Dive Brief:

• UPS plans to hire more than 100,000 seasonal employees to handle an expected influx of packages during the peak shipping season, the company announced last week.
• The seasonal jobs will be filled at hundreds of UPS locations across the country. Open positions include delivery and CDL drivers, package handlers and driver helpers, according to a news release.
• The release said UPS' digital-first hiring process means job offers for most roles can occur in as little as 25 minutes. “We have made our hiring process as simple and easy as possible,” said Nando Cesarone, executive vice president and U.S. president, in a statement.

Dive Insight:

UPS' peak season hiring goals mirror what the company aimed for in 2020 and 2021, despite last year's holiday volumes settling in below company expectations. CEO Carol Tomé said during a July earnings call that the company expects "a good peak" this year as its customers' inventory levels are in better shape to meet demand.

Now, the company is ramping up hiring to ensure reliable service during the high-stakes period. It’s not alone — the U.S. Postal Service announced its own peak season hiring plans on Monday, with the agency looking for 28,000 seasonal employees. Available positions include truck drivers, letter carriers and processing team members. FedEx has disclosed its own seasonal hiring goals in years past, but hasn’t yet made an announcement for this peak.

Parcel carriers have endured a fast-changing labor market amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with staffing shortfalls in 2021 morphing into excess labor capacity in 2022.

After fuel, wage and benefits were the largest contributors to UPS' U.S. domestic business seeing a 6.9% YoY increase in adjusted operating expense in Q2, CFO Brian Newman said. The company could have made a short-term decision to trim labor expenses, but that wouldn't have served it well before its peak season hiring spree, according to Tomé.

"We kept the bench though, because if we let the bench go, then we'd have to rehire them for peak, and that doesn't seem like a good idea," she said.

UPS is also moving to deploy new technology prior to the peak season to improve warehouse productivity. The company is on track to deploy its smart package initiative at 100 facilities this year, which will eliminate millions of manual scans daily for employees. Additionally, UPS is bringing two automated facilities online this year. Newman said on the call that these types of investments "will help to offset the increases in wages and benefits in the back half of the year."