As retailers embrace AI to improve the Christmas shopping experience, there's another opportunity worth exploring: how automation can help HR teams manage seasonal hiring, onboarding and the people who keep everything running.
Christmas shopping is getting smarter.
AI can help you find a gift for the relative who already has everything, compare prices across retailers and track down that one very specific present your child has suddenly decided they absolutely must have.
And shoppers are increasingly using it.
According to research from PayPal, 35% of UK consumers are already using, or planning to use, AI to help with their Christmas shopping. Meanwhile, Adobe forecasts that UK online spending will reach a record £28.52 billion during November and December 2026.
For retailers, that means new opportunities to reach customers, recommend products and make shopping more convenient.
But there's another side to the Christmas rush that doesn't get quite as much attention.
Someone still needs to pack the orders, stock the shelves, handle customer enquiries and make sure everything arrives when promised.
And before any of that can happen, someone in HR needs to make sure those people are actually ready to work.
For retail HR teams, Christmas preparations can begin months before the first festive decorations appear in stores.
Seasonal recruitment brings a familiar collection of tasks: preparing contracts, collecting employee information, checking documentation, arranging onboarding, coordinating with store managers and making sure new starters have everything they need.
Now multiply that across dozens of employees, multiple locations and different start dates.
It's a lot to coordinate, particularly when the existing HR team is still responsible for everything else happening across the business.
And while retailers are finding increasingly sophisticated ways to use AI in their customer experience, many of these internal processes still depend on emails, spreadsheets and someone remembering to follow up.
The result? HR professionals spending valuable time checking whether contracts have been signed, chasing missing documents and asking managers if they've completed their onboarding tasks.
Not exactly the most festive way to spend November.
In a recent Retail Gazette article exploring AI and the Christmas ecommerce rush, our CEO and co-founder, Kristján Kristjánsson, highlighted why retailers need to think beyond the customer-facing applications of AI.
"During the Christmas rush, having enough seasonal staff ready to work is essential. Automating HR processes like contracts and onboarding helps retailers get people working sooner, so the experience behind the scenes can keep pace with what customers now expect."
It's an important distinction.
Retailers can invest in better product recommendations, personalised shopping experiences and faster checkout processes. But if seasonal employees are waiting on contracts, onboarding tasks are incomplete or managers don't know who's ready to start, those improvements can only go so far.
And while technology can't solve every staffing challenge, it can make the administration surrounding seasonal employment considerably easier.
Consider a retailer bringing in 150 temporary employees across several locations.
Without automation, HR might need to prepare individual contracts, send emails, monitor signatures, collect documentation, remind managers about outstanding tasks and keep a spreadsheet updated with everyone's progress.
That's a lot of repetitive work, especially when the same process needs to happen for every new starter.
With an automated HR workflow, much of that coordination can happen without someone manually moving each task along.
For example:
The important part is that these steps work together.
A completed form can trigger the next action. A signed contract can move the process forwards. A missing document can prompt a reminder.
And HR can see what's happening without having to chase every update.
AI can help with tasks such as checking information or drafting personalised communications. Other steps, like sending reminders and routing approvals, are often better handled by straightforward automation.
The aim is to use the right technology for the task, rather than adding AI to everything simply because we can.
This isn't just a theoretical exercise.
Airport Associates, which manages a highly seasonal workforce, uses 50skills to automate employee onboarding and offboarding.
The business hires, onboards and offboards between 150 and 200 employees each year, creating significant administrative work during its busiest periods.
By automating these processes, Airport Associates saves more than 300 hours annually across onboarding and offboarding.
That's time previously spent on repetitive coordination and follow-ups, with automation also helping reduce the risk of important steps being missed.
Although Airport Associates operates in aviation rather than retail, the challenge is familiar to anyone managing seasonal employees: large numbers of people joining and leaving within relatively short periods, often with a small HR team responsible for keeping everything organised.
And the same approach can be applied to other repetitive HR processes throughout the year.
There's another opportunity that seasonal employers sometimes overlook.
The end of the Christmas trading period doesn't necessarily mean the end of the administration.
Temporary contracts finish. Employees leave. Access needs to be removed. Equipment may need to be returned. Payroll and managers need the right information.
Then, a few months later, the planning starts again.
For retailers who regularly rehire seasonal employees, there's also an opportunity to make returning to work easier.
Rather than starting every process from scratch, automated workflows can help coordinate the information, documentation and approvals needed to bring returning employees back, while ensuring anything that needs updating or reviewing is properly handled.
And once HR has automated seasonal onboarding, there's little reason to stop there.
Employee requests, contract changes, approvals, internal transfers and other everyday HR processes can all benefit from the same approach.
Much of the conversation about AI in retail this Christmas is understandably focused on customers.
How will people discover products? Which brands will AI recommend? Will shoppers trust AI to make purchases on their behalf?
Those are important questions.
But as retailers look for ways to make shopping faster and more convenient, it's worth paying the same attention to the processes supporting the people who deliver that experience.
For HR teams, that means finding better ways to manage seasonal hiring, reduce repetitive administration and keep onboarding moving, even when employee numbers increase dramatically.
At 50skills, we help HR teams do exactly that.
50skills is an HR workflow automation platform with AI that works alongside the systems organisations already use. Simply describe the HR process you want to automate, and 50skills builds the workflow for you.
Whether it's onboarding 150 seasonal employees, managing contracts across multiple stores or coordinating offboarding when the Christmas rush ends, there's plenty of opportunity to make those processes easier.
Because AI might help someone find the perfect Christmas present.
But someone still has to get it to their door.
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