Is your retail or logistics business struggling with staff shortages? Seasonal demand, unexpected absences, and high turnover can make it hard to find reliable workers quickly. Streamline your hiring process with our “Favourite Pools” feature: Build personalised groups of top performers to re-hire quickly and effortlessly, saving you the hassle of sifting through applicants and finding the right fit in time. Companies who use Favourite Pools have more than 90% job coverage on average. And, if your business has multiple locations or works with partner companies in the same region, you can share your Favourite Pool with them, too.
Learn more about how you can start building your own reliable workforce.
Situation: Growing labour market crisis
The retail and logistics sectors in the UK are facing an escalating crisis in finding and retaining qualified staff. Several factors contribute to this challenge:
Labour shortages: The UK logistics industry faces a significant shortfall of qualified workers, particularly in the transportation sector. The Road Haulage Association has reported a shortage of over 100,000 drivers due to factors such as Brexit and the pandemic.
Retail isn’t far behind: the British Retail Consortium reports that the retail sector has been hit with a severe staff shortage as well, with a vacancy rate of 4.1% – the highest it’s been since 2013.
This shortage is further compounded by seasonal peaks, where demand for additional staff surges by as much as 30% during the holiday season.
Absenteeism: According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), sickness-related absences in the UK average around 5.8 days per worker annually, with last-minute absences particularly affecting retail and logistics, where operational efficiency depends on fully staffed shifts.
For logistics companies, unplanned absences not only affect day-to-day operations but can lead to delivery delays and customer dissatisfaction. For retailers, staff shortages during peak hours can directly impact sales and customer service.
Training costs and time: Onboarding new workers in the retail and logistics sectors can take significant time and resources. Research shows that it costs businesses an average of £1,500 to recruit, onboard, and train new staff. For temporary roles, this represents a major loss of both time and money, as companies often need to repeat this process multiple times during peak periods.
Problem: Resulting staffing shortages
Retail and logistics companies struggle with the following:
Difficulty in finding reliable workers:
Temporary staff may lack the familiarity with a company’s processes or culture, leading to inefficiencies and errors. Workers come and go, and it can feel like starting from scratch every time. This affects productivity and service quality, as untrained workers may struggle to keep up with the demands of their roles.
Slow recruitment and costly onboarding:
Recruitment processes can be lengthy and resource-intensive, especially for temporary or seasonal roles. Often, companies must spend valuable time sourcing, interviewing, and training new workers who may only be needed for a short period. This means businesses are frequently stuck in a cycle of continuously training new workers.
Staffing shortages during peak times:
Seasonal peaks, like the holiday rush for retailers or end-of-quarter pushes for logistics companies, put additional strain on staffing. When reliable workers aren’t available, businesses risk falling behind on deadlines or losing sales, which can have a long-term impact on their reputation and profitability.
Solution: Coople’s flex workers & Favourite Pools
The labour challenges in the retail and logistics sectors require a combination of scale and reliability to meet fluctuating demand and cover staffing gaps. Coople provides an ideal solution through the combination of our pool of over 400,000 vetted workers and the ability for businesses to build their own Favourite Pools of trusted staff. With the Favourite Pools feature, you can create a dedicated pool of reliable workers who are already familiar with your company’s processes and culture, streamlining hiring and reducing onboarding times. This dual approach offers both immediate access to a large, skilled workforce and the flexibility to build trusted, personalised pools of professionals that best meet your specific needs.
Build a pool of Favourites: When a worker completes a shift with your business and meets your expectations, you can mark them as a ‘Favourite.’ Over time, you build a roster of trusted workers who have been onboarded, trained, and proven to meet your standards. This way you can cultivate long-term relationships with Cooplers you know you can trust.
Advertise jobs directly to your pool: For future shifts, you can choose to post jobs exclusively to your Favourite Pool, ensuring that only pre-approved workers can apply. This dramatically reduces the need for lengthy hiring, onboarding, and training processes. Re-hiring workers from a reliable pool of Favourites will help you fill jobs up to 40% quicker than if you were to review and hire new applicants.
Share across locations and regions: If your business has multiple locations or works with partner companies in the same region, you can share your Favourite Pools. This means you can access a larger network of vetted workers, further improving flexibility and reducing recruitment lead times.
Key advantages of using Coople:
Retail & Logistics clients that rely on Coople:
Founded in 1992, and taking inspiration from the worlds of fashion, art and entertainment, Anthropologie has established itself as a leading lifestyle brand. They operate both online and high street stores worldwide.
How did Coople help?
Anthropologie posted jobs on the Coople platform to cover internal absences within 2 hours of when the job started. They used their Favourite Pool of 20 sales associates to consistently hire reliable workers. Anthropologie needed their Favourite Pool to be flexible and available to work across their multiple retail sites, especially during peak periods, this was particularly helpful for their Regent Street store.
Anthropologie avoided losing weekly revenue by hiring flexible staff to cover their urgent shifts. Additionally, they reduced the stress within their internal teams due to hiring a weekly rota of 1-2 sales associates in advance, as well as the last-minute coverage.
The Coople platform matched available workers for shifts starting within 2 hours. Anthropologie hired 5+ of their Favourite workers for sickness cover weekly, across their nine retail sites through Coople.
Vitabiotics is the UK’s No.1 vitamin company who have pioneered advances in nutritional healthcare for over 45 years. They are the fastest growing vitamin company in the UK, exporting goods from their warehouses to over 100 countries.
How did Coople help?
Vitabiotics built a pool of high-quality warehouse workers within two weeks, in preparation for Black Friday. The selected workers were within a commutable distance of the warehouse and had proven to be consistently reliable. When Vitabiotics experienced no-shows or cancellations from their internal team, they were able to utilise their Favourite Pool of trusted warehouse staff to cover last-minute shifts and ensure they were not left short-staffed.
Get in touch
Ready to learn more? Reach out to one of our relationship managers today to see how Coople can help you seamlessly navigate the holiday rush.