Seasonal hiring is the part of running a camp that arrives all at once. You spend the off-season with a handful of returning leads, and then over a few weeks the count climbs to forty, eighty, a hundred and twenty. Applications, offers, background checks, certifications, tax paperwork, and a stack of camp-specific forms all land in the same window — and most of it lives in a different place. The hiring inbox, a spreadsheet of who said yes, a shared drive of signed PDFs, a sticky note about whose lifeguard cert expires in July.
This is a guide to running that window without losing the thread. The work is not any single hire. It is keeping a clear, current picture of who is ready and who is not, across a hundred-plus people, in the weeks before the first day of staff training. Staff management is part of running a camp, and it reads off the same camper record as the rest of the season.
The problem is visibility, not volume
Hiring forty people is not hard because forty is a big number. It is hard because each person carries a small pile of unfinished business — a form not yet signed, a check not yet cleared, a cert that lapses mid-season — and the pile lives in three or four different tools. The same staffer is a row in your spreadsheet, a thread in your inbox, and a folder on a drive, and the three drift apart the moment one of them changes.
The fix is to put the whole arc of a hire on one record. Application, offer, background check, certifications, emergency contacts, onboarding items — one place, one staffer, one current answer to the question that actually matters: is this person ready to show up.
Let staff enter their own details
The fastest way to fill a hundred records is to not fill them yourself. Invite each new hire by email, and they enter their own contact details, paperwork, and forms. Camp Runner sends an invitation with a token and an expiry, so the link is tied to that person and stops working after it lapses. When someone declines or goes quiet, you revoke the invite and it is gone — not lingering as a half-finished row you have to remember to clean up.
For staff who are minors, the record carries guardian contacts, so a message about a missing form routes to the parent who can actually act on it rather than to a teenager who will see it after camp ends.
Track background checks where you can see them
A background check is binary in the worst way: either it cleared in time or it did not, and you find out which on the day it matters. Tracking check status on the staffer’s record — not started, pending, cleared, failed — means you can scan the whole roster and see the ones still in flight. The check that has not come back is the one you want surfaced two weeks out, not discovered on the morning of training.
Certifications expire — record the dates now
Lifeguard, first aid, ropes, food handling. Every camp runs on certifications, and every certification has an expiry date that lands somewhere inconsistent. A cert that is current in June and lapses in July is a coverage gap waiting to happen, and the only way to catch it early is to record the expiry date the moment the staffer is hired.
Camp Runner keeps certifications on the staffer’s record with their status and expiry, so the lapse is something you see coming rather than something you discover at the waterfront. When you go to staff the lifeguard rotation, the system already knows whose card is good through the season and whose is not.
Build the onboarding checklist once
New hires need the same things, in roughly the same order: signed offer, tax forms, background check, certifications on file, emergency contacts, a policy acknowledgment, and whatever is specific to your camp. Built once as a per-staffer checklist, every new hire runs the identical list, and you mark items complete as they come in.
The value is not the list itself. It is that the list is the same for everyone and visible at a glance, so onboarding becomes a status you can read instead of a memory you have to hold. Open a staffer, see what is done and what is outstanding. Open the dashboard, see who across the whole roster is fully cleared and who is still missing a piece.
Carry the rehire signal into next season
The best source of next year’s staff is this year’s staff. At the end of the season, capturing who you would rehire — and a one-line note on why — turns next spring’s hiring from a cold start into a warm list. A staffer who indicates they want to return goes onto that list directly, so re-hiring is a confirmation rather than a fresh search. This is the same logic as building the returning-family list in the season close-out checklist: spend the memory while it is fresh, and next season starts with a head start instead of a blank page.
Where one system earns its keep
A spreadsheet can hold a roster. A drive can hold the signed forms. The cost is in the stitching — matching the spreadsheet row to the right folder to the right inbox thread, by hand, for a hundred people, in the busiest hiring weeks of the year.
When applications, offers, checks, certifications, and onboarding items live on one staffer record inside one system, the stitching disappears. The dashboard already knows who is cleared, because clearing is recorded on the same record the dashboard reads. Once staff are hired and cleared, the same records feed straight into staff scheduling and bunk coverage — the people you onboarded are the people you assign, with their roles and certifications already attached. You can browse the rest of the staff operations writing for the adjacent pieces.
You run the hiring. Camp Runner lets you run it from one record, so on the morning training starts you know exactly who is ready. Hiring and onboarding are one piece of camp staff management kept on a single staff record. If that is the season you want, join the waitlist.
Common questions
- How do camps track seasonal staff hiring and onboarding?
- The reliable way is a single record per staff member that carries the whole arc: application, offer, background check, certifications, and onboarding items. Spread across a hiring inbox, a spreadsheet, and a shared drive, the same name lives in three places and the three never quite agree. On one record, you open a staffer and see exactly what is done and what is outstanding.
- What should a camp staff onboarding checklist include?
- At minimum: signed offer and tax paperwork, a current background check, required certifications with expiry dates, emergency and guardian contacts for staff who are minors, and any camp-specific items like a policy acknowledgment. Build it once as a per-staffer checklist so every new hire runs the same list and nothing depends on remembering.
- How do you onboard 40 to 120 staff before the season starts?
- Invite them by email so each staffer fills in their own details, then work from one dashboard that shows who is fully cleared and who is still missing a form or a certification. The work is not in any single hire — it is in knowing, on the morning staff training starts, exactly who is ready and who is not.
- What is Camp Runner?
- Camp Runner is one system for running an independent summer camp — registration, payments, medical, staff, and season close-out on a single shared record. For hiring, it carries each staffer from application through onboarding so the director sees who is cleared and who is outstanding in one place.
