Supporting a major supermarket chain to maintain service continuity: Covid-19 hiring surge

Recruit, screen and fully vet an emergency contingent workforce of over 1,800 in just 4 weeks

• Only 48 hours' notice before first workers required
• 100% fulfilment
• Over 500 workers deployed in the first week

The challenge:

We have worked with this well-known supermarket chain for more than a decade and provide a fully outsourced managed service contingent worker solution. 

In March 2020, Pertemps were given 48-hours’ notice to recruit 1,800 workers across 18 nationwide locations for 8 to 12-week assignments, adapting working practices to accommodate the 'new-normal' and ensuring the wellbeing of our workers and client delivery team.

With the Coronavirus pandemic starting to take hold and placing increasing pressure to the client’s front and backline services, it was imperative that this implementation should not distract attention from the operational and management teams, effectively enabling them to manage the surge in demand for groceries at such a critical time.

The solution: 

Building upon our scalable delivery model, we modified and flexed our approach by assembling and deploying an increased candidate care team, leveraging our experienced nationwide branch network and shared service delivery centres.

The dedicated contract delivery team focused on delivering positive experiences: delivery performance, issue resolution and candidate experience.

Immersive training was conducted within 48 hours, ensuring that our teams delivered a seamless candidate experience and a quality contingent workforce.

Working practices were adapted to ensure the wellbeing of our teams and all necessary equipment was rolled out.

This was all achieved within 48 hours.

The results:

The company needed to ramp staff quickly to meet the challenging and ever-changing situation. Pertemps’ solution allowed them to achieve the rapid increase in hiring requirements while exceeding their mission to safely deliver increasing customer demands. Achievements include:

• Delivered 1,803 workers for the 1^st phase of 12-week assignments in less than 4 weeks
• Over 500 workers deployed within the first week
• Supported tiered vendors in additional sites to achieve fulfilment
• 638 of our contingent workers have now secured ongoing and permanent positions in this critical economy
• 464 candidates have been retained in ongoing temporary positions
• 174 have been taken on permanently by the Client and now have secured futures