The holiday season is in full swing, and it’s shaping up to be yet another busy year for big shipping companies—even before we all start panickedly placing our last-minute online gift orders.

This holiday season, shipping giant UPS aims to hire 125,000 total seasonal workers—about 25,000 more than the year prior—who will primarily work for the company during its largest “peak season” during the end-of-year holidays. These temporary roles include drivers, operational workers, seasonal support drivers who deliver packages from their own vehicles, and driver helpers who primarily assist drivers in making deliveries.

It’s probably no surprise that hiring for this many workers takes quite an amount of prep work. In fact, hiring for peak season has become a year-long planning process for Jeff Grant, VP of HR of the west region at UPS, told HR Brew.

Come January, Grant will begin planning hiring again for the 2025 holiday season. So it makes sense that throughout the year his team is already thinking about ways to retain the best of these workers, either for future seasonal roles or permanent positions.

Keep reading here.—PM

Pay transparency laws will take effect in five states next year, bringing the total states with legislation to help end salary gaps to 14, according to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC).

Several other states are considering similar legislation, Paycom reported. Meanwhile, a handful of cities, such as Toledo, OH and Washington D.C., have enacted such laws.

“There is a cultural phenomenon that we are witnessing,” said Da Hae Kim, state policy senior counsel for the NWLC.

Indeed, even companies that aren’t directly affected by the laws are releasing information about salaries, said Mariann Madden, co-lead of pay equity at WTW. She said expectations of more state laws are pushing companies to release more salary data. And while Madden doesn’t anticipate any new federal legislation, she said that companies operating in the EU are readying to comply with sweeping pay transparency legislation that goes into effect in June 2026.

Keep reading here.—TA

Contrary to popular belief, younger workers don’t want to work from home (sometimes).

Almost all workers between 18 and 34 years old said in-person experiences, like holiday parties, boost engagement (95%), and team offsites positively impact their overall employee experience (91%), according to a recent Indeed report. While younger workers continue to be the staunchest supporters of flexible work, they’re craving some face time.

“You have this really large percentage of young workers that…don’t even have [office] experience, or if they’re maybe older Gen Z, younger millennials, they got a couple of years of the taste of that, and the pandemic hit, and it was taken away,” Gabrielle Davis, a career trends expert at Indeed, told HR Brew.

While younger workers want in-person experiences, Davis said HR pros should remember that they want it in tandem with flexible work options.

Keep reading here.—MC