This season cautious retailers hired 25 percent fewer holiday employees to help with the Christmas rush as they focused on permanent hires and held back in the face of lower sales expectations.

Retailers across the country added only 120,600 workers this year after hiring 159,700 temporary employees in December 2006, according to outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. The firm based its figures on data released Friday by the Department of Labor.

The “anticipation of the weakened consumer really showed in the numbers,” said John Challenger, chief executive officer of the firm.

Retail hiring in November 2007 actually exceeded that in 2006 by 5.7 percent, but hiring this October was markedly lower — about 40 percent below the 2006 mark.

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Retailers are “trying to maintain a stable number in their work force rather than have to have such a spike in their hiring,” Dan Russell said during the holiday season. Russell is the vice president of Aon Consulting, a human capital consulting firm based in Chicago.

They are “trying to do more with what they have” by filling in the “gap with current employees … and staffing to their norm rather than staffing toward the holiday profile,” Russell added.

This comes amid an overall December unemployment rate of 5 percent, an increase from 4.7 percent in November, the highest in just over two years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

wblake@dcexaminer.com