Who's Hiring The Most This Holiday Season

For America’s 11.3 million job seekers, the holidays offer a potential respite. Companies like Kohl’s JCPenney and Toys R Us currently have thousands of positions open for seasonal employees.
According to a survey of 2,100 hiring managers and human resource pro’s, 39% of retailers plan to hire holiday help this year, up from 36% last year. In addition, employers in information technology (18%), leisure and hospitality (16%) and financial services (16%) plan to hire seasonal staff.
Holiday wages aren’t great, but at least more than half of employers, 51%, plan to pay $10 or more per hour. The news is especially good for students: Some 45% of employers say they tend to hire college students over other types of workers, even including experienced worker who are not retired (34%).

Though many employers have already hired a share of their holiday workers, we asked Indeed, the Google GOOG +0.18%-like search engine for jobs, to pull together listings from company websites and online job boards and compile a list of companies with the most listings for jobs right now at companies with 2,500 or more employees.

Because some employers have already filled holiday positions and others haven’t yet determined how many workers they will ultimately hire for the holidays, the numbers are not exact. Also, retail employers like Sears and The Gap GPS +0.59% often list a single job, like cashier or sales associate, when they mean to hire multiple employees for those positions, so there may be even more openings than the big numbers here suggest. Many of the listings don’t distinguish seasonal positions from permanent full-time jobs. But this is fresh data, and gives a rough idea of where the jobs are this holiday season.

Big box retailers take nine out of the ten slots on the list. Even while consumers continue to browse in stores and then buy online, enough people are picking up their sweaters, toasters and flat-screen TVs in person that recently-struggling chains like Best Buy BBY +1.27% have managed to survive and even thrive, at least for the moment. The last time I was in The Gap, there was a long line for the register. The Gap lists more than 10,000 jobs at the moment. Best Buy lists 6,300.

The one company in the top ten that’s not a retailer is Crossmark, the sales and marketing services company based in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The top-listed jobs, like “In-store Demo Event Specialist,” and “Merchandiser Retail Representative,” are related to retailing, which makes sense as the holiday buying season gets more intense.