The Woolworths Group has announced it will hire up to 20,000 new staff over the next month to cope with the unprecedented demand for food and drinks.
Many of these new hires will help Woolworths scale up its online and home delivery operations to support changing shopping needs as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds.
Most of the positions will be casual or short-term.
“These are uncertain times for many industries and we have an important role to play keeping Australians employed through this crisis,” Woolworths Group CEO Brad Banducci said.
In a statement, Woolworths said that the redeployment of its ALH staff that were stood down would be prioritised in this new round of hiring.
“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,” Banducci said. “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 has said it is also working with a number of other retail businesses that have had to stand down their staff due to COVID-19 restrictions, saying they plan on making thousands of short-term roles available to these employees.
For now, Woolworths expects the number of new jobs to be distributed by state as follows:
New South Wales: 5,700
Victoria: 5,000
Queensland: 4,700
Western Australia: 2,100
South Australia: 1,350
Tasmania: 600
ACT: 300
Northern Territory: 250
