Bosses at a top department store are mystified because they struggling to fill 30 job vacancies.
Andy Ray, the Sales Manager at Debenhams at the Eagles Meadow shopping centre, in Wrexham, was expecting to be inundated with applications.
But so far only a handful of people have put their names forward for temporary jobs to help with the extra demand leading up to Christmas.
He was particularly surprised at the poor response because they’ve never had any trouble with recruitment before.
According to Mr Ray, he’s hoping that around 10 of the temps will be kept on as permanent staff once the Yule Tide rush is over.
He said: “Obviously it’s only August but Christmas isn’t far away and the Christmas rush starts for us in October.”
“We want the best people to come and work in Debenhams in Wrexham and the jobs are now available online.
“The numbers of hours available varies and we’ve got jobs in different departments, so it will be really good experience.
“At the end of the season we will keep a good percentage of the temporary staff on – we won’t want to lose the people who’ve done a good job for us.
“For us, the actual official Christmas period that they’d actually start working for us is October, but we are quite early in trying to take people on.
“We invite people to apply online and after a simple telephone interview we will invite suitable candidates to attend an assessment centre.
“The jobs have been advertised online for a couple of weeks and we’ve really struggled.
“We’re really, really surprised at the apparent lack of interest. Things are going well for us here at Eagles Meadow but you would think there would be plenty of potential candidates out there.
“It’s even more surprising when you consider that on average 40 people apply for every job – and we’ve got 30 up for grabs
“I said it might be a lack of knowledge about the availability of the jobs so we want to get the word out there because we have a busy period coming up.
“We do a lot of in store training ourselves and it’s something that we focused on massively in the past year and we have training sessions for all levels.
“We’ve had similar recruitment campaigns over the past few Christmases and we’ve now got people who manage their own department who’ve started off as Christmas temps.
“So, it can actually lead to a permanent and a highly successful career – if they’re good enough then they’ll progress through the business.
“All you need to do to apply is to go to our website www.debenhams.com and all the available jobs are on there.
“We’re open to anyone, we don’t have an age limit – we employ men and women over 16.”
Anybody interested in applying should go to www.debenhams.com
