At one point in the movie Home Alone, Kevin McCallister (age 8) catches Santa Claus right after he’s taken off his beard at the end of his shift. "I know you're not the real Santa Claus, I'm old enough to know how it works, " Kevin says. "But I also know that you work for him. I would like for you to give him a message."
To the best of Kevin's understanding, the job of a hired Santa Claus is to relay communication to the North Pole. The reality is a little more complicated.
The pool of online job postings for “Santa Claus” is relatively small—but there are still hundreds posted each year in the United States. That’s enough to understand the overall pattern of demand, the top skills required, and how Santa jobs compare to other holiday hiring.
It comes as little surprise that seasonal hiring for Santa Claus peaks every year just before the holiday season. But even this spike is relatively small, peaking only at 293 in 2020.
Santa’s Skills
In The Night Before Christmas, Santa Claus is described as having "cheeks like roses, and his nose like a cherry," and "a little round belly that shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly." He of course makes his list of who's naughty and nice, he checks that twice, and all of that is on top of the sleigh-driving, gift-making, reindeer-raising, cookies and milk consumption, and aggressive annual delivery quota.
In job postings, he has a different set of skills.
Those are all skills found in the Lightcast taxonomy—but we also found several less-common skills in the postings. If our data pros see an uptick in demand for any of these, we might need to add them to our list of 36,000 skills and counting.
“Natural beards”
“Real beard”
“Ability to smile frequently”
“Jolly”
“Ability to announce a hearty "HO HO HO"”
“Twinkling eyes and rosy cheeks”
You Can Do The Job When You’re In Town
When we expand out to look at not just posts mentioning Santa Claus, and look at all postings mentioning “Christmas”, we see a similar seasonal pattern at a greater scale.
Consumer activity spikes sharply in November and December, and businesses need short-term labor (usually hired in September and October) to handle the surge. Retailers, delivery companies, warehouses, and hospitality providers all face much higher sales and foot traffic, heavier shipping and logistics volumes, and extended store hours and promotional events. The occupations and employers with the greatest volume of Christmas job postings are heavily skewed toward those industries.
Holiday cheer aside, this raises an important point: the holiday economy depends on in-person work jobs. It’s most obvious in Santa’s twinkling eyes and rosy cheeks, but retail stores, warehouses, and restaurants all rely on physically demanding labor that cannot be easily automated.
Lightcast research has explored several factors that are squeezing the labor force that’s available for those kinds of jobs. Younger workers are waiting longer to get their first jobs (meaning fewer teenagers and young adults in retail and foodservice), and the first jobs they ultimately get are often office-based and require a college degree. On the other end of the age spectrum, we have more older professionals exiting the workforce than young people entering it. That might be fine for Santa Claus, but it’s a challenge for every other job at the mall. Employers will need to be more deliberate and strategic in their hiring as their demand for workers faces lower supply.
Of course, every talent strategy needs to account for the demographics of its specific region. And for Santa Claus jobs, the city with the most job postings isn’t North Pole, Alaska; Christmas, Michigan; Santa, Idaho; Noel, Missouri; or Christmas, Florida…
…it’s Santa Claus, Indiana.
Thanks for reading On The Job. Be sure to catch up on our past issues, including “Military Skills in the Civilian Job Market,” "Six Dos and Don'ts for AI" and "The Next Great Resignation." You can also subscribe here. We’ll see you next time.
