TAMPA, Fla. — Have you started on your holiday shopping lists? Even though we aren't yet past Halloween, the holiday season is months of planning in the making for mail delivery services like UPS.
"Everyone knows, for us, the holiday season is the busiest time of the year," said Yanina Hernandez-Bynum, the Florida District Human Resources Director for UPS. "Although we're starting to believe there is no downtime."
UPS is hiring an additional 100,000 employees nationwide for season positions. In Tampa, about 500 seasonal positions were added.
To stay competitive in a growingly difficult job market, UPS is offering incentives for referrals from existing employees.
"It gives them the opportunity to earn $200 for every successful referral," said Hernandez-Bynum. "So every referral that they give us that is hired, that works through the holiday season, they can receive $200."
Hernandez-Bynum said UPS rehires roughly one-third of the seasonal workers for permanent positions. There biggest challenge in staffing up for the holidays: time.
"Time is always a challenge because we look to do it in such a short period of time," said Hernandez-Bynum. "But we try to get creative with that as well."
Seasonal positions at UPS include warehouse workers, package delivery drivers, personal vehicle drivers, driver helpers and tractor-trailer drivers.
On the UPS jobs website, you can see how many jobs are available in different cities across the country. Jobs with hourly pay listed range from $15 to $23 an hour. Other jobs without an hourly rate listed are entry-level.