Year-end seasonal hiring predicted to be lowest since 2008

Santa needs fewer elves in the workshop this year.

This year’s forecast for seasonal hiring in retail is the lowest since 2008, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm that tracks seasonal hiring trends.

The firm predicts an additional 410,000 seasonal positions will be posted this year. In contrast, retailers added about 100,000 more jobs over the same period last year.

“There’s still going to be hiring that’s happening; 400,000 jobs isn’t nothing,” SVP Andy Challenger told Yahoo Finance. “We’re not hearing quite the scramble that we heard the last three years with companies offering no interview positions, hearing back from applications within 30 minutes because it was so competitive. That atmosphere seems to have cooled this season.”

Challenger pointed to increased interest rates, and the tight labor market, as contributing factors. Retailers, he suggested, are wary to raise prices on consumers.

“When I talk to HR leaders, when I talk to companies, they are feeling the crunch in the people part of the equation of their companies right now. Labor costs have gotten much higher over the last few years,” Challenger said. “But the labor market has continued to cool in step with a cooling overall economy. We’ve seen month-after-month of that now, and while we think it has slowed—the cooling slowed a little bit the last two or three months—we do expect it to pick back up as companies come to this conclusion that they’re not going to be able to pass on all of those extra labor costs to consumers in increased prices.”

The Amazon exception. Amazon is—so far—the lone outlier.

The online retailer announced plans last month to hire an additional 250,000 seasonal employees, the most since Challenger began tracking hiring moves in 2012.

“This announcement from Amazon was a big surprise to the upside,” he noted. “Since we put out this report, last year, they had only announced 150,000…so 250,000 is a big increase. There are certainly going to be players that are hiring to their payrolls during the holiday season that need extra help.”