Why hire seasonal associates if you are not going to be able to give them hours?! We barely have hours for the regular associates. This is why everyone leaves and turn over is so high. Sears invest all this money on the new hire process (paperwork, d--g test, background test, training, etc) and then the person quits because of no hours. You would think they would just invest in the people we nave now. This company is run by a bunch of baboons. Week after week my store gets hit with at least 15 appliacants, some are not interested because of c-ap pay and hours , some dont show, and the rest just dont show up after their first shift. It just makes no sense.
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I forgot to add, it could be some kind of move made by the company to assuage concerns abour its viability. Since all retailers are hiring for the holidays, it would look bad if Sears and Kmart did not hire seasonals. There would be increased speculation that Sears/Kmart is doing bad if they are not hiring seasonals.
So, what is probably happening is that they are going to hire all these people just to say to investors, the media and Wall Street analysts that they are "strong enough" to have a need for extra staff in their stores, even though many stores probably don't need seasonals anyway since foot traffic in Q4 has rapidly declined at Sears/Kmart, a fact they are trying to hide. If they didn't show that they hired seasonals, would display a lack of confidence in the company's ability to perform, if that makes sense.
Investors and analysts will never see the fact that these seasonals will probably get something like 50 hours throughout the entire holiday season (if that). They will just see "we hired 10,000 seasonal associates" when Q4 is discussed.
HR has to keep busy. Seriously. They have to seem useful so they don't get cut. When it's your job to hire people you keep hiring people.
Not that I agree with this practice, but they are probably doing it for tax incentives. Hire x amount of workers, get this much of a tax break.
I also think they do this to keep some workers on "standby" or "in reserve" in case of call outs, absences, no-shows or people quitting without notice. This is an issue for some stores more than others. Turnover for Sears and Kmart seems like it might be higher than the average for retail, and retail turnover is pretty bad.
It's self defeating because those new hires are going to quit if they don't get the hours, and word surely gets around among job seekers about these kinds of practices. It's not cheap to hire someone either. It's about $1500 per new hire, so they are wasting their money if they don't intend to retain the people they are hiring.