Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat and more people than ever are looking for a little extra cash to fund the festivities. Retailer recruiters, both online and on the high street, have reported that more people than ever are looking for temporary holiday jobs this winter.

Totaljobs.com reports that the number of Christmas job searches on its website has risen from 14,100 last year to nearly 59,000 this year. Hitwise, an internet monitoring company, says that the number of searches for holiday jobs has increased by 83 per cent compared with last year – the figure has risen tenfold in the past 12 weeks.

Traditional retailers have also noticed an increase in the number of candidates applying for jobs. “We have had a great deal more applications this year than last year, which we attribute to more people looking for work in the current market and economic climate,” Ed Watson, a spokesman for Debenhams, said.

Yet many big retailers expect to increase their temporary recruitment over the holiday season only slightly, if at all. Debenhams is envisaging using fewer temps than last year, although it will not be cutting the number hired for frontline customer service roles. It is also trimming costs by using a phased start: while temps have been hired and trained slightly earlier than usual, some will begin work later than in the past.

Selfridges, which a few weeks ago was planning to recruit more temporary staff this Christmas than last, has revised its figures and now plans to recruit fewer than in 2007.

Nick Gladding, a lead analyst for Verdict Research, a retail analysis business, confirmed that retailers were being guarded about taking on extra staff. “There is a great focus on cost-cutting and they are taking a fairly cautious view of their prospects over Christmas, so it makes sense not to take on extra temporary staff,” he said.

“People are also expecting Christmas [shopping] to start later this year, so some have delayed their Christmas recruitment.”

Some of the reduction in the recruitment of temporary staff is related to a change in the way in which retailers employ their regular staff, with a trend towards hiring part-time rather than full-time workers, Mr Gladding said. This gives retailers greater flexibility, allowing them to meet demand by increasing the number of hours worked by permanent part-time staff.

Manpower, a recruitment consultancy, expects a rush to hire more staff closer to Christmas when retailers get a picture of how sales are progressing.

Those companies that are increasing recruitment are doing so because they have opened new stores. One, Sainsbury’s, will recruit about 12,000 staff into Christmas jobs, an increase of 2,000 on last year’s numbers but about the same on a like-for-like basis. Marks & Spencer also opened new stores this year but it has reduced the number of extra employees taken on over Christmas from about 18,000 last year to 15,000 this year. Tesco never takes on more than a relatively small number of Christmas temps, relying instead on its existing part-time staff and the 5,000 or so head office staff who spend the 10 busiest trading days working on the shop floor. “We have more part-time than full-time staff now,” Lorna Bryson, Tesco’s head of resourcing, UK, said. She expects the number of “top-up” staff taken on to meet demand in the very busiest stores to be about the same as last year.

Christmas is looking a little brighter for online jobs boards: one4s.co.uk, a student jobs website, reports that 45 per cent more retail jobs were advertised in September and October 2008 compared to 2007, according to Chris Eccles, a director.

“The increase in the number of retail jobs posted on the site shows that retailers are still hiring, despite the gloomy forecasts for this Christmas,” he said. “This is also probably the result of retailers switching their recruitment advertising to job boards away from more expensive options such as recruitment agencies.”

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