The news that John Lewis and Waitrose are preparing to recruit around 10,000 seasonal workers ahead of Black Friday and Christmas is a striking reminder of the scale of workforce mobilisation required during the Golden Quarter.
Bringing thousands of people into an organisation within weeks is an enormous recruitment exercise. But behind those headline numbers is another challenge procurement teams should be considering now: can the screening supply chain scale at the same speed? This year, that question has added significance. From 1 October 2026, changes to the UK’s Right to Work regime extend responsibilities further into temporary and alternative worker arrangements, making it increasingly important to understand how workers entering an organisation through labour supply chains are being checked. Seasonal recruitment can therefore no longer be viewed simply in terms of sourcing enough people at the right price. Screening capacity, supplier resilience, technology, service levels and compliance all need to be part of procurement planning.
Right to Work changes the equation
The timing of the new Right to Work requirements is particularly relevant to retail, arriving as businesses rapidly expand their temporary workforces. Where workers are supplied through agencies or other labour arrangements, organisations need visibility over how Right to Work checks are being conducted and who is responsible at each stage. Procurement should be asking whether suppliers can provide appropriate digital identity and Right to Work checks, whether their systems can cope with significant increases in volume and whether the candidate experience is straightforward. Compliance and candidate experience shouldn’t be competing priorities. A cumbersome process can create delays and candidate drop-out at precisely the point employers are competing for seasonal workers.
Can your screening provider actually scale?
A provider may perform extremely well handling normal recruitment volumes, but what happens when those numbers increase dramatically? Procurement teams need to understand how providers intend to flex their operations. If the answer relies heavily on recruiting and training additional screening staff at short notice, that can introduce its own risks around capacity, consistency and turnaround times. It is also worth asking what other large-scale projects the provider will be managing simultaneously. Retailers don’t experience peak recruitment in isolation. Logistics, hospitality and other employers are often expanding their workforces at exactly the same time. A supplier’s theoretical capacity and its actual available capacity during the Golden Quarter can be very different. For particularly large projects, organisations may also want to consider whether relying entirely on one screening provider creates unnecessary concentration risk. When thousands of workers need to be cleared against tight deadlines, resilience matters.
Set the rules before the rush
Clear service-level agreements are critical. Turnaround times, escalation procedures, responsibilities, reporting requirements and screening standards should all be established before recruitment volumes climb. For major projects, there can also be value in establishing dedicated screening teams rather than absorbing thousands of additional checks into business-as-usual operations. Without clear project ownership, boundaries and accountabilities can become blurred, potentially creating delays and inconsistencies. Procurement has an important role in ensuring everyone understands who is responsible for what before the pressure begins.
Look beyond price
Cost will always matter, particularly when thousands of checks are involved, but price per check tells only part of the story. Procurement teams should consider a provider’s track record in delivering large-scale programmes, ability to flex capacity, technology, candidate experience, compliance expertise and quality of management information. Professional standards should form part of that due diligence. PBSA members operate within an established professional framework and have access to industry guidance, education and developments affecting the screening profession. Procurement should seek suppliers able to demonstrate credible experience and a proven track record at the scale required. The objective isn’t simply to find a company capable of processing checks. It is to identify a partner capable of delivering when recruitment is at its most intense.
Use screening data to raise supplier standards
There is another opportunity procurement teams shouldn’t overlook: the management information generated through screening. Where organisations use multiple temporary staffing agencies, anonymised screening outcomes can provide useful insight into the quality of candidates being supplied. Are particular agencies consistently providing candidates whose information is straightforward to verify? Are others generating higher levels of discrepancies or incomplete information? Used appropriately, this intelligence can help procurement assess temporary labour suppliers on quality as well as price, speed and headcount, ultimately helping raise standards across the agency pool. The John Lewis and Waitrose recruitment drive may be one of the more eye-catching examples of seasonal hiring, but employers across the UK will soon face similar pressures.
My advice to procurement leaders is simple: plan screening capacity at the same time as labour capacity. Ask suppliers how they will handle peak volumes, what other major projects they will be delivering and whether dedicated resources are needed. Agree SLAs, examine digital Right to Work capabilities and ensure management information provides visibility across the temporary labour supply chain.
Recruiting 10,000 people quickly is impressive. But the real measure of success is whether those workers can be recruited, appropriately screened and ready when the business needs them. For procurement, that means asking one critical question this Golden Quarter: Can our screening supply chain withstand the same peak in demand as the rest of our business?