The Midcounties Co-operative is to “change tack” in the way it recruits in a bid to fill more than 40 vacancies across its travel group and grow its own homeworking division.
The group has been focused on recruiting staff with travel industry sales experience for its network of Your Co-op Travel shops this year following gaps left by staff leaving the sector post-pandemic.
Around 40 staff are being sought for the group’s high-street branches, while there are also three or four head office roles and tour operator positions to fill as well as four homeworkers to double its team of employed ‘travel experts’.
But head of retailing Alison Holmes said the current jobs crisis meant the group was having to rethink its approach to recruitment.
More: Price guarantees, added value and book early messages ‘will be key for peaks’
Midcounties appoints COO and restructures travel business
She said: “We have been focusing on experienced staff but we have to change tac to look at people who have different skills.
“You can teach people travel. If they have the right personality and are in sales I don’t see why their skills cannot be transferred into travel. We have to start bringing in people from a non travel background.”
She said job security was now less important to employees than it had been during the pandemic, adding: “Salaries and work-life balance are now becoming more important to staff than job security. We still get a huge volume of interest [in joining] but finding the right people for the business is still a challenge. One [consortium] member had a new person start one day and leave the next day.”
Vacancies have been unfilled for “a couple of months”, she said, although there has been a “bit of a slowdown” in staff leaving the sector.
“We are now down to one a week, whereas before we were getting a couple a week [leaving the sector],” she said. “We are seeing people in this industry moving to other industries where they can work from home and get more money.”
The Midcounties Co-operative chief officer for travel and leisure Sara Dunham said the group wanted to increase its own homeworking team from four to eight, who can take ‘overspill’ calls from the group’s shop network. The employed homeworkers are paid a guaranteed salary and are fed calls and generate their own sales leads.
“We want another four and longer term we want to scale that up. We have not set a number,” said Dunham, who this week told The Co-operative Travel Consortium conference that Midcounties’ travel division was well placed for future growth.
More: Price guarantees, added value and book early messages ‘will be key for peaks’