Steering High-Volume Hiring on a New Course: How Holland America Turned Around Its Recruiting Practice to Meet Its Goals

A seasonal hiring operation supporting hotels, rail cars, and motor coaches across Alaska and the Yukon fell badly short of its target one year, bringing on only a fraction of the workforce needed to run the season. With five months until the next season opened, no strategy in place, a shaky tech stack, and no room for error, the recruiting team rebuilt the process from the ground up.

The turnaround focused on practical, unglamorous fixes rather than anything experimental:

• Building candidate personas for each hiring department, drawn from a widely used marketing model, to identify who was actually being targeted, such as college students, career-changers, work campers, and retirees, and where to find them.
• Layering in peripheral marketing, including digital IP targeting and even bus ads and radio spots on campuses with a history of producing motor coach drivers, so the employer name became familiar before anyone applied.
• Turning on one-way and later two-way texting through the applicant tracking system, since candidates for hospitality and high-volume roles are on their phones far more than they check email.
• Cutting response times drastically. Candidates who waited six weeks to hear back had already moved on, so action within the first week became the standard pushed to hiring managers in the field.
• Running drip email and text campaigns for candidates hired months before their start date, since early offers with no follow-up create flight risk, in the same way top university recruits go cold without contact.
• Promoting a strong built-in incentive, a free cruise after a set number of hours worked, as a recruiting hook rather than a hidden perk.

The following season, hiring reached beyond the original goal, filling out staffing for hotels, lodges, glass-domed rail cars, and motor coach operations. The same effort also produced a strong external showing in a candidate experience benchmark, providing a baseline the recruiting team is now working to improve.

The lessons apply broadly to any organization running high-volume, seasonal, or hospitality hiring: meet candidates on the channels they already use, respond fast, keep offered candidates warm until their start date, and don't discard older tactics, like campus bus ads or radio, if they still reach the right audience.