Seasonal Workers Aiming for Permanent Position
October is when companies start to add "seasonal workers" for the holidays. Last month, retailers added about 151,000 temporary hires. That's three times as many as they hired a year ago.
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Many are finding that a foot in the door often leads to something more permanent, CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports.
At UPS, Kevin Reagor started as holiday help. He worked hard, and UPS re-packaged his seasonal job two years ago into a permanent one.
"Came in early and stayed late and the opportunity did come up," Reagor said.
Reagor has risen to a UPS operations supervisor. Like UPS, many companies look at seasonal jobs as an audition to see who's worth keeping.
Here's the bigger picture on this year's seasonal employees: Best Buy's hiring 29,000 people; Macy's hiring 65,000; Kohl's 40,000.
In all, an estimated 600,000 seasonal were hired. For many of them, it's a short-term paycheck with the hope of something more.
The good news? CareerBuilder.com - an employment website - surveyed companies hiring seasonal help. How many intend to make some permanent job offers? This year: 40 percent of them. Last year: only 31 percent. That's a bight spot in this often jobless recovery.
"Firms are really confident that this season is going to be great," said Emory University labor economist Thomas Smith. "Hopefully this will transition into more full-time jobs and eventually a lower unemployment rate."
At Sur La Table - a boutique kitchen chain - Meredith Moon's a seasonal hire hoping for bigger things.
"You have to do your best and hope the boss likes you and says, 'Hey, would you like to stay?'" Moon said.
But competition's keen.
UPS is now hiring 50,000 seasonal employees, and its jobs website is averaging a million hits a week, many of them people looking to become the next Kevin Reagor.
"Be ambitious, come in and work hard and if you want to move up, you've got to act like it," Reagor said.
Moon intends to do just that, hoping she'll still work for Sur La Table during next year's holiday season.
