UPS hiring for winter holiday rush holds steady above 100,000

UPS plans to hire more than 100,000 workers to help handle the holiday rush this season, in line with its holiday hiring the past two years.

Holiday season volumes usually start rising in October and remain high into January. While online shopping has slowed from the height of the pandemic, it’s still well above historic norms.

UPS says it will have job openings for full- and part-time seasonal positions, primarily package handlers, drivers and driver helpers.

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UPS promotes seasonal jobs as positions that can lead to year-round employment. In recent years, according to UPS, roughly 35% of people hired for seasonal package-handling jobs land permanent positions.

Its seasonal drivers start at $21 an hour, with tractor-trailer drivers making as much as $35 an hour. Package handlers’ starting wages range from $15 to $21 an hour.

With a streamlined hiring process, most hires require only 25 minutes – from filling out an online application to receiving an offer, according to Danelle McCusker Rees, the company’s president of human relations. That’s down five minutes from last year.

The job market remains just as competitive as it was last year, Rees, who started as a seasonal worker, said in an interview.

Employers added 315,000 jobs in August, about what economists had expected, down from an average 487,000 a month over the past year, according to a government report a week ago.

The nation’s jobless rate reached 3.7%, the highest level since February. But it rose for a healthy reason: Hundreds of thousands of people went back to the job market, and some didn’t find work right away, which boosted the government’s count of unemployed people.