United Parcel Service (UPS) said Wednesday it has begun an early push to bolster its seasonal ranks by more than 100,000 workers as it heads into the peak shipping season.
The Atlanta-based delivery company said seasonal full- and part-time positions are available for last mile delivery drivers, driver assistants, commercial drivers and package handlers.
UPS is hoping a digital application and hiring process will speed up the recruiting efforts, allowing applicants to bypass the need for interviews in most cases. It’s touting the fact that applicants can be hired in as quickly as 25 minutes in this digitally based recruiting process.
“We have made our hiring process as simple and easy as possible,” UPS executive vice president and president of U.S. operations Nando Cesarone said in a statement. “UPS’s strength has always been our people, and we are excited about the opportunity to welcome new UPSers to our team as we deliver what matters for our customers this holiday season.”
UPS said about a third of its seasonal hires last year, or about 35,000, transitioned into permanent positions, with delivery drivers earning an average of $95,000.
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A spokesperson for the company told Sourcing Journal Wednesday, the hiring count is about on par with recent years’ seasonal recruiting. About a third of UPS’ domestic workforce began as seasonal workers, with each year seeing a “significant number” of temporary workers transition to permanent status, the spokesperson added.
The upcoming holiday selling season is expected to be marked by inflation and the flatt online sales, according to Salesforce’s early read of the peak season in July.
The software company said 42 percent of shoppers expect to begin their holiday shopping early, motivated by getting ahead of inflation.
UPS CEO Carol Tomé was upbeat in the company’s most recent quarterly update in discussing the holidays.
“On peak [shipping season], we’re getting forecasts from all of our large customers now as we build our peak planning and we expect it to be a good peak,” Tomé told analysts in late July. “Inventory levels are good. Retailers are brought in to sell, where last year, they didn’t. So that should help the peak demand.”
UPS has been ramping its digital investments, which could help heading into holiday.
“We are moving from digital literacy to digital fluency,” Tomé told anlaysts.
That includes workforce training, but also encompasses automation in its package facilities. Two automated facilities in the UPS network are expected to be operational before the start of peak season. One of those is an 800,000-square-foot regional facility located in Harrisburg, Penn.
The company’s also using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology to speed up processing times by cutting out the need for workers to scan packages as they’re being loaded onto a vehicle. That technology is expected to be rolled out to 100 facilities this year.
As UPS invests in tech, it’s also employing a strategy it calls “Better Not Bigger” in its approach to the business, including where it will grow and where it will not, including pumping the breaks and bringing down the amount of volume it is contracted to deliver with its largest customer Amazon.
“We’ve contractually agreed on what makes sense for us versus what makes sense for them,” Tomé said in July of Amazon. “That means that both volume and revenue for Amazon [are] coming down. We project by the end of this year that Amazon revenue will be less than 11 percent of our total revenue. That gives us room to grow in the parts of the market that we want to grow like SMB and B2B and healthcare and others.”
SMBs accounted for 29.2 percent of UPS’s overall volume domestically in the quarter. Average daily volume from that shipping segment during the quarter rose 3.3 percent in the U.S.