Hire a summer crew or pay overtime to the crew you have. Run both numbers
Overtime looks expensive per hour and often is not, once recruiting, training and the risk of a slow August are counted against it.
- Written by
- Ellen Marsh
- Published
- Filed under
- Corporate
- Length
- 727 words, about 3 minutes
Demand climbs in May and stays high until Labor Day. The existing crew can cover it by working longer, or you can add people for the season. Both are defensible, and the choice usually gets made on the sticker shock of the overtime rate rather than on the totals.
Run both properly and the answer often surprises the person running them.
What overtime actually costs
The premium rate is the visible part. Under federal wage law, non-exempt employees receive at least one and a half times their regular rate for hours over forty in a workweek, and some states add daily thresholds or a doubled rate above a further limit. The rules governing this sit with the Department of Labor and the applicable state agency, and getting the regular rate calculation right matters because it includes more than base pay.
What makes overtime cheaper than it looks:
- No recruiting cost, no onboarding, no training time.
- No additional equipment, uniform, vehicle seat or workspace.
- Full productivity from hour one, on work the person already knows.
- Most fixed per-employee costs do not repeat on additional hours.
- It scales down instantly when the season ends, with no separation to manage.
What makes it more expensive than it looks:
- Output per hour falls as weekly hours climb, and it falls faster after several consecutive weeks.
- Error and injury rates rise with fatigue, and one injury can exceed the entire seasonal labor budget.
- Your best people are the ones asked, and the ones most able to leave.
- There is a ceiling. Past a certain point the crew cannot physically cover the work regardless of pay.
What a seasonal hire actually costs
The wage is the smallest part in a short engagement, because the fixed costs do not have time to spread out.
- Recruiting and screening time, at the cost of whoever does it.
- Onboarding paperwork, equipment and any required safety training.
- Supervised ramp-up, which consumes an experienced person's hours as well as the new person's.
- Payroll taxes, unemployment insurance and workers' compensation at the applicable class rate.
- The productivity gap for however long the ramp takes, against a season that may only be twelve weeks.
The critical variable is ramp time as a fraction of the season. A role someone is productive in within a week is a good candidate for seasonal hiring. A role that takes six weeks to learn, in a fourteen-week season, spends most of its existence being subsidized.
The comparison in practice
| Condition | Favors overtime | Favors seasonal hire |
|---|---|---|
| Ramp time | Long | Short |
| Peak duration | Weeks | A full season |
| Extra hours needed per person | Modest | Large |
| Work type | Skilled, judgment-heavy | Defined, supervisable |
| Crew appetite for hours | They want them | They do not |
| Certainty of demand | Uncertain | Booked |
The option most people skip
The split. Cover the first few weeks and the tail of the season on overtime, and bring seasonal staff on for the middle where the peak is deepest and the ramp has time to pay back.
This also solves the recruiting problem, because you hire in June for a role that starts in June rather than committing in April to a demand forecast you cannot yet see.
If you hire seasonally, four things to get right
- Say it is seasonal, in writing, with an expected end date. Ambiguity here produces a difficult conversation in September and can affect unemployment claims.
- Classify correctly. Seasonal does not mean exempt from wage and hour rules, and it does not make someone a contractor.
- Assign one trainer. A seasonal hire learning from four people learns four systems and masters none of them in twelve weeks.
- Decide in advance who you would keep. The best seasonal hires are the cheapest permanent hires you will ever make, because they are already trained and already assessed. Tell them in August, not in October when they have found something else.
The number that settles it
Take the total additional hours the season needs. Divide by the number of weeks. Divide again by the crew you already have. If the result is a handful of extra hours per person per week, overtime wins on almost any assumption. If it is closer to a second shift, no amount of premium pay covers it and the hiring decision was made for you.
Running that calculation in April rather than in July is what keeps the choice a choice.