 2.2, respectively.
“Stronger interest in seasonal work isn’t a great sign for the health of the overall labour market,” the report said, adding that it could indicate some are considering seasonal work to make ends meet. That has likely made it more difficult to land a temporary job when compared to previous years, Bernard said. “That might cause folks, who would in other times prefer to work a more stable permanent job, needing to look for temporary work just for now,” he said.
Seasonal hiring slower than summer months
The weak labour market created a competitive environment for seasonal jobs in the summer, but Bernard said it’s hard to gauge whether the holiday hiring season will also be that fierce. While there are some similarities in economic conditions, the labour demand and types of hiring are starkly different for the summer season, Bernard said. “There’s a lot more hiring that happens in the summer than around the holidays, just because there’s so much more work that gets done over the summer months,” he said.
Unlike this winter season, where postings are slightly higher, Indeed Canada’s summer hiring report showed summer job postings had dropped 22% in May year-over-year. “We did see a bit of a change in direction (this winter), which is good to see, even if it’s not going to be a roaring market,” Bernard said.
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