Woolworths 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.
The new hires will allow the retailer to better meet the unprecedented demand for food and drinks across Australia. It will also help scale up online operations to support the changing shopping needs of the community as the health crisis continues to unfold.
Woolworths Group CEO Brad Banducci said: "These are uncertain times for many industries and we have an important role to play keeping Australians employed through this crisis.
"Our top priority as we continue delivering an essential service to the community is upholding customer and team safety through clear social distancing rules and elevated hygiene standards.
"As we do this, we will have more hours for existing team members and additional roles to fill as we focus on meeting the needs of our customers and communities.
"These new roles will not only help us better serve the increase in demand we're seeing in stores right now, but also allow us to scale up home delivery operations in the months ahead.
"Our immediate hiring focus is the redeployment of our ALH team members impacted by this week's mandatory hotel closures.
"We have already placed around 3,000 of those impacted into new roles across BWS, Dan Murphy's and Woolworths Supermarkets and will continue to take expressions of interest.
"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."
Woolworths Group is standing up similar streamlined application processes with the likes of Village Entertainment, Michael Hill Jewellers, Cotton On, Accor and Super Retail Group. It expects to make thousands of short-term roles available to employees from these businesses.
Brad Banducci added: "We're working with a number of customer-focused businesses impacted by recent government measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.
"We're hopeful these businesses will bounce back strongly once this crisis passes, and we want to do our bit to help them - and their people - get through the short-term challenge.
"We're confident the strong service skills and work ethic of candidates from these businesses will be highly transferable to Woolworths."
Woolworths is also working through thousands of applications already made through its careers website and walk-up applications made in-store.
The vast majority of new roles will be casual in order to provide maximum workforce flexibility to respond to peaks in demand and cover for existing team members who may be unable to work. For those on leave without pay arrangements with other employers, Woolworths will offer short-term contracts.
On 12 March, Woolworths introduced special leave support measures for all its Australian team members impacted by coronavirus, including casual team members.
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