Seasonal hiring is shrinking while retail quits climb, and that puts more weight on how quickly each new hire becomes useful.
Ask a store manager how long it takes a new holiday hire to work a shift without asking for help, and the honest answer is rarely a number. It depends on who is on the floor, which questions come up, and whether anyone has a spare minute to answer them.
Tushneem Dharmagadda, CEO and founder of workforce experience and operations platform HubEngage, says onboarding at many frontline organizations is inconsistent: training is delayed, managers answer the same questions repeatedly, and new hires take longer than necessary to become productive. This season the gap costs more, because retailers are again planning to add fewer people than last year, which was already the smallest holiday class since 2008.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas projects that retailers will add about 450,000 seasonal jobs in the fourth quarter of 2026, according to its holiday hiring outlook published in September. That is just under the 461,500 added in the same quarter of 2025, which was itself 15 percent below the year before. Retailers, the firm says, are leaning on existing staff, automation and on-demand pools before committing to large seasonal waves, a more targeted approach than the pre-pandemic playbook.
A Smaller Wave, Constant Churn
A net gain of 450,000 hides how many people actually start a job, because retailers also replace everyone who leaves. In August, retail trade recorded about 667,000 hires, or 4.3 percent of employment, up from 3.6 percent a year earlier, according to preliminary figures from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Quits reached 3.0 percent of employment, against 2.4 percent in August 2025 and 2.1 percent across all private industry. A store that hires and loses people at that pace is onboarding all the time, and a smaller seasonal class means each person in it has to be ready sooner.
The economics are plain even without a spreadsheet. Every hour a new hire spends waiting for an answer is paid time without full output, and every hour a manager spends giving that answer is an hour not spent on customers or on the people who already know the job. Multiply that by a crew that turns over this quickly and the cost sits in the places a payroll report does not show.
The first weeks matter beyond December, too. Challenger’s report notes that one national craft retailer said nearly half of last year’s seasonal in-store roles converted to regular positions. For retailers that use the holiday season as a recruiting channel, what a new hire experiences in the first week is part of the decision to stay.
Why the First Week Drags
As Dharmagadda frames it, a frontline employee does not want to log into several systems to check a schedule, read an announcement, find a policy or take a short training. The friction is the same for a seasonal hire on a first shift. He describes it from the manager’s side too: a store manager does not want to spend hours answering repeated questions, chasing training completion and sending reminders by hand, and the goal is to give managers more time leading people than managing systems.
Seasonal retail adds a second problem, which is that the material keeps changing. Promotions start and end, return windows extend, and store procedures shift for the rush, so onboarding content written in October can be out of date by Black Friday. Meanwhile, the manager who would explain the changes is covering the floor. New hires pick up part of the job from whoever is standing nearby, and what they learn depends on who that is.
Questions as a Map
On AI, Dharmagadda is specific about where the value is. An assistant that answers questions about policies, procedures or benefits can spare an employee from hunting through documents or tracking down HR, he says, but only after the company has organized its information and given the assistant access to it. Without that groundwork, the answers are only as good as what went in.
He sees a second benefit that suits a new hire’s first weeks. “If employees repeatedly ask questions that cannot be answered, that tells you where your policies, manuals or communications need to improve,” he says. A retailer that watches what seasonal hires ask in the first week learns what its training left out, and it can fix that before the next group arrives.
Where HubEngage Fits
HubEngage is built to carry the repeatable part of that first week on a phone. Its employee app is a single branded app that new hires can install by scanning a QR code. Communications, short lessons, knowledge checks and policy reminders reach new hires through it, along with the AI assistant and short pulse checks that ask how the first week is going, which gives a manager an early read on how people are doing.
For a store, that means the content changes as fast as the season does. Product knowledge updates, promotions, store procedures, safety reminders and customer service expectations can be pushed to new hires as they change instead of being printed once, and recognition can mark a strong first week in the same place. Dharmagadda is careful about the limits. The aim, as he describes it, is not to replace managers but to leave them more time for people, because human connection still has to happen.
The setup scales with the size of the retailer. A smaller operator can use it in place of a scattered set of tools for onboarding, communications and training. A larger retailer that already runs HR, payroll and formal learning systems can keep them as the systems of record, with HubEngage connecting to them as the layer new hires and store managers open each day. Faster time to productivity is the first outcome it is aimed at, followed by fewer repeated questions for managers and more consistent answers from one store to the next.
With fewer seasonal workers arriving this year and more turnover underneath them, a retailer has little slack to spend a third week discovering what a new hire never learned. The case for moving the repeatable part of onboarding onto a phone is that it frees limited management time for the parts of the job that need a person.
