Iceland Foods has launched a further recruitment campaign, offering approximately 3,500 new jobs across the United Kingdom. These comprise 1,000 vacancies for home delivery drivers and 2,500 for store assistants, principally to work as online pickers to help meet the growing demand for online shopping.
The latest drive follows the creation of more than 3,000 new jobs during the first six months of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in Britain last year, and the hiring of a further 3,300 temporary workers to support normal seasonal spikes in sales over the Christmas and New Year holiday period. Many people engaged on these temporary contracts are now being offered extended roles in Iceland’s business.
The Iceland frozen food retail specialty chain’s multi-million pound investment in personnel, vehicles and systems last year enabled it to handle a 300% surge in home deliveries year-on-year by September 2020, and gave it the total capacity to process up to 750,000 orders per week. This expansion means that Iceland still has online delivery slots available in most parts of the UK, despite the further rise in customer demand since the latest government lockdown announcement in England on January 4.
Lockdown restrictions, which are not expected to ease before mid-March, require people residing in England to stay at home and only go out for “a reasonable excuse.” The government defines this as engagement in essential shopping (including trips to supermarkets, food stores and takeaways) and participation in outdoor exercise once per day, as well as keeping medical appointments.
“We are one of the very few supermarkets with online delivery slots available to customers right now, and are able to offer yet more job opportunities as a result of the continuing growth in demand for our service,” said David Devany, chief customer and digital officer at Iceland Foods. “Our team is now well over 30,000 strong and I am proud of the way our store and delivery colleagues have gone above and beyond during the pandemic, introducing new measures to help their local communities and offering a truly outstanding service to our customers.”
Iceland Foods, which operates more than 1,000 outlets across the United Kingdom, offers free delivery on online orders over £35.
