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When hiring has to work - at scale, under pressure, and with real-world consequences - the recruitment process quickly reveals what’s broken… and what actually holds up.
And the underlying pattern looks very familiar across industries:
• High volume
• Short timelines
• Similar roles
• Multiple stakeholders
• A candidate pool that expects speed
• A business that still demands quality hires
We recently hosted a webinar with Refapp exploring how Swedish municipalities and regions are preparing for summer hiring 2026, particularly within care and public services. But the playbook they outline is bigger than Sweden, bigger than “summer jobs,” and bigger than the public sector.
At its core, it’s a modern blueprint for any TA team trying to deliver fast, fair, high-volume hiring.
Below is a summary of the webinar highlights, translated into lessons that apply just as well to retail and other industries running peak hiring globally.
Municipalities and regions have a unique hiring reality:
• Demand is seasonal and predictable (summer staffing needs return every year)
• The roles are often mission-critical (care, support services, public operations)
• Hiring volumes can be huge
• The candidate mix includes many first-time job seekers or junior profiles
• There’s low tolerance for mis-hires - because the work impacts real people
That combination creates a process stress test that looks a lot like retail peak hiring:
• A surge of applicants in a short period
• Many candidates with limited CV history
• Hiring managers needing people “yesterday”
• Candidate drop-off if the process feels slow, confusing, or unfair
So how do you redesign a peak hiring process so it scales, year after year, without sacrificing candidate experience or quality?
The webinar reinforced a key principle: Automate what doesn’t require humans, so humans can do what only humans can do.
In peak hiring, recruiters lose time in repetitive work: CV screening for similar roles, first phone screens, chasing references and admin coordination.
And that creates bottlenecks that damage everything: time-to-hire gets worse, quality gets inconsistent, candidate experience drops and teams burn out.
The proposed fix isn’t “add more people” (which rarely works fast enough). It’s process design:
• Make early steps lightweight and standardised
• Use structured data instead of messy documents
• Reserve real human time for the points where it actually changes outcomes
Peak hiring often fails before it begins: with the requirement profile.
In municipalities, the challenge is clear: there’s a huge need, and you want as many suitable people as possible to apply. But overly strict requirements create unnecessary friction.
Key recommendations:
• Keep must-have requirements minimal and non-negotiable e.g. availability, legal requirements, language level (where needed)
• Make the rest meriting, not blocking - avoid filtering out potentially good hires too early
• If you centralise hiring, capture job preferences early - location preferences, department preferences, type of shift/work
How this maps to wider industries with seasonal and peak hiring:
Retail teams often overspecify roles: “1–2 years experience” for jobs where attitude and reliability matter more. Simplifying requirements increases applicant flow without lowering standards - if you replace those “paper requirements” with structured assessment later.
Top takeaway: In peak hiring, your requirements should widen the funnel safely, not narrow it unnecessarily.
The webinar panellists recommended to push teams to measure more than “applications received.” The real KPI is: Where did our best hires come from?
Recommendations:
• Work closely with internal communications/marketing
• Use realistic content (short videos work well): “What is this job actually like?”
• Go local (municipality hiring is geographically tied)
• Measure the full chain: source → quality → hire
Wider industry translation:
If you’re staffing multiple stores, “go local” becomes store-level targeting and messaging. If you’re hiring across regions, it becomes channel strategy tied to quality metrics (not just cheap clicks).
Top takeaway: If your metrics end at “application submitted,” you’re blind during peak hiring.
The webinar was clear that traditional application forms are often built for candidates who already have polished documents and time. But the reality is (in municipalities, retail, warehousing and other industries alike):
• That young candidates apply on mobile
• They apply outside office hours
• They drop off fast if the process is painful
Recommendations:
• make applications mobile-first
• reduce or remove CV upload requirements for entry-level roles
• use a guided, conversational flow to collect essentials
Practical test for any TA Leader: Try applying to your own job on your phone. If you feel even mildly annoyed, you’re losing candidates.
Top takeaway: Candidate experience isn’t a “nice-to-have” in peak hiring, it’s a throughput strategy.
CV screening is becoming less informative - especially for junior roles. And generative AI makes CVs even more similar, more polished, and harder to compare meaningfully.
The proposed alternative is to shift toward structured early screening, where:
• everyone answers the same relevant questions
• responses are captured consistently
• screening can happen quickly (10–15 minutes)
• candidates can complete it when it suits them
This replaces two common bottlenecks:
• manual CV screening
• the first round of phone screens
Wider industry translation:
This is huge for store hiring and seasonal or peak ramp-ups. Instead of recruiters trying to guess from CVs (or being flooded with identical AI-written ones), you collect job-relevant signals early: availability, motivation, realistic job fit, behavioural examples.
Top takeaway: Peak hiring needs structured signals - not prettier PDFs.
Municipalities often use group interviews to save time, the first truly human moment.
What to use interviews for:
• behavioural competencies (collaboration, problem solving)
• situational judgement (“what would you do if…?”)
• communication and language
• realistic job preview and relationship-building
And importantly: If you automate early steps, your interview time becomes higher quality. Instead of meeting everyone, you meet the right people - and do it better.
Wider industry translation:
This is how you avoid the “speed vs. quality” trap. You don’t have to pick one, you just need to stop spending human time on admin.
Top takeaway: Use humans for judgement and connection, not repetitive screening.
Municipalities and business risk dropping references in summer hiring because it was too time-consuming. But you shouldn’t skip them - you should modernise them.
The panel highlight an important reality: as it gets easier to fabricate documents and claims, TA teams increasingly become verifiers, not just evaluators.
Concepts discussed:
• references adapted for junior candidates (teachers, coaches, supervisors)
• questions focused on observable behaviours (reliability, learning speed, teamwork)
• verification aligned to role risk (especially when roles involve vulnerable people or access to homes)
Wider industry translation:
You might not reference-check every seasonal/peak hire. But the principle holds:
• design checks proportionate to risk
• use scalable methods to validate critical info
• don’t let “we’re too busy” remove the steps that protect quality and safety
Top takeaway: Peak hiring can increase risk. Scale your trust-building steps accordingly.
If you take one key thing take from the webinar, let it be this process shift:
1. Review last year’s data (where were the bottlenecks and drop-offs?)
2. Simplify requirements to widen the funnel safely
3. Make applications frictionless (mobile-first)
4. Replace CV-first screening with structured early assessment
5. Reserve interviews for human differentiation
6. Use scalable references/verification based on role risk
7. Debrief after the season and improve every year
That last point matters more than people admit: municipalities do peak hiring every year, so they’re forced to think in cycles. Retail, hospitality and alike should copy that mindset - because peak hiring is predictable too.
Want to learn more? This blog captures the highlights but the webinar itself adds useful nuance - especially around how to build a repeatable, data-driven cycle for 2026 and beyond. Watch in full here (only available in Swedish).