Supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths are hiring thousands of people and opening three new distribution centres to meet the increased demand and logistics challenge.
Coles CEO Steven Cain said last week the company opened three new pop-up distribution centres in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, to cope with unprecedented demand during the current covid-19 pandemic.
Steven said this has opened more jobs in its supply chain network and the company is also looking to open additional distribution centres to help move more stock to stores.
Coles recruited more than 7000 people in just two weeks to meet customer demand, and are now extending the recruitment drive by opening an additional 5000 positions across the country.
These roles include store team members to serve customers and replenish shelves in Coles supermarkets and liquor stores, Customer Service Agents to deliver orders to Coles online customers, and more than 100 trade- qualified bakers for our in-store bakeries.
“To ensure we could act quickly, we streamlined our recruitment processes and assigned a dedicated team to fast track applications sent by corporate partners like Australian Venue Company and Virgin Australia,” Steven said.
On Friday 27 March, Australia’s leading supermarket, Woolworths, announced the group will hire up to 20,000 new roles across its supermarkets, e-commerce, supply chain and drinks businesses in Australia over the next month.
Brad Banducci, Woolworths Group CEO said these new roles will help us better serve the increase in demand the company is seeing in stores right now, but also allow the group to scale up home delivery operations in the months ahead.
“We’re also preparing to offer up to 5,000 short-term roles to Qantas Group employees taking leave without pay, including more than 1,500 in our distribution centres,” he said.