Lowe's and Home Depot Increase Seasonal Hiring

This headline caught my eye this morning: ATLANTA - The Home Depot says it has already begun filling more than 80,000 seasonal positions to assist customers during its busiest selling season - 10,000 more than last year.  I thought this was interesting from two perspectives.  First, the fact that The Home Depot is planning to hire 14% more seasonal workers than last year is a positive sign.  That means they expect the busy spring selling season to be up over last year.   Lowe's is planning to hire 13% more seasonal workers this year also.  The Home Depot vendors that we track in our retail POS reporting service are trending up so far YTD so the data we have seems to confirm their expectation.  In addition, the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University said this month that spending on home improvement increased 9 percent in 2012.  The center found that people were spending more upgrading their homes after years of holding back, and that improvements to the 2.9 million homes in or at risk of foreclosure likely will represent sources for future spending growth.    The second reason I thought this was interesting was purely from a management perspective.  Put yourself into Tom Crow the VP Human Resources at The Home Depot for a moment.  Hiring 80,000 people is an enormous task and to accomplish that task in a short window of time must be daunting.  How exactly do you process that many applications, conduct interviews and background checks, and ensure that your corporate culture is preserved when you need to hire thousands of employees every week?