The 4 days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday equal one of the biggest weekends in retail for the year – and a period when Australians are set to spend billions of dollars.

Our client is a leading manufacturer and marketer of various cosmetics such as skin care products, makeup, fragrances, and hair care products, with approximately 1,600 freestanding stores across 150 different countries and territories. Zoom Recruitment has been supplying Warehouse and Storage staff, particularly pick packers, to our client for several years.

THE CHALLENGE:

Although the number of workers that our client requires fluctuates, the Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend meant that they required a total of 50 warehouse staff. Specifically, they needed 25 people working on the morning shift and 25 people working on the evening shift for a 2-week period to meet customer demands for sale orders. And the Covid-19 vaccination requirements only made our task more complex.

INNOVATING TO FIND STAFF:

Our branch in Mascot usually runs off a fantastic word-of-mouth referral system. In previous years, we’ve had many backpackers who come to Australia on Working Holiday visas and then refer their friends to us. But because of Covid-19, this hasn’t been the case. This kind of staff shortage has been seen across Australia, but for us, finding 50 warehouse staff in a short time period meant that we’d need to be innovative in our methods of finding staff.

One of the things we did that we’d never done before was contact local universities and put jobs up on university job boards. We also advertised for the roles and used our Artificial Intelligence technologies to find candidates who met all of our client’s criteria. These technologies perform the more repetitive tasks which in turn frees up consulting time so that we can build relationships with our candidates.

COMMUNICATION IS KEY:

Our client understood the challenges we faced in finding 50 fully vaccinated warehouse staff in the current candidate shortage market and was very involved in the recruitment process. Through regular video conferencing with our client, we discussed how many candidates we had onboarded and how many staff we still needed to find. Together we developed strategies to fill the order, and the open and honest communication with our client resulted in more innovative solutions. Using our consultancy methods and being in constant communication with our client really helped to achieve the outcome.

“When you work together as a team and work collaboratively with your client, you can achieve even the most complex and difficult things.”

In just one and a half weeks, we over supplied with 35 pick packers on the morning shift and 25 pick packers on the evening shift. It was a hustle right to the end but we came through and it was a success.

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