Iceland is planning a new recruitment push to serve more customers online in the latest lockdown, having already boosted its delivery capacity by 300% last year.
The frozen food retailer is looking for 1,000 extra home delivery drivers and 2,500 store assistants, the latter principally to work as online pickers.
It’s on top of the 3,000 additional drivers and store assistants Iceland has already taken on in the pandemic. In September last year, the supermarket announced the new roles had helped it increase home deliveries by 300% within 12 months, to about 45,000 a day, with the capacity for 750,000 a week.
Iceland also took on 3,300 additional temporary staff over the Christmas trading period, many of whom are now being offered extended contracts, a spokesman said.
Iceland saw faster sales growth this Christmas than any other bricks & mortar supermarket, according to Kantar, at 18.9% in the four weeks to 27 December. It boosted its delivery fleet with 250 new vans in the run-up to Christmas, each with double the crate capacity of its existing ones.
News of the latest recruitment drive comes after Iceland MD Richard Walker revealed the business had contacted 150,000 vulnerable customers within an hour of PM Boris Johnson’s lockdown announcement last week, offering them priority delivery slots.
Iceland is recruiting for drivers now, with an ad saying: “We’ve 2,900+ home delivery drivers across the UK. And they will tell you that no two days are the same.
“They find it very rewarding making lots of different customers happy and providing a quick and polite home shopping service. Not everybody can get out to one of our stores. We provide a vital local service.”
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