The season starts whether every role is filled or not.

Holiday parks and resorts hire most of a season's team in a few months: chefs, cleaners, lifeguards and hosts. Every park needs to run at full capacity from the first busy weekend.

Hiring for the summer starts in spring, peaks when every other seasonal employer is hiring too, and still has to land before the guests do.

A role that is not filled by then is a shift covered by agency staff at a higher cost, or a service the park cannot run.

Haven ran its 2023 recruitment marketing in three phases. The first two promoted the roles that run all year on job boards and aggregators, while social campaigns built awareness ahead of the summer. The third, in early June, was a Summer Jobs campaign across every channel that filled the top of the funnel for every key location.

Each phase had fresh creative, and the message mattered as much as the channel: messaging about role benefits and flexibility drew the highest click-through, so variations of it ran in every phase. Haven hit its annual headcount goal by August.

A role that fills in a week near a city can sit open for a month on a stretch of coast with a thin local labour market. Chefs are hard to find almost everywhere, all year.

One media plan run across every park overspends where roles fill themselves and underspends where they do not. The budget has to follow the vacancies, park by park and role by role.

Which park, what hours, whether the role runs for the season or all year, what it is like to work on site. Many are students or people working another job, and they look in the evening, when nobody is there to answer.

An applicant who cannot get an answer moves on to the next advert. The recruiter who does answer spends the morning replying to the same questions by hand.