NEW YORK — UPS plans to hire more than 100,000 workers to help handle the holiday rush this season, in line with hiring the previous two years.

Holiday season volumes usually start rising in October and remain high into January. While online shopping has slowed from the height of the pandemic, it's still well above historic norms.

UPS said Wednesday that there will be job openings for full- and part-time seasonal positions, primarily package handlers, drivers and driver helpers. UPS promotes seasonal jobs as positions that can lead to year-round employment. In recent years, according to UPS, roughly 35% of people hired for seasonal package-handling jobs land permanent positions.

Seasonal drivers with UPS start at $21 per hour, with tractor-trailer drivers making as much as $35 per hour. Package handler starting wages can range from $15 – $21 per hour.

The company continues to streamline its job hiring process and most hires require only 25 minutes – from filling out of an online application to receiving an offer, according to Danelle McCusker Rees, the president of human relations at UPS. That's down five minutes from last year.

Rees started at UPS as a seasonal worker.

The job market remains just as competitive as it was last year, said Rees in an interview this week with The Associated Press.

Employers added 315,000 jobs in August, about what economists had expected, down from an average 487,000 a month over the past year, according to a government report last week.

The jobless rate reached 3.7%, its highest level since February. But it increased for a healthy reason: Hundreds of thousands of people went back to the job market, and some didn't find work right away, which boosted the government's count of unemployed people.

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